The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

“Tajakalu may be able to use their physical strength to throw a projectile,” Yukino Sensei said, turning back to his class. “Fonyakalu may be able to use their nyama to push against one. Our nyama is the projectile. When a weapon is made of ice, we can control it down to the molecule. As jijakalu, we are the only race of theonite who can fight with a solid weapon that is truly an extension of the self.”

‘there are a million ways to tell the same story. Our job as jaseliwu is to find the one the listener needs to hear. Not necessarily the one that makes them the happiest or the one that gives them the most information, but the one they need to hear to do what they need to do.’

‘I am the blood of gods,’ he said to the assembled crowd, ‘as are all of you. The moon and ocean fear no change.’

Power was born into a person and lived in the wordless depths of their soul. The strength of a bloodline wasn’t something you sang about; it was something the holder knew and others witnessed.

She might never be able to destroy the part of her that was aggressive and willful, but she could bury it.

“Most strong things are rigid. If you are water, you can shift to fit any mold and freeze yourself strong. You can be strong in any shape. You can be anything.”

“Why don’t you try taking responsibility for the things you can control instead of the things you can’t?”

You learn over time that the world isn’t broken. It’s just… got more pieces to it than you thought. They all fit together, just maybe not the way you pictured when you were young.”

listening never made any man dumber, but it’s made a lot of people smarter.”

“Fire is like an animal,” Kotetsu Kama always told him. “If you feed it, soothe it, and treat it with care, it need not bite you.”

A decade later, a fifteen-year-old Hiroshi would become known as the youngest swordsman ever to master the Whispering Blade. What the world would never know, was that he was the second youngest.

a person’s tragedy doesn’t define them or cancel all the good in their life.

Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.