The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

But here, high in the obscuring mists of Takayubi, where nothing seemed to have changed for a thousand years, it

was easy to believe the fantasy of a stable world.

“I said you’re cannon fodder.” Kwang’s voice was even. “The Emperor will give you guys any made-up story if it means you’ll stay put and die for him. You may think you’re great warriors with some noble purpose, but as far as the capital is concerned, you’re just game pieces.”

was a doll—stiff, unfeeling, incapable of producing life because she was not really alive. There were horror stories of Tsusano puppet masters, manipulating the blood in the bodies of others—dead and living—making them dance like dolls. Sometimes Misaki wondered if she had subconsciously become one of them, puppeting her own gutted body through each

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.”

That wind that had darkened the sky and roared like a god… the heart of it had been human.

After all, a lady wouldn’t have been able to slice a man’s legs out from under him and then plunge a blade into his mouth when he opened it to scream. A mother wouldn’t have been able to cut a young woman’s head from her shoulders. A human being wouldn’t have been able to turn from their dismembered corpses without a single pang of guilt. Thank the Gods she was a monster.

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.

People always said the Ranganese were demons of a different breed from

the Kaigenese, but their blood seemed to be the same color, now that they lay still, letting it run together. They had all come out of the same ocean, hadn’t they? At the beginning of the world?

Because we don’t matter, Misaki thought numbly. The only thing the Empire cares about is stopping the Ranganese here. It doesn’t matter how many of us get caught in the crossfire.

Her fighter who preserved life. Her theonite who kissed like an adyn. Her tajaka who drank the cold like it could sustain him.

“A life of dangerous adventures might seem

worth it now, when you are young and seemingly invincible, but one day, you will have children, and you will not want that life for them.”

The next breath that came out of her was more of a scream than a sob, and the pain it sent through her lungs was so pitifully small next to the sheer absence beneath her hands. She would let a fonyaka pull her life from her mouth, she would give her soul a thousand times over, if she could just bring Mamoru’s back.

“It is enough that, even for a moment, I had a son like you. It is enough that Hiroshi, Nagasa, and Izumo will have a brother like you to look up to as they become young men themselves.

She had thought she was water that could adjust to fill any container, be as strong in the shape of a mother as a warrior, but in the end, maybe Koli had been right about her. She was a knife, a sharp edge, that killed or cut anything it touched.

“I left everything behind to marry you! I have been an obedient wife, I have borne you children, I have done everything that was asked of me, so why did this happen? Why is my son gone?”

“You lost your right to my obedience when you stopped being a man!”

“But I made a mistake,” Takeru continued. “I retreated into the mountain to spare myself the reality of leaving my brother and son without considering the fact that they were born of this mountain too. Their jiya was bound to the same snow, and ice, and moving water as mine. I didn’t realize that, in that state, I would feel them die.”

As she

had just learned, he was just as human as anyone else.

The enemy that loomed before her now was not Matsuda Takeru himself, but the bitterness of silence that had built up between them over fifteen years. She would fight it, kill it. And when she was done, she would have a husband. Her children would have a father. Takayubi would have a leader. Mamoru could rest.

“I’m Matsuda Misaki,” she said with pride and honesty she never attached to those words before. “I’m your wife.”

in all her blind love and ruthlessness, would never have understood.

In all her years of training at Daybreak, Misaki had never had the skill to match a master swordsman in combat. But unencumbered by the tight kimono or the childish cowardice that had bound her for years, she had become a new creature, more fluid and boundless than a girl but more solid than a shadow—a woman of lightning sinew and roaring blood. For once in her life, her body kept pace with her mind. The moment she visualized a swing, the blade was there. The moment she registered an opening, she was inside it. If she willed her stance to hold, it held. She was breathing hard, but it occurred to her that for the first time since the Soul Pull, the heaving breaths were not hurting her lungs. Three

Flayed and boneless, he faced the creature he had awakened, this woman of gods’ blood and fury.

So many years, he had avoided touching this porcelain doll he had been given for fear of breaking her. He hadn’t wanted to see this beautiful, strange woman crumble the way his mother had. Somehow, he had broken her anyway, but she hadn’t broken quietly like porcelain.

had broken like black glass and ice—jagged and more dangerous than ever.

Takeru was forced to realize that he had spent fifteen years sleeping obliviously next to a combatant very nearly his equal in skill.

Unable to move their limbs, most had trouble using their powers to affect the world around them. But Misaki’s power was not around her; it was inside, lending her little body godlike strength as it strained against its prison. Her pain screeched against him like claws on stone, and he struggled not to cringe.

And he saw them both for what they were: a woman who needed her husband, and a man who needed his wife.

In the falling snow, Takeru stared at the woman he had married and saw her for the first time. “I accept.”

Takayubi legend said that a Matsuda had never walked away from a duel without first spilling his opponent’s blood on the ground. Takeru and Misaki broke that tradition that day.

She caught the drops of blood before they could fall and placed a gentle hand over the cut on his neck.

So much of her anger had spawned from Takeru treating her like a doll, but she hadn’t been much better. She had treated him like a human-shaped mass of ice without considering that there might be entirely human reasons that ice had formed.

To most people, that might not have seemed like the sign of a happy marriage, but Misaki never felt so viscerally connected with someone as she did in the middle of a confrontation. She had fought with her father and brothers, with Koli, Elleen, and Robin, with everyone she had ever really loved.

No one officially named her, but the village, in their whispers, called her Kazeko, Wind Child, for the terrible thing that had brought her into their midst. Perhaps that was the reason Takayubi tolerated her presence: she was walking memory. Bodies could be burned and buried. The blood of the dead could be washed from a blade. But this little creature, with the eyes of Yukino Hyori and the power of a fonyaka, was irrefutable. They might fear and hate her, but she was living testament to everything the Empire had tried to erase. As long she walked the Duna, no one could forget what had happened on the Sword of Kaigen.

The Empire may have refused to let the people of Takayubi mark the graves of the dead, but the mountain didn’t forget.

“But if I learned one thing from Firebird, it’s that a person’s tragedy doesn’t define them or cancel all the good in their life. I’ve had four wonderful children, whom I love. I still have three of them, and now, after all these years, it turns out, I have a good husband.” Misaki had never thought she would say those words, especially not to Robin Thundyil. “I know, given what you know of him, it probably seems unbelievable—”

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

Her index finger curled around his pinky, and they knotted together—dark and light, hot and cold. She knew in that moment that this was one more thing that would never go away. She would always love Robin, the same way she would always miss Mamoru. For everything

that had changed, this hadn’t. It hurt. Gods in the Deep, it hurt, but it didn’t consume her. After so long, she had learned to carry it like a woman.

The familiar ache rose between them—the burning urge to rush into an embrace, contained in the knowledge that they never could.