The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

be careful how hard you love what you know you can’t have.

They would never change the world, nor understand why someone would want to, but they loved her. She could laugh with them, and that was enough.

She was a small woman with a sweet smile and a quiet voice, yet there was a knowing intelligence in her eyes that Mamoru had always found the smallest bit unsettling.

Power was born into a person and lived in the wordless depths of their soul.

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.”

“A competent god would never make a housewife with your skill and hunger. You might look like a decorative flower, but you’re more sword than anything else.”

I’ll miss him, but I suppose… it’s enough that I ever had him at all.”

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

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.

What sort of a man closed his eyes to the world and called it clarity?

“There was no way you could have understood. You can’t until it’s you.

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.