The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

That’s what happens when you come into contact with people who aren’t quite like you. 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.”

“Don’t we have to trust our government?” “I suppose so,” Misaki said, and before she could stop herself—“if you really want to be a child forever. Do you, son?” She looked sharply at Mamoru in the growing light. “Or do you want to be a man?”

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

For fifteen years Misaki had lamented being fated to raise her husband’s sons. All that time, she hadn’t considered that these boys might have something of her in them too.

“You cheated.” Indignant, Misaki scowled down at the fonyaka. “You try fighting fair after pushing out four babies,”

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.

“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. It is enough,” she told herself, even though she would never hear him laugh with his little brothers again, never watch him bring beauty to another kata, never see that boyish smile, with those dimples, deepen into the smile of a man. For a moment, her hands had been full of pearls. She rocked and repeated, “It is enough.

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

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

Back then, all she had wanted was to seethe, and burn, and fight, and feel. That was before she knew pain, before she had seen her son’s body on fire. Now she found herself appreciating the cool steadiness of Takeru’s power.