“In the tavern tales, I hear stories of the Endsinger. Of a goddess who sought to swallow the world, and the stormdancers who stood in her way. I hear the honors given to those who paid the steepest price, who gave more than anyone may ask of a brother or friend.”
She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes.
“Their sacrifice should live in legend. But that is not the truth of this tale.”
Kin squeezed her hand. She squeezed it back, tight as she dared.
“The truth is, the abyss lives in us. In our greed. In the way we look at things different to us, and see things lesser. In the way we see the smaller, or the weaker, and think them prey.
“It begins with the beasts of the land, the birds of the sky. And in a blinking, we find ourselves seeing our lessers in people with different-colored skins. Different gods. Different creeds. We see them as lessers, and we hurt, and we kill, and we think nothing of it. Because they are different, we think ourselves just. Because we are stronger, we think ourselves righteous.
“That is the abyss in all of us. And we stand close to the edge still. Closer than any can dream. We need but stray for a moment and we will find ourselves back again, staring down into that black. And who will save us? When everything that was different to us is already gone?”
The woman shook her head, her eyes downturned.
“We choose this. This place. This life. What it will be, and how we live it. We are not slaves to gods, or fate, or destinies woven in veils of smoke. We choose the people we want to be, and we choose the shape of the world in which we live. Nothing worthwhile comes without sacrifice. There is nothing so easy as swimming with the current, nothing so difficult as being the first to stand up. To say no. To point at a thing wrong and name it so. There are none so brave as those who choose to stand, when all others are content to kneel. None so worthy of the title ‘hero’ as those who fight when there are none to see it. Who choose a life bereft of accolade or fanfare, a life of struggle for the idea that we are all the same. Every one of us. And every one of us has the right to be happy. To know peace. To know love.”
She searched the faces of the crowd, young and old, man and woman and child.
“You can choose this. Right here. Right now. You can choose to be the one who fights to make things better. You can choose to see how close we came to the edge, and how easily we can fall there still. Or you can close your eyes. Go back to sleep. Hope someone else will fight for you. Or you can hope for nothing greater at all.
“It is within all of you.”
As Kin let go of her hand, Yukiko drew her tantō, held her palm aloft and ran the blade down over the old scars. Blood welled, streaming down the whorls of the folded steel. Hana drew a long dagger from her belt, held her palm aloft and did the same, cutting deep. The women pressed their hands together, the blood of Foxes and Burakumin and distant lives across the seas, mingling upon their skin.
Yukiko turned to the crowd, her voice calling high and clear.
“Choose,” she said.
Open palms.
Scarlet droplets, flung into the breeze.
An inversion of sound.
White light.
Silence?
“Choose.”
EPILOGUE
She sat alone on the stage in the dark.
A curtain of storm clouds drawn overhead, shutting out the glow of the smothered moon. The distant lights of Kigen city, the flares from kindling wheel and dragon cannon, fireworks blazing up toward the clouds. Never high enough to reach. Always falling short and tumbling back down in gravity’s hateful grip.
The wound at her palm ached. Just like the wound in her chest. Kin had bandaged it gently, pressed his lips to hers, then left her with her thoughts. As he always did.
She looked at her other palm, made of scars; a thousand marks from a thousand knife cuts to spill a thousand drops and heal a thousand wounds in the earth. But never the one inside her. Never the ache he left behind. She was blessed and she knew it. The love of a wonderful man, beautiful children, a life spent in the making of a brighter tomorrow for the ones she’d brought into this place. She loved them with all she had to give. But it was on nights like this …
Nights like this …
When the storms would roll down from the Iishi, laden with rain’s promise, a deluge so powerful it seemed the God of Storms had been saving it all for her. When Raijin would fill the heavens with his drums and hurl arcs of brilliant blue-white from all corners of the sky. When all was tempest, all was chaos, she’d look above to that rolling sea of black and miss him so badly her chest would ache. Her soul would bleed. Her breath would catch in her lungs and her throat would seize tight and it would be all she could do not to scream, scream at the heavens that it wasn’t fair, that it wasn’t right, that it should never have been him.
Never have been him.
She hung her head, sodden hair falling over her face as the rain began to fall, pawing at her breast and the hurt behind it, sobbing from the depths of herself.
“I miss you, brother…”
Thunder across the skies, settling in her bones.