Curses and Will Chapter 26: Chapter 5: What the Blade Refused to Show

Read chapter 26 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I stayed in bed another three days before Kagenken finally let me back on my feet properly. He didn't rush the healing, didn't push me toward training the way I half expected him to. He simply sat with me most afternoons, cigar between his teeth, talking about nothing in particular until the talking eventually circled back, gently, toward everything that mattered. It was on the fourth day, the two of us alone in his study while Annya and Suga ran errands in the village, that he finally brought up what had actually happened during the fight with the shadow beast. "You went somewhere," he said, not looking at me directly, his eyes fixed instead on the smoke curling up from his cigar. "When the power took you. I've seen that look before. Only once, but I've seen it." I knew what he meant without needing him to spell it out further. The blank space in my memory where the rampage had happened, the scream that had torn out of me, the guard I'd nearly killed before he'd stopped me. "Jonathan," I said quietly. He nodded slowly. "Jonathan, yes. Though what happened with him went further than what happened with you. He learned to live with it, mostly. Caged it. You haven't learned that yet, and until you do, it's going to keep finding the cracks in you whenever the grief gets loud enough." "What is it," I asked. "Actually. Not the half explanation. All of it." He set the cigar down and studied me for a long moment before answering. "You already understand Yuta as a kind of energy. Reinforcement, the kind you used instinctively in our spar. Reforming, which changes a weapon's structure mid-use. And Formation, the rarest of the three, which lets a skilled user shape entire weapons out of raw Yuta alone, nothing physical required to start from." "I've felt the first two," I said. "Maybe." "What you haven't been told," Kagenken continued, "is that Yuta itself splits into two deeper currents, beneath all three forms. Most people who carry Yuta never touch either current directly. They simply use the forms as tools. But some, the ones who carry enough unprocessed feeling inside them, eventually find themselves pulled toward one current or the other." "Light or dark," I said, the words arriving in my mouth like I'd always known them, somewhere underneath conscious memory. Kagenken's eyes sharpened slightly at that. "You already knew." "I didn't. Not consciously. It just felt right to say." He let that sit a moment before continuing. "Light Yuta is rare. Vanishingly rare. It comes from feeling processed all the way through, grief that's been carried honestly and turned into something closer to clarity rather than rot. As far as anyone knows, only one person alive currently carries it in any meaningful strength. The leader of Yami-o-Sakamono." The name landed heavier than I expected. "The ones who killed Jonathan's family. The ones who attacked the palace." "The very same." Kagenken's jaw tightened. "Whatever else you come to believe about that organization, understand that its leader did not earn Light Yuta through anything resembling an easy path. People assume monsters are born from darkness alone. It's rarely that simple." I sat with that, uneasy, filing it away without fully understanding yet what to do with it. "And dark Yuta," I said eventually. "That's what happened to me. At the cliff. Tonight, with the shadow beast." "Dark Yuta is forbidden for good reason," Kagenken said, voice dropping lower. "It comes from feeling that's been buried instead of processed. Grief, rage, guilt, all of it pushed down past the point where a person can consciously access it anymore, until it finds its own way out regardless of what the person wants. Left unchecked, it doesn't just empower the person carrying it. It consumes them. According to the old legends, dark Yuta left to run wild long enough doesn't just destroy the person who carries it. It destroys whatever's closest to them too. The legends call it the seed of true destruction, the kind capable of