Curses and Will Chapter 22: Chapter 1: Shattered Stones

Read chapter 22 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

His intention carried no hesitation in it. His hand was so perfectly still I understood immediately, without needing to be told, that he had killed more people than I could properly imagine. Before I could react at all, he already had the advantage. He asked Annya to stand back without taking his eyes off me, his gaze sharp, his voice calm but carrying a weight that pressed down on the whole room. "Who are you. What is that blade doing in your hands." I was frozen, speechless, paralyzed in front of something that felt very close to death itself. His presence kept building, rising like a gathering storm, matching and then surpassing the weight I'd felt from Jonathan in his final moments. Then Annya spoke. "Master. He's a friend of mine. Jonathan's apprentice." The tension left his body the instant the words landed. He withdrew the blade and let me go, and his face broke into a smile, warm and entirely human. "Ah. My apologies, son. Forgive me for jumping to conclusions." I couldn't reconcile the two versions of him standing in front of me. Calm now, almost gentle, nothing like the man who'd nearly opened my throat without a flicker of doubt a moment earlier. He turned to Annya and asked about Jonathan. She glanced at me, asking me without words to leave the room. She understood, somehow, that I couldn't sit through hearing the story again so soon. So I left with Suga, walking through the village while she stayed behind. There was barely any yokai presence here at all, maybe the shrine near the entrance kept them at a distance. When I returned to the dojo later, the master looked different. Broken, in a way he was clearly working hard to hide. His face, his posture, all of it carefully composed, but I could feel something underneath it anyway, a bond neither of us had to name out loud. The kind only people carrying the same particular wound seem to recognize in each other. I could feel the sadness sitting inside him, bitter enough to hollow a man out slowly from the inside no matter how tightly he tried to seal the cracks. He never blamed me for what had happened to Jonathan. And somehow, that made it worse. Maybe some part of me had been waiting for someone to finally say it was my fault, just so the guilt would have somewhere specific to land. I joined the others for training that evening. Night fell heavy, the air thick with something close to despair, a taste you could almost identify if you tried, bitter and metallic. Pressure built in my chest like something working toward an eruption it couldn't postpone much longer. Finally, in the bath that night, I couldn't hold it back anymore. The water scalded against my skin, but it did nothing to burn away the guilt sitting underneath it. It came out of me all at once. "Why are you treating me like this. It feels good, but do I deserve it. After what happened to Jonathan, because of me, because I was too weak, because I ran." Tears poured out of me, a waterfall that had been dammed up by duty for far too long finally breaking through. Kagenken came and pulled my head against his chest. Warm. Not like water, not like fire. Something steadier than either. "It wasn't you, Shin. It wasn't you, Shin Zetsu. You did what your master asked of you. You did what was right. You protected Annya. That's what matters in the end." The stones holding back everything inside me finally gave way completely. Tears fell heavy and hot, and I felt something else against my back. Kagenken's tears, falling silently while he held me. A silence settled over the room afterward, the particular kind that only a soul past the point of easy repair can fully understand. And somehow, despite everything, it carried the power to heal a little of what had broken. After the bath, I slept more peacefully than I had in longer than I could properly track. The feeling of letting my heart out into the open was still new to me, strange in a way I hadn't gotten used to, but every time it happened, something heavy seemed to l