Author's Notes: First comes the general disclaimer that I do not own any rights to the Ronin Warriors universe. The family is also part of the original storyline and are not mine. I claim rights to the mother and grandfather's names only, as they are anonymous canon characters according to the internetz. All others mentioned hereafter including extended family, friends, and background characters are mine. Why you'd want to steal one, I don't know. Next, a bit of an explanation. The storyline jumps around quite a bit.
... Three periods hanging out by themselves denote a scene change
while italics insinuate a flashback.
(((Anything within three parentheses suggests a flashback within a flashback. A bit confusing, but I trust that you're capable of following. I hope.)))
That being said, I am a western writer attempting to write about two very foreign cultures, so please excuse me if anything is inaccurate. Also, it's been quite a while since I've written something of this magnitude and my grammar skills may be a bit rusty. Constructive criticism and reviews are welcomed.
Chapter One: Awake
The tall grass hissed over leg plating, all noise and no feeling in his head. Below, the earth muted his footsteps in the field. He didn't know how long he had been walking and the memory of where he came from slipped out of his grasp just a moment too soon. Wherever it was, it sent waves of sinister energy at his back and drove his heels.
A village was coming up, small and silent, with only a few blocks of modern buildings to serve as the downtown area, casting cool blue shadows over the concrete. He hadn't been feeling out for any nether realm presences but the lack of life caused him to instinctively tense and prepare for ambush as he eased toward the field's edge.
The soil disappeared from under him so suddenly he wasn't even aware until the soft clicks of his spurs echoed off the cobblestone. With nerves electrified by the dead giveaway of his march, the lone man crept on through the still streets until he came upon someone frozen at a wrought-iron table in front of the café. It was a little old woman, her hair gone white, with her back turned to him. He stopped for a moment, trying to discern whether or not she was a threat. In the passing heartbeat his fears turned to the possibility that she was wounded and his feet crushed the road into gravel as he ran to her, glancing around at some unknown threat concealed in the alleys. Nothing there but footfall resounding.
The woman was fine as far as he could tell. Then again, she could very well slip out of her skin and be some nasty thing going straight for his throat. Unchanged even as he neared, she afforded him one glint of a face bone white and too much like sand whipped into curved trenches. She jerked into life when he reached her, as though she was a doll with cranks of an invisible key that sent her little arm moving slowly in jagged little shakes against the liquid weight in her hand. She sipped her tea, leaving a red lip print on the ring of the cup, and despite her frail body she spoke in a low, cracked voice. "They don't want you here, boy. They fear the darkness that follows you."
The Ronin looked to the windows to see them for the first time: faces vanishing from the sky reflected in glass, shying away from his sight and a viscous mist clinging to brick. Behind him a heavy black fog was creeping across the field from which he came. He spun around to the woman with hands up in protest. "No, that's what I'm up against!"
To the empty windows, "I'm not here to hurt you, I swear!"
The old woman turned her eyes from the tea leaves in her cup and looked at him fully for the first time. Her blue gaze pierced him and she let the moment hang before speaking. "Take your death and destruction elsewhere."
He nodded. He was no angel of destruction… was he?
A wall of cold air fell as he walked to the edge of town where the fog was growing ever closer. The tinge of green swirled about his legs and he paused there to watch the black clouds rolling in overhead. A nervous sigh escaped his lips, taking with it all the warmth and fear from his heart. Only the cold nerve and lust remained, the thrill for blood that was always new, even now. He would have to make a break into the thicket of woods and try to lead away whatever was out there.
For just a moment he felt the hollow eyes of the vague blue faces at his back.
...
Kento started awake and held his tremoring muscles as still as he could manage in the initial deafening silence that came with resurfacing from dreams. When the vision began to dissolve into the walls of the dark apartment, he relaxed and kicked off the hot sheets to expose his sweat-soaked shirt and boxers.
The air in his bedroom was still in the lull of night. Signs of the sun lightened the sky outside his window into grays and pinks while the man watched shifting, silent gazes raining down their revulsion here in the waking life. The stares forced his body into an upright position on the edge of his bed to rest his head in his hands. Gravity settled his blood, leaving his muscles heavy and acidic with exhaustion as though he'd been thrashing about all night. He closed his burning eyes and saw them still, visages gone black with a sea of void white eyes doubling the glassy blue masks of his dream. They didn't disappear, no matter how hard he rubbed his eyes. They merely changed colors.
The dreams still haunted him. They'd begun in the early days of the first war when he'd flown off a derailed train and down a rabbit hole, where he saw the blankets of sand and blood sculpted from Hardrock's insatiable thirst for battle. In his life of training and glory dreams, he'd never steeled himself for that.
The faces of his mother and grandfather appeared among the dream masks, twisted and agonized as the night Hardrock shook awake.
Winter had lingered that year. The season did not bother Kento much, even the ever-present dirty slush that washed the world in flat shades of gray and brown. He simply didn't like the dormancy. That was all gone now, far past this evening in the late spring months, the time he preferred. The ground was waking and growing in long breaths of green up the hillsides, reaching to the edges of a sky promising rain. Subtle breezes drew the warmth from the evening soil as the sun slipped through the clouds to paint the shadowed roofs and broad rivers of road in licks of orange.
It was one of the first balmy nights of the year, with crickets and wind whispering little songs over the silken red wallpaper. The earth shivered under the house, up into the beams. Kento shifted his weight on the living room floor where he had stretched out after dinner. Throughout his life unease settled over him prior to every shimmy and shake, and now was no exception. His first concrete memories consisted of his nerves betraying him in cold waves working up from his feet to gnaw harshly at the pit of his stomach, sometimes igniting into an electric burn rattling through the meat of his bones in those rare but time-stopping quakes that sent him huddling into doorways with arms clutching protectively at his family. He had learned to ignore it and yet, tonight, tension flowed through the ground, through the air, through him. He merely turned again and tried to focus on the newest episode of Takeshi's Castle. From above his head came a delicate however strong woman's voice. Kento glanced up at his mother chattering into the telephone and nudged the TV's volume button with his toe.
Rei Faun Wenling, formerly of the Sikou name, was tall and pretty with a youthful white face and the same slate blue hair and eyes as her son. All his life she wore the matriarchal bun and the elegant yet durable clothes needed for a traditional mother and lady of her husband's business. Once she had been slim, in times before Kento could remember. Having borne five children, her hips had settled out nicely into a solidly curved body. Small lines were beginning to form on either side of a mouth that too often twisted itself into silent shows of emotion, be it good or bad.
As a quiet yet candid soul, it was not often that he saw her draw out conversations as she was doing now with his aunt. Very much the foundation for the earth-bound clan, she instead chose to direct her energy into stones placed all about her home and garden. Like her son, she was eroded by concern. She took on the sorrows and illnesses and pains from her family with a loving duty, and the negative energy unhealed by stone showed through in her tendency to absentmindedly rub her shoulders within the privacy of the home. When needed, she tended her stressed body with the finest root blends and muds. Tonight was such a night when she painted her face with the stuff and folded her bare feet up under herself in her spot on the loveseat. The scent of clay mask, powdery and slightly feminine, mixed with the warm air of evening into what would become one of Kento's most cherished and painful memories. He would not know how much he would miss it. Not yet.
In fact, that subtle odor wasn't even registering in his conscious mind. He was musing to himself that he could tiptoe through the course in which normal Japanese citizens were failing. A man lost his footing and tumbled into a mud pit. The television host uttered a quick offer of sympathies before he gestured wildly at a green screen flashing replays and a current tally. Kento groaned and rolled over as it cut away to commercial, not particularly interested in the graphics of Lucky Cat brand salmon.
Darkness filled the doorway in a form smaller than he, but threatening all the same. The boy instinctively rolled into a crouch with one knee to the ground and hands splayed defensively.
The figure moved slowly, deliberately into the light, revealing itself to be a worn man. His bones held strong under the yellow skin that had worn into deep grooves with the blood and labor in his lifetime, etching a scowl that dripped from the corners of eyes and mouth. A shock of that same blue held fast to the white knot stretched tight over his forehead.
He was Sikou Qiang, Kento's maternal grandfather and only living grandparent. He shouldered his duty as carrier of the Hardrock bloodline with a subdued pride, having taken care to perfect the wushu to mastery as a young man and pass it along to his kin. He marched on through time gracefully with the edges of his mind still sharp against the years.
The earthen armor itself had been lost from the physical plane; all that remained was an antique scroll with ten warriors charging five on five over charred battlefield. Taking after his ancestors, Qiang whispered the tale of five juxtaposed warriors many times into the night for his grandchildren. Kento had imagined himself in samurai garb, fighting in the name of balance beside the other four, all anonymous behind the armor masks. These memories, too, so innocent and half-forgotten, would resurface in the depths of tunnels and atop broken concrete where he would lay his head. They kept him moving when pain radiated from every bone and every muscle cried out for peace.
Now he was just riding the crest of unused adrenaline. In the space between recognition and relaxation, the boy caught the flicker of orange over the flat blue in the Hardrock patriarch's eyes. Though old man's voice was thick with age, it held its strength. "Kento."
The way his grandson's name fell from his lips brought the air to a standstill. His daughter's voice fell into silence before it hit the telephone. Suddenly the drone on television was distant. Qiang lifted his chin, guiding the mother and son to the pair of iron oxen on the end table and between the hooves, where a smooth, clear crystal emanated an orange light that painted the walls in dim arcs.
"No…" Wenling was the first to break the silence with one pained word. Flakes of dried mask cracked and fell away at the edges of her face. "No… Not yet! He's only fourteen!"
Kento pushed himself up onto his feet, through her cries, toward the crux of his existence that had, until this nightfall, lain dormant. For a moment the rest of the world crumbled away as his hands closed in on the rumbling crystal and he stood there, feeling the call of battle, the dreams of victory flowing all through him from the one link between this world and something greater. That tension was stronger than ever then, fixing his fingertips to the orb just like a magnet. His eyes burned with the horizontal slashes of a single character. Justice.
When his senses came back to him, only his grandfather stood in awe of the armor's orb. The telephone lay squawking effeminately on the floor. The two shook themselves back into reality and the elder bent to sweep up the receiver.
"Grandfather, where is Mom?"
"She's gone to tell your father." Qiang did not sound as joyous as he should have. Kento knew his mother must be taking it with a great weight on her heart.
The boy stared into the rounded stone and found no direction in its light. "What next?"
"I cannot tell you, Grandson, for I do not know. Hardrock belongs to you and you alone. My only guidance is the words of those before me: the path is sought within. You must find the way with your feet and your heart."
Kento turned to his grandfather, waiting for something more. To the puzzled look Qiang replied, "Go, prepare for bed"
He opened his mouth, found nothing else he could ask of Qiang as the old man pressed the telephone into his ear. "Yes, Chu Ju? Are you there?… Wenling is fine. Just shocked… The day is here."
He rolled the door on its track and found himself in the verandah. After the Rei Faun family had emigrated from the old country, Kento's grandfather Gen Tung, long deceased, worked steadily to purchase a siheyuan house, modeled in the style of old Beijing by an immigrant Chinese architect and braced against the temperamental Japanese land with buttresses and crossbeams.
The corner house was a large figure-eight composed of seven stone buildings with a large painted rose quartz marking the address in the outlying streets of Yokohama. A yellow dragon clawed its way across a crimson gate that swung back from the street into an open-air entrance hall in the southeast corner adorned with an iron patterned screen to keep the ill spirits out. The southern building served as a dining room adjoined with the kitchen in part of the lower west building. The next room to the north was the bedroom of the second-eldest son, Mei Ryu. Across the courtyard, the lower east building constituted his youngest brother's room and nearer his parents' room was the master bath. The main building was divided with a small walkway linking the two courts. The room to the east was the bedroom of his parents, the room to the west was the family area. The interior was decorated with traditional scarlet and oxblood taking the form of figurines, tapestries, paintings. The family found the auspicious red to be a harsh color and kept it as accents against the earth tones within their home. The remaining décor was mostly swaths of lush houseplants springing from ornate pottery in crowds underneath the windowsills and from hooks and braids in the ceiling. In both rooms, the southern windows were larger than those facing north to gaze into the courtyard.
Outside, a stone-topped table sat in the southwest corner for the family to dine there whenever the idea seized them. Nestled into the diagonal corner was the Buddha's shrine. Ash and soil bedded the etched tablets that immortalized the family's sacred dead on either side of the weathered icon. The yard was broken with flowers and paths, lit with candles along the roofed walkways and lanterns hanging from the tallow tree in the middle of it all.
The upper east building roofed his grandfather's living space, the meditation room, and his father's library. The smaller room in the southern half of the upper west building was his mother's sun room, decked with edible greenery among the birdcage and iguana tank for the pets to have at. The larger was the weaponry room, a space barren save for the implements of pain, old and new, decorative and functional. Between the two rooms a heavy wooden side gate that served as the door to the garage that lay outside the house proper.
A few peony bushes hugged the walls of the northernmost building and nothing more, for the rear courtyard served as the family's training grounds and even the grass had been beat back into nothing. The building was the only one in the house with two floors with an anteroom that separated the two lower rooms between his sisters, where maidens were customarily housed. A stairway wound around a large ficus growing right out of the floor and led up to a small bathroom in the southeast corner of the building, and his bedroom running along the entire upper floor. It overlooked his home through high, narrow windows and allowed for one glance back at the garage. A large window faced the west and a smaller one to the east opened up into the branches of a tree splitting the small lot between house and alley. Near the alleyway was an old compost bin. On humid days the smell permeated the air and Kento took in the scent as part of what was his.
The Rei Faun heir looked around at the lit sheets of glass. Most of the family was still awake on this electric eve, their silhouettes moving and shrinking and growing all around the courtyard. He set foot past his parent's room and stole a glance at the picture cast in shadow on the vermillion curtains: his father sitting with head low between his shoulders and his mother holding his baby sister, turned to look at her husband. The moment was too intimate and, turning away, he hurried on down the hall.
Water surged into the granite tub, sending an ever-growing cloud of steam into the bathroom while Kento stripped down and hung a towel from the corner of the gilt dragon screen. After he stepped into the tub and his nerves had acclimated to the heat, he tried to conjure all the glorious fantasies that had crowned his head for so long. Only an absence of all emotion flowed through him in the wake of shock, and that damned magnet pulling at his stomach. The confidence that had building all these years, all the training, all of grandfather Qiang's stories, all the daydreams, all whirled around too fast for his own head to keep up with. Instead the weight of his body sank into the heat.
The only thing that made sense in his head was the barrage of questions. He rose and began to wash as he tried to answer himself. What would he do now? Carry on until something goes down. The best thing would be to keep ears and eyes open for any signs. Signs like what? He didn't know, really. What if nothing happened? Then he would have to go looking. Would something come hunting for him? They couldn't, not yet. They didn't know who possessed the armor…did they? Worst of all, how long must he wait for an answer?
When the water had drawn out the last of what energy was his, Kento pulled the drain plug and rose from the bath. The whole affair had done nothing to relax and prepare him for rest; the magnetic charge still flowed. He pulled on a pair of jeans over wet skin and walked barefoot to feel out the fridge in the darkness, where he stood inside the open door, basking in the soft yellow light and picking apart the last of a butterflied hen. The fan was kicking on just as he finished his midnight snack, throwing a hum up from the floor. He dropped the bones into the trash, closed the door, and pulled his weight up onto the marble counter, then merely sat looking at the orange glow of the metropolis outside the walls of his home.
The magnet was kind then, ebbing in the night as if satiated with the food. His eyes burned and his body ached, yet he fought the pull of sleep. He feared what lay on the other side. After a little while a voice came from the darkness behind him, rumbling low like the ghost of an earthquake. "Strange night, huh kid?"
The boy's heart nearly exploded. "Don't do that! Are you trying to kill us all?" He wheezed with a palm held dramatically to his chest. When his nerves had calmed enough and his father did not laugh at the morbid remark, he turned around to the sight of ash glowing red and lighting the same jaw as his own.
"Dad, are you smoking?"
"Leave your old man alone," the rough voice, a little heavier tonight, said from behind the cherry and took another drag. "This is very stressful."
"Yeah, tell me about it," he turned back to the city lights with his hands pushing his shoulders up against the counter.
Kento had inherited his father's image from face to frame. Rei Faun Chan Run towered over his son now and would until the boy leveled off at 186 centimeters when he was 19 years old. He passed on the coarse hair, though his was cropped and slicked and the color of amethyst. His eyes, smaller and moss green, wrinkled when he laughed. He possessed the brutal strength that showed in his son. The two shared the square chin and barrel chest, the gravelly voice and joie de vivre.
As his family reaped gifts of the physical in bounty through their restaurant, he had learned the joy of the perpetual work to fill his days before coming home at night to bask in the comfort of family and domain, and it showed in his callused olive skin. His great palms were always busy, flitting with paperwork, heavy with a hammer, pointed to count inventory, swinging through fire in his kitchens, pulling his weight up hills when he led the family into the countryside for hikes, tracing the sky to teach his children how to tell time by sun and stars.
An earthen man through and through, Chan Run was still affected by his birth into a cycle of flame and harbored a deep affinity for pyrotechnics. All holidays were celebrated with the small vibrant display in the rear courtyard. For the fireworks he could not legally handle, he was the one hustling the family out the door for the Chinatown display. And he would hold his ribs and laugh maniacally under the rain of mineral fire, always.
Perhaps the fire could explain his love for tobacco. The cigarette was unfamiliar for Kento to see between his father's teeth, had been since the time near his eighth birthday. The process of abandoning the drug was the only time he had seen Chan Run snap at the family and argue with his mother. The old coffin nail was not a welcome sight.
"Where did you get that, anyway?"
"The stale pack I've been hoarding for times like this." The answer was very matter-of-fact. The tension in his father's body was almost audible then. He waited. "Have I told you how you were given your name?"
"Aw, Papa. Please," he held up his hands in the dark. "Grandfather told me this a few years ago on my birthday. Don't you remember?"
"I remember perfectly well. You simply didn't hear it all. Listen to your tale, Kento, and keep it in your heart when you go off to battle."
The bearer of Hardrock looked over to watch the ash burn bright in the darkness. When Rei Faun Chan Run began, a veil of smoke rolled across his son's vision of the orange clouds over Yokohama outside the kitchen window.
"Your grandmother had always dreamed of having a large family, and so did your mother. Dawei used to tell me of how they both wanted brothers and sisters for your mother. But her body was frail; she had difficulties even with your little aunt Chu Ju. Her body was far too weak for your uncle, and she knew."
Here the two paused for the lost souls.
"Your mother was crushed. I had come to know your grandmother Dawei and loved her. One could always find a friend in her. She was a good woman, kind and even-tempered. I never knew why the heavens took and took from her in the way they did.
"She was so happy when she learned of the son she was to have, but anyone could see a fear in her eyes. It was like she held something from us. She was also very pale, and grew whiter with time. When she passed, your mother was heartsick. I saw her little aside from the funeral affairs and the classes she managed to attend. In the few moments we had together, she simply laid her head in my lap and cried. The pain she was in must have been unbearable."
Chan Run lapsed again to reflect on Wenling's pain and perhaps his own. Kento could feel it in the darkness, in a nearly imperceptible shift of corporeal magnetism.
"We had wanted to begin planning our wedding after our schooling, but that was lost. I was so worried for her strength!" A pause, another chemical breath to look back on an agonized face. A face Kento had seen shadows of just tonight, a face Kento did not like.
"After our graduation, she insisted that we postpone the date. I didn't argue, of course. She was so tired she just slept. For months and months, she would wander like a zombie whenever she crawled from her bed. All I could do was tend to her and wait. When she woke up again, she was better. Silent and pained, but determined to rebuild herself stone by stone. I waited a long time to make her my wife. Until then I was there for her every time she needed me. Even when she didn't.
"And when the heavens blessed us with you," he turned to his eldest, "you were a healthy baby. You ate so much and still managed to sap your mother's strength. I was afraid that the same thing would happen, that I'd lose both of you.
"But your mother never showed any fear, not once. After she fought and fought, I remember, she really did glow, looking down at you like that." He paused to take a drag. "She knew. I think she knew before you were even born. If she didn't, she figured it out soon enough, the way you would cry before an earthquake."
Kento shut his eyes with the old pain running through him.
"She's shaken right now, but don't fear for her, Kento. She's always known. We've all known."
(((This is what the boy had heard on his tenth birthday, when his grandfather went to Chinatown and came back with, among lotus seed and eggs for the dinner, a bottle of wheat wine.
Before the meal Kento and the other children were herded into the rear courtyard, where Qiang and mother and father and aunt Chu Ju presented him with a coiling dragon staff and a naginata, the weapons of the armor Hardrock. He was finally of the proper age for training.
Leaves were beginning to rain down in noisy showers of orange as the moon edged back into the earth's last shadow before the Harvest Festival. Kento picked a leaf out of his birthday cake and twirled it between his fingers while Qiang leaned into the sour cloud hanging over the table to speak of his pale wife, and then of his pale daughter. The old man never said why he chose to drink that particular night, if not perhaps to regale Kento with the tale in colors and strikes and blows so vivid while the boy looked upon the staves and ponder Hardrock marching on through the mountains like the Ronin of days before, on toward a demon left faceless and nameless by the keeper of the tale. The ground cried out and opened to swallow up the twisting, howling creature at his will.
The story, however, started off on a somber note. Then again, many stories did.)))
Chan Run's gaze focused into the present and turned for his son to see in the dimness. "I know you won't fail, son. You've spent nearly half your life preparing for this. The only thing I've given you is the body and the roof over your head. Your mother has given everything for you to win. Her strength of mind, her wisdom, her fight, her temper. If nothing else, come back for her."
"I will if you put that thing out," Kento flicked a finger at the half-burned cherry. Without question, the senior Rei Faun plucked the butt from his mouth with thumb and middle finger to stamp it out in the drain and swing the faucet over from the left basin to give a shot of water on the hot ash. It went without saying that he wouldn't do this again. "You'd better bury that in the trash or else Mom will have your skin. You should probably brush your teeth again, too."
Chan Run shrugged and ran it down the drain. "I need sleep and so do you. We'll figure out what to do in the morning."
His throat rose and fell in a nervous swallow and Kento knew the lie. "Go to great-uncle Jianyu's. You know it's unsafe so close to the cities."
"There is no honor in fleeing without your first son-"
"But it's not worth it to lose everyone else. Especially when none of us actually knows what will really happen. I've heard all of you talk about it when you thought I was sleeping. You have to get as far into the country as you can. Run for the hills!" He threw his hands up for comic relief. His father chuckled, an affirmation of the plans.
"In the morning. It's time to sleep."
"I'll try." The magnet was gone now and the idea was suddenly quite possible. "Goodnight."
"Goodnight," Chan Run echoed as he started toward his bedroom door.
Kento went down to check the front gate's lock. He rounded the partition and stood looking around at the front houses, darker than before. His father was just turning off the overhead light in his bedroom, leaving only the table lamp's glow. From the cracks of the bathroom door, light filtered out with the sound of running water in the sink. He caught a glance up at the clear sky before knocking on the door. Wenling rolled back the door almost immediately with water still running down her face. She dried her skin in the hand towel and waited for him to speak.
"I'm gonna hit the hay," he tilted his head at his bedroom. "Goodnight."
Wenling said nothing for a moment, only bowed her head. Then she sprang up on her toes to wrap her arms around his shoulders. "Goodnight."
He gave her a reassuring smile as he broke the embrace and jumped the space between the angle of the verandahs, over Buddha's head. His grandfather's room was lit with a reading lamp. For a moment Kento thought of stopping to say goodnight, but the old man was never to be disturbed after he retiring to his room. So he kept on, straight across the body-worn mat of dirt that shone in the moonlight, beckoning to him.
(((A pebble flecked off the ridge of his left eyebrow.
"Pick up your staff, Kento." Wenling stepped forward and threw another rock at his shoulder. When he hesitated, expecting maternal instinct to hold her fingers, she did not miss a beat. An edge of quartz bit at his cheek. "The enemy will not pause for you."
"Ow! Mom-"
Another rock.
"You must listen to that gut feeling."
Another bite.
"And act before they can."
A glint nearly cut at his eye and the pain sent his body into a defensive charge with a spin of wrists and fingers.)))
Up the stairs and into his unlit room, scarcely noteworthy save for the sand yellow walls and slightly Westernized atmosphere of mecha figures and action posters. He moved through the shadows of branches toward the far west end where his bed lay, through the space left empty for the long nights and rainy days when he would practice his forms and certain routines with his weapons. He stripped off his jeans and stepped into a pair of sleeping shorts, musing to himself that he was still too worked up with the news, that he wouldn't be able to sleep like this.
He had barely finished the notion when gravity pulled him down onto the sheets, into the last spell of absolute peace he would have for a long time.