"Fire does not judge the shape of what it burns. Only what is left behind speaks of what it once was."
— Letter from Hotaru no Yakusha
---
Night in Kamakura carried a silence sharp enough to cut skin.
In the alleyways behind crumbling temples, where monks no longer dared to pray, ash settled over the stones like a thin blanket of grief.
And there, moving without honor or haste, walked Shindō Motsura — a man whose name had long since lost its meaning.
His armor was lacquered black, cracked at the edges like old lacquerware, stained by more than the blood of enemies.
His blade — a nodachi longer than he was tall — hung on his back, bound in a soiled cloth to hide its shape.
But even hidden, it breathed murder.
They called him many things: Ronin, butcher, curse made flesh.
Yet none of those words touched the frozen marrow of his heart.
What he had become was something simpler: a man who had chosen, with deliberate cruelty, to kill what softness might have survived inside him.
Tonight, the air smelled of burned rice and wet cedar.
A reminder of villages set to flame, of children running barefoot across dying embers, of the sound flesh makes when it refuses to die quickly.
Shindō remembered those sounds.
Not because they haunted him — he had taught himself to sleep even when the dying whispered.
He remembered because they were proof: proof that his blade was real, that the world bent before him, that fear could be shaped like clay.
Yet even clay cracks.
---
It was at the ruined gate of an old Buddhist temple that Shindō paused.
Moonlight struck the broken tiles, painting everything in pale silver.
A statue of Kannon lay decapitated, its head cradled by roots that had clawed through the stone courtyard.
In that place, something stirred behind Shindō's eyes: a memory, or maybe just the ache of old scars.
> "Mercy," his mother had whispered once, hands trembling over a prayer bead.
"Without mercy, even the strongest blade turns on the hand that holds it."
He had been twelve then.
He had slit her throat before sunrise.
---
The temple door creaked at his touch.
Inside, the dust smelled older than bone.
Painted screens depicted dragons coiling through clouds now cracked and fading — their scales peeling like the skin of rotting fish.
It was said dragons once brought rain to dying fields.
But what did dragons know of hunger? What did gods know of rot?
Shindō's hand drifted to the hilt of his nodachi.
He wondered — not for the first time — if the steel still remembered all the lives it had ended.
And if it did, whether it blamed him for swinging it.
---
Outside, a lantern glimmered.
A single, flickering light, no bigger than a firefly — a hotaru.
At first, he thought it belonged to a beggar or thief.
But the figure holding it stood too still, wrapped in a robe blacker than night, mask covering every trace of a face.
Then came the voice.
Soft. Calm. As if speaking not to him, but to the emptiness itself.
> "Motsura of the Ashen Blade," it murmured.
"The world does not need your mercy. It needs your fire."
In that moment, the flame of the lantern burned brighter.
Not yellow. But blue — like the last breath of a dying pyre.
---
And so it was that Shindō Motsura first heard the words of Hotaru no Yakusha, the man who would offer him something darker than vengeance:
A purpose.
Even the coldest heart aches to belong.
Even the ash of a dragon remembers that once, it burned.