The Cracks in the Sky
The mist has not yet lifted from Hinoshima when Kai begins his first strike.
Dawn in the mountains arrives slowly, reluctant, as if the sun itself must be coaxed over the jagged peaks that ring the village like the teeth of some sleeping beast. The courtyard of the dojo sits on a shelf of stone halfway up Mount Kurai, and at this hour it belongs to shadow and silence, to the thin cold air that burns the lungs on the inhale. Kai's bare feet find the familiar cracks in the flagstones without looking—cracks his master once told him were older than the village itself, scars left by an earthquake generations past. *The stone remembers being broken,* Master Ishido used to say, *and still it holds you up. There is a lesson in that, if you would only stop long enough to learn it.*
Kai never stopped long enough. He doesn't now.
His fist drives into the wooden post for the hundredth time this morning, and the dull *crack* of knuckle against grain echoes off the mountainside like a struck drum. Pain lances up through his wrist, familiar as breathing, and he exhales hard through his nose and strikes again. The post is scarred pale where the bark has long since been pounded away, and where…
