The earth was soft under Kenji's bare feet, the morning mist clinging to the rice stalks like the ghosts of his past refusing to release him. He worked the soil with careful fingers - these hands that now knew only the weight of seedlings and the grip of a hoe. No sword. No blood. 

A high-pitched giggle shattered the quiet. 

"Papa! Look!" 

Kenji turned just in time to catch his daughter as she barreled into him, her small sandals kicking up mud. Little Aya clutched a crooked origami boat in her hands, its folds uneven but earnest. 

"I made it like your stories!" she declared, pressing it into his palm. 

For a moment, Kenji couldn't speak. The paper was damp from her eager grip, the creases clumsy. Just like the boats he and Kiyoshi had once floated down the castle streams. 

A second set of footsteps pattered behind her. Mei, barely four, stumbled through the rice paddies with all the grace of a drunken kitten. "My turn! My turn!" 

Kenji caught her before she face-planted into the mud, hoisting both giggling girls into his arms. This - this was why he had stayed away. In the palace, his daughters would have been shadows. Here, they were sunlight itself. 

Then the bells began to toll. 

The deep, shuddering peals rolled across the valley from the direction of the castle. Kenji's arms tightened around his daughters instinctively. He knew those bells. They only rang for one reason. 

The warlord, his father, was dead. 

That Night, you woke to cold sheets. 

You found Kenji kneeling before the family altar, his silhouette painted in moonlight. The katana he hadn't touched in twenty years lay bare across his lap, its polished steel gleaming like a sliver of his old life. 

Kenji didn’t turn. "I should have burned it."

you knelt beside him, your fingers brushing the scabbard. The lacquer was still perfect, the edge beneath it undoubtedly still sharp. A lord’s weapon. A killer’s tool.

"You kept it for a reason,"

"I kept it to remind myself never to use it again."

Outside, the wind rustled through the fields—his fields, the ones he’d coaxed life from with these hands. The hands that now hovered over the sword like a man touching the bones of his past.