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“I would like to commission a sword,” Kamisato Ayato says to the man forging a sword.
“I do not make swords,” says the man forging a sword.
“You appear to be making a sword right now,” Kamisato Ayato says to the man forging a sword.
The man forging a sword looks down at the blade in his hands, shrugs, and says nothing else. He returns to forging a sword.
Bemused, Kamisato Ayato leaves—for now.
To go from the Kamisato estate to Nazuchi Beach is neither an easy nor a quick trip. It requires two boats, checking in with (and obtaining approval from) the officers at the Kujou Encampment, and then walking across the better part of Kannazuka Island. All said and done (even if the wind favors the boats and the Tenryou Commission doesn’t delay him simply because they can) it’s still guaranteed to be a two-day trip.
Kamisato Ayato is a very busy man. He does not have two days to throw away on a trip to see a bladesmith who will, once again, turn him away cold at the door. He does not—and yet, he does so anyway.
The second time he comes to the hut on Nazuchi Beach, the sun is just beginning to set, the ocean lit up in a mirror of flames. The hut resounds with the sounds of the forge, the heavy repetitive impact of hammer upon metal. The forge itself is not indoors—it is outdoors, under a reed awning, and Ayato steps over the low fence to enter the yard. He leans against the lavender melon tree in the yard, plucks one ripe fruit, peels it with his eating knife, and watches.
The bladesmith is a young man—perhaps a handful of years older than Ayato himself is—with a surprisingly lithe build for his profession, although there is a great deal of muscle in his upper arms and chest, his back broader than seems to fit his proportions. He wears simple undyed linen hakama and kyahan, going shirtless in deference to the heat of his forge, his white hair pulled out of his face and tied at the top of his neck, although strands stick to his skin with sweat, the red streak over his forehead particularly striking against his flush of exertion.
He does not wear a Vision.
He is, once again, making a sword—a tantō this time, the blade short and practical rather than martial. Ayato had expected that the bladesmith would be bothered by having an audience, particularly one he had already turned away, but were it not for the fact that the pace of his arm slowed when Ayato came into his yard he seems to have not noticed Ayato’s presence at all.
In the three years since he became Yashiro Commissioner, Ayato has forgotten the relief of anonymity. It’s been three years since someone treated him with such refreshing indifference. There is no expectation or fear—just complete lack of interest.
As the sun dips further and further down in the sky, the last red-hot glow off the waves forcing Ayato to close one eye and shift to the side to keep from being blinded by the reflection, the bladesmith finishes his tantō. After he’s quenched it, he washes his hands, takes a long drink of water from a bamboo cup and basin beside the door, and wipes his chest down, sighing with relief at the cool water on his skin.
Only then does he turn towards Ayato. His expression is as carefully neutral as Ayato’s own is, but where Ayato keeps his in an unreadable smile, the bladesmith has the faintest furrow between his brows.
“I do not make swords,” he says, and then steps inside his house. Ayato doesn’t bother to chase him—it’s certainly not a soundproof structure and the back door and all the windows are open to let in the cool air of the sea breeze.
“I’m not here to commission a sword.” Ayato raises his voice to be sure the other man can hear. “As you’ve said, you do not make swords.” Aside from the sword that Ayato saw him make. Ayato turns towards the ocean, flips his eating knife over, and throws it overhand into the surf, putting enough force behind the throw that it goes into deeper water so no passersby will step on the blade.
It disappears beneath the waves with a plunk sound. If Ayato wanted to, it’s close enough to the shore that he could probably go swim out and dive down to find it—but he does not want to.
“I seem to have dropped my eating knife into the ocean. I’d like to commission a new one.” The hut is quiet before the bladesmith ducks back out, looking at Ayato with what seems like new eyes, his eyebrows raised, his expression—well, not interested, but curious, perhaps. Like a cat, considering some new piece of furniture. Ayato lets his smile widen and shrugs one shoulder. “Oops!” The bladesmith continues to look at him for a long, fraught moment of silence, before going back inside again.
He returns with two stools, both of them fine black lacquerware that has been much-repaired. They wobble on the packed earth of the forge yard, the ground not flat enough (or, perhaps their legs no longer even enough) to stand straight. The bladesmith sets a small bottle of sake between the two stools, placing beside it two stoneware cups, both of them glazed with a pattern of autumn leaves. He sits on one stool and gestures Ayato at the other stool.
“What will it cost?” Ayato asks, after he sits.
“What will you pay?” the bladesmith returns, pouring a cup of sake for both of them. For the first time since Ayato has been out here without any retainers or protection, he feels a frisson of fear, something prickling along the curve of his spine. There’s something about the way the other man says it that leaves him unsettled—as if there’s the implication of his trading flesh for steel.
“Mora?” Ayato hazards, drinking the sake—only belatedly realizing he’s drunk before the bladesmith, and the wine or the cup or both could be poisoned.
He spends too much time around the Shuumatsuban. If this bladesmith wanted to kill him, there would be a plethora of ways more straightforward and effective than poisoned cup. The laws of hospitality are laws for a reason. He is sitting on the man’s stools, drinking from his cups, and the kind of poison that would be hidden in sake would render the ceramic of both vessel and cups unusable without the risk of future poison.
For a bladesmith who lives so far from Inazuman society, on the verges of where it is safe to reside without risking exposure to the Tatarigami, fine ceramic cups are not the sort of thing one would squander.
Ayato drinks, and tells himself to stop worrying.
“I accept payment neither in coin nor in kind,” the bladesmith replies at last, resettling his weight on his stool. A gust of wind blows from behind Ayato, throwing his hair around his face, and the bladesmith catches a leaf that flies off of the cuihua tree at the edge of the garden. “The wind brought you hence,” he continues, holding the leaf between them—in his right hand, the sake cup. In his left, the leaf. “Just as the wind brought this leaf. The leaf’s story I already know: It grew from a bud in the spring and then matured through the summer, and now, as it turns to autumn, it will fall, return to the earth, and eventually decay into soil.” The bladesmith looks once more to Ayato, his eyes alight for the first time Ayato has seen. “What is your story? What is the story of your knife? Why have you come here, to commission this blade of me? Surely there are equal swordsmiths on Narukami Island.”
Ayato does not answer right away, staring down into his sake instead.
Why did he come here? What wind blew him hence, across Narukami and Kannazuka? What called him to this house not only once, but twice?
He considers his reply for long enough that the sun sinks below the edge of the horizon, twilight gloaming blue and purple over the beach. When he does finally speak, the words come without his consciously choosing them. “The dandelion wine of Monstadt can never be brewed the same way twice. The scent, flavor, profile, density, ingredients—every time, they change and change anew, so the wine is never the same. Even if you brew two barrels from the same ingredients and age them side-by-side, the wind is freedom, and dandelions are the wind. The wine is free to be whatever it wants. I wonder sometimes if people are dandelion wine. If we’re all made of the same stuff—of blood and bone and muscle and the seven elements—what is it that makes each of us unique? Could I have been you, in another lifetime? Could you have been me?”
“What do you think?”
The breeze stirs Ayato’s sake in his cup, a faint tremor that starts at one side, then the other, again and again until the entire surface is never-ending ripples. In each ripple there’s a sliver of Kamisato Ayato, his reflection fragmented and splintered into a strip of eyelash, a flash of skin, a shining eye, parted lips.
He wets those lips before he replies, “I think that eternity is, for any one human, fleeting. Eternity is the steps we all walk. My father held a knife to eat, so I hold I knife to eat, so my children will hold a knife to eat. That is eternity, and between them, we are free to do whatever we think is justice.”
The bladesmith is quiet. Ayato does not look at him as he drains his cup, stands, and steps back into his house. “Come back in nine days,” says the bladesmith.
Ayato nods, and drinks the rest of his sake so slowly that the moon has risen high into the sky before he finishes the cup. The candles inside the house have been quenched when he finally moves to stand.
He leaves the cup upside-down on top of the stool, along with a small offering of sacred sakura petals and a palm-sized bag of salt, in thanks.
Nine days later, Kamisato Ayato returns to the hut on Nazuchi Beach. He finds an eating knife waiting for him, wrapped up inside a single leaf off of the chuihua tree, set on the top of the fence where he leaned last time he came.
There is no sign of the bladesmith.
Tired from his journey and enjoying the chance to be both out and alone, Kamisato Ayato decides to wait.
He spends the night sleeping propped up against the back wall of the house, not wanting to enter space that is not his. It’s a restless night, the late autumn wind off of the ocean cooler than he expected, and the hard dirt is not particularly comfortable. His dreams are unsettling and he wakes whenever he hears what could be the sound of an approaching monster or assassin, his Vision cool and reassuring against the inside of his collar, where it hangs, hidden within his shirt.
Nothing comes. His night passes uneventfully.
In the morning, he takes two ladles of fresh water from the bladesmith’s rain barrel and drinks both, then takes a third, wets his handkerchief, and wipes his face, the small of his back, beneath his arms, and behind his knees.
Just after dawn, the bladesmith comes up the beach. He is dressed for travel, wearing a black and red hakama and kyahan, his jacket white beneath the same pattern of red-ombre leaves as his sake cups, an arm guard on his left shoulder. There is a blade sheathed across his back, the likes of which Ayato has never seen worn in Inazuma.
It is not a katana.
“You don’t make swords,” Ayato says, gesturing at the blade on the other man’s back. “But you carry one.”
“I don’t make swords,” the bladesmith agrees, stepping over his fence and throwing down his carry bag beside his anvil, “but I know better than to die alone on a seldom-walked road. Why are you still here?”
“I wanted to thank you for my knife.”
The bladesmith blinks and straightens. He peers at Ayato more carefully this time, like he’s searching for something. He seems to find it, for he offers Ayato a faint smile. “I hope it treats you well, Commissioner.”
It is only halfway back to the Kujou Encampment that Ayato realizes the bladesmith called him Commissioner. He’s so shocked by this realization he actually misses a step and turns his ankle, stumbling on the sand and into the ocean up to his shin, his left foot now damp, his sock dripping wet, and his right dry.
Why only say something then?
Kamisato Ayato has no intention of returning to the bladesmith of Nazuchi Beach, but two months after he walked across half of Kannazuka with one wet foot and one dry foot and an eating knife burning a hole in his pocket, he receives a troubling report from the Shuumatsuban, one that will inevitably end up on some desk in the Tenryou Commission.
This time, when he returns to Nazuchi Beach, Ayato wears his own clothes, although he refuses any official Shuumatsuban escort. He takes Thoma instead, and leaves his friend at the other end of the beach, out of sight. He’s close enough that, should Ayato need him, he can reach, but far enough that it will not be seen as insult.
The bladesmith is not hammering today. Instead, he sits on one of his old lacquerware stools in the back yard, wearing a shirt in light of the oncoming winter, holding a katana between his knees. From down the beach, Ayato can see him startle, the brief flicker of the red streak through his bangs catching the light—it is further than he can possibly see, as engrossed in his task as he must be. Something else must tell him Ayato is coming. A trick of the light, a flicker of the water?
When Ayato arrives, the bladesmith does not look up, focused on the whetstone and the sword.
Ayato leans against the fence from the outside this time.
“You’re making a sword.”
“I don’t,” says the bladesmith, for the third time, his voice low and surprisingly firm, like a hard northerly wind when it cuts over the Narukami headlands and sets the trees rustling and sand blowing up into your face, “make swords.” When Ayato doesn’t reply, the bladesmith frowns. “A sword does not bring freedom.”
It takes Ayato longer than he would like to admit to parse this statement. “Isn’t that what the people of Watatsumi Island need swords for? To fight for freedom? Or adventurers? The whole point of organizations such as the Knights of Favonius in Monstadt is to use swords to fight for freedom against tyrannical rulers.”
The bladesmith does not look up from his katana. “If I told you to order the Shuumatsuban across the beach to strike me with his blade, what would happen?”
Ayato is genuinely alarmed now. He doesn’t flinch, but he does look, eyes flicking towards where Thoma is hiding. He could raise his hand and call for his friend, but is he truly likely to face real danger here? Is this bladesmith about to kill him?
“He uses a spear,” Ayato says instead, which is not an answer. The bladesmith shrugs one shoulder, awaiting his real response. “He would strike you, and you would either block, dodge, or die.”
“And you, Commissioner? If you drew your sword, could you strike me without cutting me down?”
“I’d like to think we both could.” Ayato feels his hackles raise. “Why are you asking me these questions? There have been reports of unusually high numbers of well-made blades appearing in the hands of less-savory elements, swords that appear to be of Inazuman make—“
“I do not make swords,” the bladesmith says. He stands and turns in one airy motion before crossing to where Ayato stands. He moves so fast, like the wind itself, and Ayato barely has a chance to draw his own sword to parry as the katana the bladesmith wields strikes his own. There is little force behind it—it was more feint than actual attack.
Even still, Ayato can feel and taste the adrenaline-fear of his pounding heartbeat.
He stares at the bladesmith’s sword, and feels his jaw drop open with a gasp, for it is not a sword—or at least, if it is, it is a worthless one. It is no mainland double-bladed sword, nor is it an Inazuman katana. Or—it is the body of a katana, but the blade is reversed. Where a katana cuts, the blade is dull. Where a katana is dull, the blade cuts.
Kamisato Ayato has mistaken sakabatō for katana, and who could blame him, for who would forge a sakabatō?
“A katana kills,” the bladesmith says, lowering the sakabatō. “A sword maims. In times of peace, an axe can cut a tree. A greatsword can mine stone. An arrow or spear can hunt. A catalyst can make water or light fire. A sword? A sword is good for only one thing. There is nothing of freedom in a sword, only the eternal need to kill and be killed.” His mouth is pulled into a sneer. “Commissioner, I do not make swords.”
Thoma’s footsteps are loud, his feet crunching in the sand. Ayato still has not lowered his blade. He stares, almost unable to believe his own eyes, at the sakabatō in the bladesmith’s hand. When Thoma stops behind him, slightly out of breath, none of the three of them move.
“A katana kills,” the bladesmith continues, his voice gentler this time—less howling gale, more sea breeze. “When you strike someone with a sword, you strike to kill. Your intention, the intention of your mind and your eye and your hand and your arm, they can be of kindness and peace, but the intention of a sword is to kill. You can kill with an eating knife or a tantō; you can kill with a sakabatō. But if you kill with one of those, you must choose it. You must want it. Your mind, eye, hand, and arm must all want to kill with as much fervor and desire as does your blade. You have the freedom to choose: Do you strike to kill, as imperfect as that may be? Or, do you strike for another reason? Do you strike with your heart? Commissioner Kamisato, I do not make swords. I make choices.”
The bladesmith meets Ayato’s eyes and holds out the sakabatō. “And this choice was made for you.”
There is no attack. There is no malice.
There is only a choice in this meter of fine steel, undecorated but unmistakably a masterwork. It is the single finest blade that Kamisato Ayato has ever beheld, the single finest blade he has ever seen outside of display. It is worth a king’s ransom. It is fit for the Almighty Narukami Ogosho herself.
It is a sakabatō. It is worthless.
It is a choice—the freedom to choose justice, rather than the eternal cycle of battle and blood and death.
Kamisato Ayato takes the sakabatō and bows. He cannot find words as he turns to join Thoma, grabbing his friend by his elbow and towing him away. All the way back across the beach Thoma tries to ask him for an explanation, as if Ayato can put any of what just happened into words. He barely knows what happened himself, for one moment he was sure he was facing down the source of the finest weapons outside of Narukami Island. The next he was certain he was about to be struck down, assassinated in broad daylight by a relative stranger with an unbloodied blade, the fear of his own demise momentarily blinding. And then...
The sakabatō is heavy in his hand.
He should offer it to the Narukami Shrine. It is surely a god-blade, worthy of an Archon, worthy of preservation by the Guuji.
It was not made for an Archon. It was made for Kamisato Ayato, and it is the freedom to choose a different kind of justice from the ones practiced by the Tri-Commission and the Raiden Shogun.
When they return to the Kamisato Estate, Ayato unsheathes, oils down, and hangs his father’s sword up on a stand, presents to it offerings of incense and prayer.
In its place, he has a new sheath commissioned, and belts the sakabatō at his hip—a reminder, no matter where he goes or what he does, that he may choose what he believes justice to be. He is not his father. He is not the Yashiro Commission. He is not a killer. He is not eternal.
He is Kamisato Ayato, and he gets to make a choice.
For two years, Kamisato Ayato does not think overmuch about the bladesmith of Nazuchi Beach. When Ayaka comes of age, he sends her there, and she returns with a metal-bladed fan and an unreadable expression, her eyes shadowed. She leaves again the following fortnight. This time, she comes back with a second sakabatō, and what it might mean to have the freedom to choose love instead of justice or eternity she never says. Ayato understands, even if she never puts words to it.
They are not blades for killing and war. They are blades for understanding and peace. They are blades for the eternal—but the eternal cyclicality of life, not the eternal nothingness of death.
And then, two months after the Sakoku Decree is passed, Kamisato Ayato receives a request for a travel permit out of Inazuma.
And the leaves begin to fall.
Kaedehara Kazuha is a slender man, perhaps a handful of years older than Ayato himself is, his white hair artfully windblown. He wears the same clothes that Ayato remembers, what was once fine now worn with age, the visible seams of mended tears here and there in the sleeves and body. Inside the Yashiro Commission he goes unarmed.
His eyes are still the red of a bloody sunset.
Ayato greets him in person, not behind a screen as propriety should dictate, and when Kaedehara sits down across from him, Ayato places the lacquerware tea tray between them and begins to do temae, the rote mechanical structure of preparing matcha as familiar to him as is the act of drinking sake.
Ayato’s tea set is porcelain, patterned with the ever-roiling burst of waves. Into both of their cups he lays a single sacred sakura petal, and then whisks the tea into a froth on top of it, blessing them with the sanctity of eternity.
They drink in silence.
“Bladesmith,” says Kamisato Ayato.
“Commissioner,” says the bladesmith.
Ayato sets his finished tea down on the tray and folds his hands, looking the other man over. There is so much that he could say—so much he wants to ask. Has Kaedehara always known who he is? Has Kaedehara always known that Ayato knew who he is? These and many others are the questions which he wonders, but the answers don’t matter. Answers are choices. They have made choices already.
What matters is the future, and it is for the future that Ayato asks, “Why do you wish to leave Inazuma?”
“To study the swordmaking arts of the rest of Teyvat.” It is a good answer. “I wish to pass on the Isshin art to others around the world, and by doing so, grow and learn in kind. When the winds blow me home again, their skills will come alongside my own.”
“And why should I sponsor you to the Kanjou Commission?”
“Why not?” Kaedehara returns, and Ayato is forced to wonder, truly, Why not? His word is strong enough that, should he sponsor Kaedehara, the Kanjou Commission would accept it. He has the standing to demand a single writ of passage for an artisan.
Here, Ayato breaks propriety, and brews them each a second cup of tea. He needs to think and it gives him something to do. He can see the slight smile on Kaedehara’s mouth, his amusement small and not unkindly. Only after Ayato has finished whisking the tea in their cups does he make up his mind.
He feared, once and briefly, that Kaedehara Kazuha would strike him down in cold blood, far from home and far from help. Here, inside the Yashiro Commission, still in some ways a pariah to Inazuman society after his family’s disgrace, Ayato would not blame Kaedehara for fearing the same outcome. They are mirrors, reflected and reflecting.
Neither of them had the freedom to choose who they would become, and neither of those becomings were caused by anything like impartial justice. Inazuma is eternal, but those who prop up its shoulders are temporary. None but the Narukami Ogosho can reign forever.
“You do not make swords.”
“Yes,” Kaedehara agrees. “I do not make swords.”
“But you wish to leave Inazuma to learn how to go make swords.”
“I wish to study the art of making swords. There is a difference, Commissioner, between the act of learning and the act of forging.”
Rather than respond to this, Ayato leans forward, one hand flattned over his knee. “I have questions that I need answers to. If you tell me the truth, I will sign a writ to the Kanjou Commission.” Kaedehara does not gesture for him to go on but does relax, breathing easier. “First, you do not make swords—but you do smuggle swords.”
Kaedehara smiles knowingly. “Yes.”
“How is smuggling a sword not the same thing as making one?”
“How is drinking tea not the same thing as making it?” Kaedehara gestures to the matcha between them. “What do you do with tea? You drink it. Twice, you made us matcha. Twice, you assumed I would drink, for that is polite—but what would you do if I refused to drink? The intent of your temae and the tea would both go unfulfilled. But, if you made a cup of tea and left it out on the windowsill, anyone could drink—or it could evaporate. Or the cup could be knocked to the ground and shattered, the tea wasted. Your intent to make tea is fulfilled, but the intent of the tea is free.
“If I make a sword—if I forge the blade and sharpen it and sheathe it and name it, I have made it with the knowledge that someone will use it to kill. As tea is made to drink, a sword is made to fight with. If I smuggle a sword... Who made it, and why? Who will wield it, and why? Smuggled swords are free to be thrown into the ocean, left to rust, used to hack down vines, used to hunt, used to defend the weak, or used to kill.”
Ayato sits with these words for a time. When he at last straightens, he sighs. “If I refuse your writ, you’ll smuggle yourself out.”
Kaedehara shrugs. “Laws are contracts. Eternity does not bind contracts; contracts must be entered into freely. Contracts cannot bind freedom—freedom binds contracts. The wind will find a way. The wind will bring glory.”
Ayato feels the hair on the back of his neck prickle. “You have a Vision.”
Kaedehara Kazuha reaches in past his collar and removes an Anemo Vision, setting it atop the table between them. It smells of autumn leaves and the sea breeze. It makes the steam from the kettle and the stove and their tea swirl and froth.
At last Ayato nods, pushing the Vision across the table towards Kaedehara. “Yes, I will sign your writ.”
“You have my thanks.” Kaedehara takes back his Vision and bows from the waist where he sits. “You have shown me kindness, Commissioner.”
Ayato writes the letter out without truly feeling what he does. The brush whispers over the paper, the ink stains it dark and the characters flow forth without his conscious thought, a writ of passage off of Ritou Island for Kaedehara Kazuha of the Isshin School, signed and marked with the Yashiro Commission seal in wax. When he gives the letter over, Kaedehara bows again and finally rises.
For Ayato, there are six steps between the table and the door. For Kaedehara, his legs shorter, there are eight. Ayato counts six and then breathes out.
The bladesmith stops, his socks whispering against the tatami as he turns. They stand in a silence smelling of breath and water and the autumn wind and the soot of the forge.
“Why did you not name the sakabatō?” Ayato finally asks. Bladesmiths name their swords. That is how it is done. Yet, he and Ayaka both hold nameless blades, their desires hidden.
Kaedehara laughs, and it is a good laugh. It reminds Ayato of how it feels to wake with ease at dawn and enjoy the first breeze over your face as you watch the sun rise, filled with awe and love for the newly-born world. “If I had named them, would you be free to choose what kind of sword you held in your hand? If I had given you a blade named Do Unto Others or Seek No Further, what would you have done? What would you have given up on finding? We are given names by our parents as their hope for our futures, the same as a bladesmith names their blades—but neither of those is choice. You are free to name your sword whatever you wish, Commissioner Kamisato.”
Ayato looks up and finds Kaedehara’s eyes. “I want you to name it, bladesmith Kaedehara. If I am free to choose, I believe the only just and righteous name for my sword is the one that you gave it, for you forged it.”
Kaedehara considers him, expression warring between awe and understanding, like he has just learned a new language.
“The subtle distance between gods and others,” Kaedehara at last pronounces. “There will always be those who dare to brave the lightning’s glow, Commissioner.” The bladesmith bows and leaves, the door whispering shut behind him.
Two days later, the Vision Hunt Decree is passed.
The day after, a man dares to brave the lightning’s glow, and Kaedehara Kazuha escapes on a ship with a dead Vision and a writ signed in Kamisato Ayato’s name that he never gives anyone.
Kamisato Ayato sets his hand atop the hilt of Kamiri Ayahito and wonders, as he watches the thunderclouds billow and roll above Tenshukaku and the ocean, whether or not Kaedehara meant the subtle distance between gods and others or the subtle distance between gods and you.
He hopes that, someday, another will dare to brave the lightning’s glow, and in whatever comes after, he will be able to ask.