It is a very difficult thing to accept the unknowable. In the shifting circumstances of life people strain to find a meaning from composition of unrelated events. More often than not the inventive mind will create some sort of rationalization. Everything must happen for a reason. In viewing particularly auspicious natural phenomena this is often the base of superstition. But sometimes the eye is keener than the inventive mind, able to perceive and accept what simply is.

Without so much as a sign of a wind. a storm had swiftly arrayed itself around the Island of the Red-Crowned Crane like a dark crown of smoke. The bay stilled as if a large, stagnant pond, as if the world had held its breath, and the sun was blotted out by shadow miles-long.

Then the sky split.

The maritime sailors swore that they saw the clouds part for miles over the Senbei Archipelago that day, a fleeting return to daylight until the blue itself seemed to shatter. Hailstones as large as fists fell riotously into the tropical mid-day, like fragments of the now-exposing stars falling to earth between the flickering aurora. The inverted night suspended itself, the ocean lurching and spitting like some wounded beasts, as its energies bathed crested wave and shuddereing masts aglow with banded fire.

Gulls cried out over the warm flotsam, and staring upward at them, Kuki narrowed his eyes as their broad shadows parted from the sun's second rising. Floating upon his back, blood-warm seawater sloshed around in the shell on his back, and he lazily bobbed adrift upon the waves.

In a battle between Masters, heaven and hell themselves would quake. He hadn't considered the old adage much until today.

"S'a sharp young man, that he is. Might've underestimated him. "

"Gyek." Ishii rubbed his beak over the swelling purple shiner on Kuki's cheek. The Old Turtle winced as salt water got into his wounded brow.

"Heh-heh. Yeah I know. But y'should see th'other guy."

Ten years ago, a False Tiger was revealed to be a Crane with broken wings. Five years ago in the snows before the Frozen Fall, Kamesennin Kuki pulled a fellow apostate from the brink of death. They had much in common, and with nowhere to return to, the world they had left behind continued without them.

Even now, the head of the house stood prominently, for those who have the will to reach for victory are strong indeed. But once all battles have been brought to their final conclusion, what is it that remains at the end of a destroyer's road?

Where can they grow from there? A conundrum held in kind.

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies
undaunted!

To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can
stand!

To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!

To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns
with perfect nonchalance!

To be indeed a God!

Walt Whitman "A Song of Joys"