Chapter 2: The First Wrongness
The first time Arashi realized something was wrong, he was three years old.
It was not a dramatic revelation. No voice whispered secrets into his ear. No sudden clarity split the world open. It was smaller than that. Quieter. The kind of wrongness that crept in through repetition.
He watched the same sparring match for the third time that week and knew—without being told—why one of the men would lose.
The two Shiba clan members circled each other in the practice yard, wooden swords held loose and casual. They laughed as they moved, insults traded with the familiarity of brothers who had bled together. Their footwork kicked up dust. Their grips were strong. Their reiatsu flared unevenly, untamed.
Arashi sat on the edge of the porch, legs dangling, hands wrapped around a cup that was still too hot for him. He was supposed to be paying attention to the drink, or the birds, or the older children shouting somewhere behind him.
Instead, his eyes tracked the angle of one man's shoulders.
Too open.
The thought arrived fully formed, then startled him with its completeness.
He frowned.
The man lunged. His weight shifted forward too early. His balance betrayed him before the strike even landed.
The wooden sword cracked against his ribs. Hard. The laughter cut off as he stumbled back, breath knocked loose.
Arashi flinched—then froze.
He had known.
Not guessed. Not hoped. Known.
His small fingers tightened around the cup until the heat finally registered and he yelped, spilling tea over the porch boards.
"Careful there," someone said, amused.
Shiba Enren lowered himself beside the child with a grunt, as if joints were things to be negotiated with rather than commanded. He glanced once at the sparring yard, then at the damp boards.
"You weren't watching the cup," Enren said.
Arashi looked up at him, then back at the men in the yard. The injured one was already laughing again, rubbing his side as the match reset.
"I was," Arashi said.
Enren raised an eyebrow. "You were watching something else."
Arashi didn't answer.
He didn't have the words for it.
This happened more often as the days passed.
He would watch someone draw a blade and feel a quiet tension build before the strike ever came. He would hear instructions given to a trainee and know—somehow—that they would misunderstand it. He would feel irritation at sloppy movement, even though he had never been taught what correct movement looked like.
It made him restless.
At night, sleep came fitfully. Dreams no longer felt like dreams. They were fragments—angles, lines, pressure points—not violent, not bloody, just precise. A sense of motion without motion. Intention without action.
He would wake with his hands clenched, heart steady, mind too alert for a child his age.
The clan noticed.
"Kid's sharp," someone muttered one afternoon as Arashi passed by with Enren. "Too sharp."
"Shiba blood," another replied, dismissive. "Burns hot or burns out."
Enren said nothing.
But he watched.
One morning, without explanation, Enren took Arashi beyond the usual practice yard. They walked past the noisy courtyard, past the drinking tables and shouting voices, toward a smaller clearing where the ground was packed flat and the air felt… quieter.
No one trained there.
A single wooden sword lay on a rack beside a post.
Enren stopped. "Pick it up."
Arashi hesitated.
He was small. Too small. The sword was nearly as long as his arm.
"I can't," Arashi said.
"You can," Enren replied. "You won't like it."
That felt true.
Arashi stepped forward and reached for the sword. It was heavier than he expected, the balance unfamiliar. When he lifted it, the tip dipped immediately, pulling his arm down with it.
His grip tightened instinctively.
The sword steadied—not because he was strong, but because he adjusted without realizing why.
Enren's eyes narrowed.
"Swing," he said.
Arashi did.
It was awkward. The arc was wrong. His feet didn't move when they should have. The blade cut through empty air and nearly twisted from his grasp at the end.
He frowned at it.
"That's not—" He stopped.
Not what?
He didn't know.
Enren said nothing. He stepped forward, placed two fingers against the flat of the blade, and nudged it an inch.
"Feel that?" Enren asked.
Arashi nodded slowly.
"That's where it wants to go," Enren said. "Don't force it."
Arashi tried again.
The second swing was still clumsy. But it didn't fight him as much.
A strange calm settled over him—not satisfaction, not joy. Something closer to alignment.
Enren took the sword back and returned it to the rack.
"That's enough."
Arashi looked up at him, confused. "Why stop?"
"Because you don't need more yet," Enren said. "And because if you go too far, too fast, you won't know which thoughts are yours."
That made Arashi pause.
Enren turned away, already walking back toward the compound. "You'll forget this," he added. "Mostly."
Arashi didn't think he would.
But he did.
Or rather, the details faded. The sensation remained.
That night, the wrongness deepened.
As Arashi lay on his futon, staring at the ceiling, something inside him shifted. It wasn't pain. It wasn't fear. It felt like pressure equalizing—like a door settling into its frame after being misaligned for too long.
The world sharpened.
Not visually. Conceptually.
He became aware of himself in a way he hadn't been before. A sense of continuity stretched backward—through days, weeks, years—and forward into an uncertain but tangible future.
Understanding flooded in without emotion.
This is me.
The thought was simple. Grounding.
And then came another.
I've been here before.
His breath caught—not in panic, but in recognition.
Images surged—not memories of this world, but of ideas that did not belong to it. Swords drawn with impossible precision. Movements optimized beyond tradition. A focus on breath, on timing, on intent stripped of ceremony.
They did not overwrite him.
They aligned.
Arashi sat up, heart steady, mind unnervingly clear.
For the first time, he understood the wrongness.
It wasn't the world.
It was him.
He belonged to this era—and did not.
He was a child—and something older watched through his eyes.
Outside, somewhere distant, steel rang against steel.
Arashi listened.
And in the quiet space of his soul, something waited—measuring, observing, patient enough to let him reach the threshold on his own.
The blade had weight now.
And soon, it would ask him whether he was ready to carry it.