Firelight and Moonlight

One prideful impulse. That was all that it took to stir the currents of fate, currents that then would build and crest and finally break upon Sariatu with terrifying force, in the time to come.

The branches of the pine trees barely stirred as she stole stealthily between them, swift and silent as a shadow, hidden from the light of the full moon overhead. Sariatu knew that, if she were being sensible, she would have waited for her sisters before departing for the Temple of Bones, rather than speeding forth the instant the last edge of the sun had slipped beneath the horizon. The three had developed a system, as it were, for dispatching the heroes whom their father so disdained - sweeping down upon their prey with mechanically-precise coordination, the chill wind billowing through their silken robes and dark waves of hair, the moonlight glinting coldly off of the steel of their swords.

But Hanzo was the very last of their targeted heroes, as well as the best, by all reliable accounts. And Sariatu wanted to face him alone, to try her might against him in true single combat, before her sisters appeared as her safeguard. Hanzo, she reasoned, might put up a true fight, even if she knew that he would eventually succumb to fatigue and error, as all of his fellow mortals did.

So Sariatu had lulled her sisters to sleep with the gentle strumming of her shamisen and had not woken them even as the stars began to glimmer in the darkening sky. Alone, she had slipped from the Palace of the Moon King and coursed down towards the earth through the last gleams of twilight, trusting that she would have at least a few minutes before her sisters caught up.

The Temple of Bones bore high into the side of a cliff at the edge of the forest. Originally a shrine to a god whose name had long been forgotten, it later became a Buddhist monastery whose monks, in a futile attempt to ward off a warring sect, had destroyed most of its only means of access. The temple's current moniker came from the perilousness of the ascent to its cave entrance: a rough-hewn path that had been chipped away completely in some places, leaving any pilgrim no choice but to leap from foothold to uneven foothold. Sariatu darted nimbly from the shade of the pine forest, across a stretch of grass silvered by the moonlight, and towards the base of the cliff. As she dashed soundlessly up the narrow path, she lifted her robes out of the way, so that they would not catch on the jagged skeletons of those pilgrims who had taken one false and fatal step, and now lay tumbled at the cliff's foot.

A large wooden torii, cracked with age and weathered to a neglected grey, straddled the widening path where it leveled to a shallow ledge. Sariatu whisked through it, the rustle of her robes echoed in the slight flutter of the origami shide dangling from a shimenawa that had recently been tied between the gate's posts. She stopped on the ledge, at the entrance to the temple, her mask shuddering against her face as her body found stillness again.

Inside the cave sat a man, his back to her. Sariatu blinked at the starkness of his dark silhouette against the brilliance of the fire that blazed in the center of the temple. When her eyes adjusted, she saw that wooden statues of various bodhisattvas stood solemnly around the perimeter of the cave, as cracked and ancient-looking as the torii outside. A few sticks of burning incense, jutting from a small bowl of rice placed within a crevice of the cave wall, filled the air with the rich aroma of sandalwood.

Although she said nothing, the man sensed her presence, for he stirred.

"So, you're finally here," he said in a surprisingly warm voice. "Frankly, after waiting all this time, I was wondering if you would ever bother showing up."

Sariatu said nothing, only swept to the other side of the fire so that she could see the face of the man whom she intended to swiftly and efficiently slay in a moment's time.

Hanzo sat in seiza, his legs tucked beneath him, his hands folded in his lap. His eyes were closed, and his rugged face appeared relaxed and tranquil, but as the fire flickered in his direction, away from the rush of Sariatu's robes, he opened one eye and cracked half a roguish smile at her.

"They told me there'd be three of you," he said, opening both of his eyes so that he could get a better glimpse of Sariatu over the top of the flames. "Guess I should have only meditated a third of the time that I did. Could have saved my feet a lot of pain."

With a grunt of mild discomfort, Hanzo stood, tucking his crested helmet under his left arm as he did so. To Sariatu's surprise, he offered her as low a bow as his brightly-lacquered breastplate would permit.

"And to what do I owe the pleasure?" he asked as he straightened back up.

"You have offended my father," she recited in a hard, polished voice, as she drew her sword with a hiss of metal. "Now you must die."

Hanzo sighed, as if disappointed that his gallantry had not attained the desired results.

"Yeah, that's about what I was expecting," he replied, lifting his helmet and settling it onto his head. "Well, let's get to it, then. We'll see how much good all the incense and prayers and self-reflection have done."

With a whisper of steel, he drew his own sword and exhaled slowly, waiting in stillness for her to make the first move.

"You're afraid," she taunted him, taking a slow step around the side of the fire.

Hanzo wrinkled his nose.

"Of course I'm afraid," he said. "Only a fool faces off with a god and isn't afraid."

Sariatu made her move so suddenly that Hanzo barely had time to raise his own sword in defense. She could feel the impact of her blow against his blade reverberate through her own arms as she stepped back and waited for another likely opening. Hanzo smiled again, his expression now filled with the hunger of battle.

"What makes a man brave, as my sensei used to always tell me," he added, "is the ability to recognize and overcome that fear. And I've gotten pretty good at that, actually."

"Save your breath," Sariatu snarled. "You'll be missing it soon enough."

"I like talking with my enemies a bit," Hanzo shrugged. "It's always somewhat enlightening to hear what they're thinking. Plus, idle chatter has saved me more than once, in the past."

And then he struck, sword flashing down in one fluid, graceful motion, like the crash of a wave. She caught the blow and threw it aside, impressed in spite of herself.

"Not bad, for a mortal," she replied coolly. "You're speedier than most, I'll grant you that."

Hanzo grinned.

"So I've been told my entire life," he boasted. "And thus the warning that I usually give my opponents: If you must blink, do it now."

In an instant he was rushing towards her once more, and, with a cry, she flew at him. He met her strikes blow for lightning-fast blow, metal shrieking against metal, their shouts and grunts echoing off the walls of the temple. Sariatu knew that she was winning, knew that she must inevitably win. But she found herself unusually intoxicated by this duel: by the flickering of their silhouettes sliding over the frozen figures of the wooden bodhisattvas that lined the walls; by the heady scent of the incense sticks that still sputtered ashes into the rice grains beneath; by the ironic grin that remained on the face of her foe, even as sweat beaded between his eyebrows and dampened his beard.

All of the other heroes had been like panicked mice caught between the paws of a cat, desperate to find some escape from whichever of the three indefatigable sisters he fought while the other two looked on impassively. Not so Hanzo. Sariatu sensed that he would remain this poised and focused, even if her sisters patiently sat in wait at the edges of the temple. Hanzo, of all the samurai she had faced, seemed to have embraced the inevitability of his fate, and looked upon it without fear.

They spun and lunged around the fire in the center of the temple, faces lit by the orange glow of the flames, stepping in and out of the pale moonlight pooling at the entrance of the cave.

"We seem to be well-suited to one another," Hanzo shouted at her, barely sidestepping her blade, then blocking her subsequent overhead blows with a series of rhythmic clangs that punctuated his sentences. "I haven't had this much fun in years. Questing for magical armor is all well and good –" (clang) "– but I've been feeling lately like I'm really searching for something else –" (clang) "– and maybe this has been it all along: a really – solid – invigorating – fight to the death."

He stumbled away, clearly shaken from the effort of deflecting her latest relentless assault; Sariatu could see his shoulders heaving, for all his bravado.

"I suppose you'll want me to congratulate you for going out on a high note, then," she sneered, bringing the tip of her sword level with his throat and thrusting forward so that he had to smack her blade aside with his own.

"A higher note, I could not wish for," he agreed gamely. "I'd say we've already reached a frequency that would snap the strings off a shamisen, wouldn't you?"

And perhaps it was the mention of her beloved musical instrument that caught her off her guard for a split second, for she did not catch his next thrust quite soon enough, and the tip of his sword caught the edge of her mask, pulling it from her face and sending it spinning to the floor, where its expressionless features cracked cleanly in two along the grain of the wood.

"Oops," was the only apology that Hanzo offered, with no small degree of smugness.

Sariatu hurled herself at him with a snarl, her sword crashing against his as her body slammed up against his panting frame. She met his gaze coldly as they leaned into each other, faces inches apart, firelight and moonlight fragmenting off the sheen of their quivering blades. Hanzo was strong, but he was exhausted, and she knew that, with one shove, she could push herself backwards and away from him, twisting her blade so that it struck him in the vulnerable nook between the lower edge of his helmet and the top of his breastplate.

But as she stared into Hanzo's eyes, tensing her body in preparation for the fatal blow, she saw his expression soften; the flare of battle left his gaze and was replaced with something like wonder. And Sariatu herself was struck with the sudden, unnerving sensation that, had she sliced his neck open right then and there, he somehow might not have minded.

"Oh," Hanzo breathed, his voice catching in recognition. "I see."

"What?" Sariatu snapped, gritting her teeth to keep her sword steady where it still engaged his. "Were you expecting a monkey or something under that mask?"

A smile broke out across Hanzo's face, not mocking like the fatalistic grin that he had worn throughout their duel, but dazzling like the sunrise that she so rarely allowed herself to watch.

"You are my quest," he whispered.

And then he disengaged, breaking the connection between their swords and sheathing his own. A moment later, pulling his helmet from his head and tucking it back under his left arm, Hanzo the fabled warrior had dropped to one knee in a reverent surrender, defeated by nothing less than his own heart, his head bowed as he waited for the daughter of the Moon King to fulfill her duty.

Sariatu stared at him, awash with emotions that she could not understand. Then, without knowing why, she lowered her sword.

Later, there would be time to sort through everything, to realize what it meant to glimpse humanity and want to feel its touch, to crave the warmth of the body against which she had been pressed in combat moments before, to marvel at how trivial the wonders of the universe could be in comparison with the simple joy of being close to someone else.

Later, there would be months of laughter, of whispers, of tears, and of devastating loss. There would be years of solitude, islands of searing clarity amid vast seas of disorientation. There would be reunions clouded with suspicion, recognition offset by grief, sacrifices sweetened by love.

Later, there would be a curious boy named Kubo, a one-eyed storyteller who brought paper and leaves whirling to life with the music of his shamisen. And later, there would be a Monkey and a Beetle who would happily give all they had so that Kubo could live.

But all that Sariatu knew in that moment was Hanzo's eyes and the joyful peace dancing within them. All she could perceive was the blaze of his mortality, as warm and immediate and ephemeral as her everlasting soul had always been cold and distant and diffuse. And for the first time in her immortal life, she looked at another being and truly saw.

"Come," she said simply, sheathing her sword with one swift motion.

Sariatu helped the exhausted and bewildered samurai to his feet and wrapped her arms about him, feeling the magic swell within her as it lifted the two of them from the ground and swept them out of the cave, into the night towards Hanzo's fortress. (She would leave him there with a promise to visit often, so that she could return to her family and lie to them, tell them that she had chased the samurai from the Temple of Bones before her sisters arrived and executed him elsewhere.)

As the pair soared above the moon-drenched landscape, above inky forests and glinting rivers, she could feel Hanzo's right arm tight around her back, could feel his heart thrumming through his breastplate against her own chest, passionate and longing and alive, alive, alive. She wrapped her arms more securely around his neck, the silk of her sleeves fluttering like paper against his armor, and breathed in the scent of him deeply.

Sariatu never doubted that she had made the right choice. She and Hanzo came from different worlds, but they completed each other, complemented each other - the shining swordswoman from the Moon Kingdom, and her fiery warrior in his red beetle robes. Perhaps the disapproving world would become more dangerous for them, but Sariatu knew that their love would make them strong enough to overcome whatever obstacles awaited. She had always trusted the old, oft-repeated wisdom that life has a way of keeping things balanced.

And that really is the least of it.

Author's Note: I also headcanon that Sariatu's snarky comment in the above, about Hanzo expecting her to be a monkey under her mask, leads to a whole little inside joke between the two of them, which in turn leads to Hanzo gifting Sariatu the monkey netsuke that becomes Kubo's "Mr. Monkey" charm. This headcanon, of course, didn't fit cleanly into the above fic, so I thought I'd toss it into a footnote, instead.

And I fully acknowledge that a lot of imagery in this fic is heavily inspired by various Studio Ghibli films. The Temple of Bones, in my mind, looks like something straight out of "Princess Mononoke," in no small part because I really enjoy imagining how much Monkey and Moro the Wolf Goddess would get along. And the very end of this story intentionally feels a lot like the flight sequence in "The Tale of the Princess Kaguya" because I really couldn't resist referencing a different visually-stunning animated film about a celestial princess whose enjoyment of life on earth is stymied by Awful People From The Moon Who Don't Understand Love.