There was no more frustrating man in the world than the one who taught Mars Mons everything he knew. Especially when that man was right.
In springtime, the garden’s Lungracian was in full bloom, scattering a carpet of pink petals and silver leaves across the stony paths. Two men wandered through the garden in awkward silence. Bamboo groves rustled and swayed around them. Two thunderheads of temperament, opposites in polarity, the silence they managed was never the comfortable kind. It was the silence of the young suffering the old and the old judging the young. Today was no different. Even if it was beautiful.
“You don’t approve,” Mars said. Shoulders slumped, hands in the pockets of an old university windbreaker, glum emotion wrinkling his full lips. Long crimson hair raged past his shoulders; errant strands tickling the old man beside him as the wind turned.
Halfway through his thirties, the trials of adulthood had chiseled Mars’ boyish enthusiasm and infection smiles to better fit the image of a warrior king: one with a hero’s broad shoulders, a warrior’s powerful musculature, and a father’s doubt lurking in the depths of his indigo eyes. That doubt was the only thing mirrored in the gnarled, greying legend who hobbled beside him. Rex Fang. Once a king, then a teacher, now just a simple man whose glory days were long since past.
The wrinkled grooves in Fang’s face deepened as his jade eyes swept the garden. His mustache twitched. “Disapproval is a strong sentiment.”
Mars buried a groan in the back of his throat. “Pick your own word, then.”
“I believe you’re making a mistake.”
“And that’s somehow any better?” he scoffed. “Not the first time you’ve preached that sermon, old man.”
“Hmph. Have you considered it’s because you didn’t listen the first time?”
Mars stepped in front of Fang, barring the path closer to the wooden estate in the center of the garden. His head shook in disbelief. “You haven’t even seen her. Tay is different. Different in a way like I’ve never felt before. You refuse to train her because of some…” he broke off in a laugh, searching for the right words. “…some nonsense fear that you’ve invented all on your own. She’s not dangerous, Fang. She doesn’t need to be left alone. She needs to be guided.”
The old man bristled, keeping his quiet until Mars finished.
“Nonsense?” was the first thing he snipped back. “Is that all the respect I’ve earned from you, Mars Mons?”
“You know I didn’t mean…”
“Nonsense, would be keeping my peace. Nonsense would be allowing the man I keep closer to my heart than my own grandchildren to go awry without a word of dissent. You earned my attention years ago, boy. Simply because it is not to your agreeing now does not mean you get to ignore it.” Fang winced, stopping to massage something in his lower back. “You’ve been searching for some salve ever since Mori left you, and this girl is just the latest iteration. She’s a distraction. A liability, one you don’t even have time for. Our enemies recoup their strength again while you meander across the lands playing at hero-”
“-and you play at politics on Olympus?” Mars’ tone sunk to a colder low. “Don’t shame me for trying to do something to fix the world you couldn’t. The Shimanos are more than just our problem now.”
A crack of thunder split the distant horizon. Fang glanced to the east, where a thin line of dark clouds gathered above the fields many miles away.
“Fate truly does give its gifts to those most likely to misuse them,” he muttered under his breath. His focus returned to Mars. Gaze stern and firm, yet the face around them softened by the shared understanding of a man who once sat upon the same throne. “I understand wanting to help people, boy. But this…”
Mars exhaled through his nose.
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“…even if it were a different child, I would still refuse. For you.” Patting a hand on a nearby rock, Fang sunk down into sitting atop its roughened surface. Imploring with his gaze. “You have a son who you haven’t seen in a year, Mars. A boy of your own flesh and blood is out there right now, watching the clouds from the balcony of a castle by the sea, growing more spiteful every day his father does not appear. You have a throne to defend and a league to manage. You have a war to conduct. You have fifteen million people looking up to you to tell them what to do; to give them hope. To be their hope. And you have a wife who is waiting for the day when you realize it’s time to leave that all behind.” His head shook, softly. “For me to enable you would only add another burden to it all. I cannot. Not when I know better than any other the weight you carry.”
Cold silence filled the space between them. Mars stared down at the old man. So far apart in the worlds they’d grown up in and the worlds they’d made, yet with every passing year, the burden of rule wore them down to the same shape. Two titans bearing the same weight.
These days, it was far harder to challenge Fang’s obstinacy. He understood the old man a little too much to be angry with him.
Mars sunk to sitting on the rock beside Fang. Hands clasped, heavy elbows resting on his legs. Salty seaside wind coursed through the garden, raking his hair like a gunslinger’s fingers. More sounds came in the distance. These ones from the house. A creak of wood, a slamming door, the shouts of children as they chased each other across the porch. The door slid open again, allowing a woman on the other side watch them play. Rusty red hair, rumpled buttoned shirt, glass spectacles shifting towards the garden as she caught Mars’ wandering gaze. A small smile, quickly fading as she saw who was with him.
“I know,” is all he said.
The two children broke out into the sun mid-stride. Lanky and coltish, young enough to not think twice of boyhood and girlhood; fawns still finding their footing in life. A boy with dark hair, serious as a blade drawn, chased by a freckled girl with luminous features and vivacious crimson eyes. Her lone left hand stretched out as she lunged after the boy, tackling him into a pool with a triumphant cry.
“You believe she’s special.”
Mars’ hands quit their restless behavior. “I won’t bother you again to help. But I do want you to at least sense her before you refuse.”
“I do sense her, boy. From my house, every day,” Fang grunted. “Five miles of separation is nothing for me. I feel her the moment her soul wakes and casts the fields in light. I feel when she slumbers in the heat of the noon and the world wilts without her might. The animals pause and search for what has been lost. The trees stand still in confusion. The flowers list.”
Stretching out one wrinkled arm, the old man narrowed his eyes, and a faint aura of ethereal green fire snaked outwards from his skin. Within moments, a blackbird darted down from the eaves to settle on his elbow.
“Have you not questioned why the songbirds are more plentiful in your garden? The tanuki more common? That your flowers grow faster with sharper colors, and Ajax’s tree shines in a way it has not in many years?” He grunted. “I suppose you would not. You only come here when you can.”
Mars’ face tightened. Reaching down, the old man scooped a black rock from the garden floor, river-stone smooth.
“The time has long since passed when we could afford to train our enemies, Mars.” He wagged the stone in gentle reprimand. “Decades ago, I made a mistake with Carra that cannot be undone. I would not make it again with his son. I will not make it again with your daughter. I will not tamper with a storm like hers.”
“She won’t turn out like Carra.”
“Perhaps. But what I fear is something worse.”
Miles away, the distant thunder of springtime showers rolled over the fields. Fang’s mustache bristled as he exhaled. His gaze lingered on the coming storm.
“…I fear she will be like us.”
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But fate did not give their fears the time to manifest. It supplied an alternative instead.
He waits atop his claimed throne, iron given life. Tail swishing across stone slicked by rain and cleansed by violent storms of thunder. Body still, mind never satisfied.
The gleaming metal of the city below is his hoard. Its energy, its vitality, the spoils of his wars. He is its deity. Its warrior king. Every skyscraper kneels in supplication to his might, not daring to raise their rain-slicked eyes. Their occupants the same. They know their place.
All but one.
Insidious and invisible, that enemy invades in a way that can never be fully killed. It is an idea. A remembrance. A fury. A mutter in the bars, a glare in the streets, a brushstroke of red smeared across an alley wall. The defiance of the living, emboldened by the dead, misguided to the last. For they have forgotten the only truth of their world: that only the strongest shall rule. And no soul in the world below is stronger than he.
Except one.
The platinum titan rises from his throne and stands at the summit of his world, uncaring of the storm around him. His metal form calls to the sky, a beacon the storm cannot resist. He waits in its conflux as the rain shudders and deepens around him. His helm raises to the hurricane.
Soon the lightning will follow.
Rageful and foolish, just like her father.