Borro's shop was not a shop.
It occupied the ground floor of a building that had clearly once been something else — a warehouse, maybe, or a stable — and had been converted into a workspace with the minimum concessions to comfort that a person could make while still technically having made concessions. There was a forge in the back that radiated heat into the entire space regardless of season. There were weapons in various states of repair hanging from the walls and lying on workbenches in configurations that looked chaotic and probably weren't. There was a stool and a low table with a cold cup of tea on it that suggested someone had sat down intending to drink tea and had been interrupted by work approximately three hours ago and had not yet noticed.
There was no sign outside. No indication that this was a place where you could bring a weapon and have it made better. Kairu would not have found it without Yumi, and Yumi had found it by a method she didn't explain, which he was learning was standard for her.
The man at the forge had his back to them when they entered.
He was broad across the shoulders in the way of someone who had been doing physical work for decades — not the sharp definition of youth but something denser, load-bearing, the musculature of a person who has simply never stopped. Grey hair, cut short. A leather apron. His left arm, Kairu noticed, ended at the elbow, the sleeve pinned back neatly, and where a forearm should have been there was instead a prosthetic of dark iron fitted with articulated fingers that were currently holding a blade steady against the grinding wheel with a precision that the original equipment might not have improved on.
He did not turn around.
"I'm not taking new work," he said, over the sound of the grinder. "Sign's been down for a month. Whatever brought you here, it was wrong information."
"There's no sign," Yumi said.
"That's what I mean by it being down." He lifted the blade from the wheel and examined the edge, turning it in the forge-light. "Go away."
"We need an assessment. Not repair work. Just—"
"I know what assessment means. I also know what go away means and I've said it more recently." He set the blade on the bench and finally turned, wiping his right hand on his apron, and looked at them with the flat professional eyes of someone who has seen enough of the world to have stopped being surprised by most of it.
His gaze moved from Yumi to Kairu. To the sword on Kairu's back.
He went very still.
It lasted only a moment — two seconds, maybe three — and then his expression closed like a door and he turned back to his workbench and picked up the blade he had been grinding as if he had simply resumed a thought that had been briefly interrupted.
"I don't do assessments either," he said. "Anything else I can't help you with?"
Yumi looked at Kairu. A look that said: *I told you.*
"You recognized it," Kairu said.
"I recognize a lot of swords. Comes with the vocation."
"You went still."
"I'm an old man. I go still sometimes. It's called standing." He ran his thumb along the blade's edge with the careful attention of someone checking their own work. "The two of you should leave before I stop being polite about it."
Kairu crossed the room, unslung the sword from his back, and placed it on the workbench in front of Borro.
Borro looked at it. He did not touch it. The almost-sound from the blade rose slightly in the heat of the forge-space — Kairu could feel it, a degree warmer than usual, a degree more present. As if the sword recognized something.
"I'm not asking you to repair it," Kairu said. "I'm asking you to tell me what you know about it."
"I don't know anything about it."
"Then why did you go still."
A long silence. The forge crackled. Somewhere in the back of the shop something metal settled with a soft ring.
Borro set down the blade he'd been holding. He looked at the Ashblade on his workbench the way you look at something you have spent time trying not to look at — with the careful neutrality of conscious effort.
"How old are you," he said.
"Fifteen."
A sound from Borro that was not quite a word. He picked up his cold tea, looked at it, put it back down.
"Where did you find it."
"It found me." Kairu paused. "My village was destroyed in a Crimson Moon incursion eight days ago. The sword was sealed in our shrine. I was the only one who made it out." He said it the way he'd been learning to say true things — flatly, without inflection, because inflection was a door and he was keeping that door closed. "I need to know what I'm carrying and what it's doing to me."
Borro was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Yumi shifted her weight behind Kairu — a small movement, the physical equivalent of clearing her throat.
"Sit down," Borro said finally. He said it like a man who has made a decision he already regrets. He pulled up two more stools with the iron prosthetic, which managed the task with complete functionality and zero drama. "Both of you. This isn't a short conversation."
---
He did not tell them everything. Kairu understood this while it was happening — there was a shape to what Borro said that had gaps in it, places where the information curved around something that wasn't being mentioned, the way a river curves around a rock you can't see. But what he told them was enough to change the quality of the room.
The Ashblade had been in Shikara for at least three centuries. The Order had documented it twice in that period — once two hundred years ago in the eastern provinces, once forty years ago closer to the capital. Both times it had appeared in the hands of a young person following a traumatic event. Both times the bonding had been unintentional. Both times the wielder had used it effectively against demonic incursion, had grown in capability rapidly, had begun showing signs of change within six months.
Borro said *signs of change* the way doctors say things when they mean something specific and are deciding how specifically to say it.
"What kind of change," Kairu said.
"Physical first. The augmentation you've already noticed — speed, precision. That continues and accelerates." Borro turned his tea cup in his right hand without drinking from it. "Then perceptual. You'll start seeing things others can't. You've probably already started."
The soul-core. The ember-light through the demon's chest. Visible to him and apparently not to the forty other people who had been watching.
"Then," Borro said, and paused, and continued: "The blade has a will. Not a human will — not desires or preferences in any way we'd recognize. But a direction. A thing it's moving toward. And the longer the bond holds, the more its direction and your direction become the same direction."
"And then," Kairu said.
"And then it's difficult to tell where the weapon ends and the person begins." He put the tea cup down. "The last wielder I knew of couldn't sleep without the blade in his hand by the end of the first year. By eighteen months he wouldn't speak to anyone. He was still him — still recognized people, still knew his own name. But the thing he wanted, the only thing, was what the blade wanted. Which is to find and consume every demon soul-core in existence." A pause. "It's not a bad goal, strictly speaking. It's just not a human one."
The forge crackled. The almost-sound from the sword on the workbench was steady and low and utterly indifferent to this description of itself.
"I'm not going to let that happen," Kairu said.
Borro looked at him with an expression that was not unkind and was not skeptical and was simply very tired.
"The last one said that too," he said. "At fifteen, in a room something like this one, with a sword on a table between us." He stood, picked up the Ashblade, and held it at arm's length in his right hand — not threatening, just examining, the way a craftsman examines another craftsman's work. His prosthetic hand, Kairu noticed, he kept well away from it. "He meant it. He wasn't lying. He was fifteen and he had just lost people and he was certain." Borro set it back down. "Certainty at fifteen is not the same thing as capacity."
"What happened to him," Yumi said. She was standing against the wall with her arms crossed, and her voice had a careful quality — the voice of someone who already knows the answer and is asking to confirm rather than to learn.
Borro looked at her. A look that lasted slightly too long to be casual.
"He died," he said. "In the second year. Fighting a General-class Murei." He picked up the blade he'd been grinding before they arrived and returned to the bench. "I couldn't stop it. I was standing right there and I couldn't stop it." He resumed work with the methodical focus of a man returning to the only thing that has never let him down. "So you'll understand if I'm not enthusiastic about this particular situation."
Kairu looked at the sword. At Borro's back. At Yumi against the wall.
"Will you help us anyway," he said.
A long silence, filled with the sound of metal on stone.
"Come back tomorrow morning," Borro said, without turning around. "I'll look at your other weapons. The ones that aren't cursed ancient artifacts. I can at least make sure you're not going into a fight with dull edges." He paused. "Don't bring the Ashblade inside again. Leave it at the door."
"It doesn't leave my—"
"At the door," Borro said. "Or don't come back."
Kairu looked at the sword. The almost-sound pulsed — steady, patient, untroubled by the instruction.
"Fine," he said.
They left. The door closed behind them. Outside the air was cool after the forge-heat, the city's evening noise resuming around them.
Yumi said nothing for half a block. Then: "I told you he'd help."
"He told us a story about the last wielder dying and said he couldn't stop it."
"Yes," she said. "And then he told us to come back tomorrow." She looked at him sideways. "For Borro, that's enthusiasm."
---
That night Kairu woke in the dark of the room above the old man's building where Yumi had arranged for them to sleep without explaining how or why the old man agreed to it.
The almost-sound had woken him. Not louder — different. The singular voice again, the specific address, but longer this time and with a quality he hadn't heard before. Something almost urgent. The feeling of a message being delivered repeatedly because it has not yet been received.
He sat up. The room was dark. The sword was beside him, its blade faintly — barely, almost not — glowing at the edge of visible.
He looked at it for a long time.
Through the wall he could hear, faintly, Yumi's breathing — slow and even, asleep. From the street below, the diminished nighttime sounds of the city. Ordinary. All of it ordinary, around this one thing that was not ordinary, that pulsed in the dark with something it was trying to say in a language he didn't have yet.
He lay back down. Did not close his eyes immediately.
"I'm listening," he said quietly, to the ceiling, to the sword, to whatever was inside it that kept trying. "I just don't understand you yet."
The almost-sound continued its pulse.
Outside, somewhere in the city, a door opened and closed.
He slept.
End of Chapter 5