The sword cut the air like lighting in the darkness.

Zed felt the movement painfully clear, as if suddenly the entirety of his world had slowed down. The weigh of the weapon in his hand, the strain in his muscles, painfully tense with the force he put into the blow. The unbearable heat of his skin as anger boiled in his veins, burning in his lungs, making him feel like his chest was going to burst.

One strike to the head and it would be over. The anger. The pain. The nightmares.

But the blade never reached the cowering man at his feet. One hand closed around his wrist, stoping and dragging him back. Zed's feet made a wet sound when they stepped on the blood pooling over the floor to keep his balance. The room was filled with the pungent scent of torn flesh and fresh clay, sweetened by a layer of floral incense. It was nauseating.

"Enough".

Zed turned around, like a startled animal. Kusho's hard glaze fell upon him, eyes glowing with the light of the spirit realm like open windows to it. The boy clenched his teeth so hard it hurt, and yanked his hand away, trying to free himself. For a moment it seemed like he might, slipping from his Master's fingers, but the man caught him again, twisting his arm so he would drop the blade.

The weapon fell with a grating clang, deafening in the tense silence of the night, among horrors of flesh Zed dared not to look onto.

"Enough!"

"Let me go!"

His voice was choked with anger. Discipline and control were forgotten and the drive to kill Khada Jhin was almost a necessity. The demon looked at him from the floor, eyes big and expectant. Zed saw no humanity in them, just the hunger and the fear of the hunted beast. The man knew better than to say anything as the boy snarled with desperation, yanking painfully at his Master's grip.

"We are not murderers, Zed". Kusho's voice was patient but tired, unspokenly so. Both of his apprentices had seen how the man had slowly withered away during this journey. The white hair and the new wrinkles covering his face were just a proof of it, and only his words retaining the authority so characteristic of the Eye of Twilight. 

"Why do you forgive him, Master?!" The boy turned around to him with a look that was both a plea and an accusation. "Why do you let him live?!"

He turned to Shen, a few steps away from them. Surely, his friend would understand. He would agree with him that forgiving this person, more demon than man, was not an act of justice but of madness. A mockery to all the suffering they had witnessed for four years.

But Shen did not meet his look of desperation. His gaze was unaverting from Khada Jhin, looking at him with such an intensity that would have paralyzed better men. An unspeakable emotion burned at the bottom of his clear eyes in a face that revealed absolutely nothing.

"It does not belong to us to bring justice over the guilty, Zed". As if he had read his thoughts, Kusho's verdict fell onto him, reprimanding. Making him feel guilty despite knowing that he was not wrong.

"It is our sacred duty to preserve Balance over all things, and to carry the things that have gone astray back to its path". He paused. Zed was squirming stubbornly, but Kusho knew he was listening in his silence. "This man is sick. His disease lead him as astray as the demons we battle but unlike them, he has a human heart and a human mind. He can be healed. He can be guided back to the path were he belongs..."

"I don't care!" Tears of anger and shame burned in his eyes. "Why should I care? He deserves nothing. He doesn't deserve to heal, he is the disease! He should die for all the harm he has done!"

Did Kusho forget so easily? All those horrors and pain. The cries, the tears, the lost daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, turned into something wretched for the entertainment of one single man. Had he forgotten the songs? How were they to explain that their loved ones will never have rest? That their suffering meant nothing in the great scale of things?

"Zed". Kusho never raised his voice and yet his calm felt more and more unbearable to him. He was being scolded and he hated it. None of his Master's world gave him any solace. "We are warriors of the Kinkou. Things die and are born in a never ending cycle we must preserve, and so the world keeps moving forward. We must remain impartial, for hate or love mean nothing to Balance".

'The Eye is blind to love, to hate'. Zed remembered those words. But in that moment they only made the Eye feel as inhuman as the murderer at his feet.

"Shen!" He called for his friend, desperate. "Do something, Shen!"

The other boy was startled, taken back from his deep thoughts. He looked at Zed, then at the lump of flesh beside him and took a shaky breath. For a moment, as he contemplated the malformed corpse of that village's potter (a woman without name, without face) a dark determination seemed to possess him, hands clenching tightly around the hilt of his swords, but it all burned away when he crossed glances with his father. Kusho's silence was heavy, not even angry, and Shen found himself growing small under his stern gaze. The fortitude he showed as the Eye of Twilight was something he should learn, and the boy ended up bowing his head in a gesture of surrender.

Zed felt betrayed.

Shaking under Kusho's grip, scared and ashamed of his own thoughts, powerless and guilty, he snarled and broke free with a painful yank. He turned around to look at his partners, with pain and hate and tears in his eyes.

"We were supposed to protect people!" He pointed at the dead woman behind them. A half-made creation, her torso was teared open, layered and meticulously shaped into a flower that would never finish to bloom. The same had been done to her face, where only lips remained, half opened into a sigh, a nascent scream.

He looked at the culprit. Khada Jhin was staring back at him, not a world uttered in those tense moments. His expression had not changed, yet his eyes felt so menacing. Like he was seeing exactly what Zed had in his heart, and enjoying how ugly it was.

That, and the sympathetic glance he received from Kusho as he sought him, were more than he could handle. He fled.

He hurried past the door, past the people gathering outside the house with both curious and worried eyes. He heard someone sobbing. He couldn't stand it. How could he face them knowing that he failed them? They will not have compensation or solace. There would be no retribution or justice for those who died, no peace, ghosts to be forgotten by a world that did not love them.

Zed ran until he left the village behind, until he could not hear their voices anymore. The outside air was fresh and cold compared to the heavy atmosphere from the room where they had been gathered, carrying the scent of water and damp grass with it. The contrast only made him feel more sick and, too nauseous to continue, he knelt down at the side of a small pond by the road, looking for shelter under the night shadow of a tree.

He pressed his shacking palms against his eyes, trying not to scream as his emotions consumed him, limbs going numb as if they didn't belong to him. He tried not to think on it, not to feel, but the events of the night kept awakening his distress.

For the longest time, nothing existed in the world beyond his shaking breath and the deafening drum of his heart in his ears. His whole body was collapsing and burning away to ashes out of his control, alien, and he dug his nails in the nape of his neck until he drew blood. The pain was an anchor in the turmoil of his emotions and he desperately sought for it, tearing his skin open as he yelped through gritted teeth.

He cried. The tears stung in his eyes until Zed could not contain them anymore, and he buried his face in his knees to hide them along the quiet sobs in his throat.

He did not sense it when, later, Shen approached him, not until his partner was standing at his side, with a face that was both bitter and sad. Resigned. Zed said nothing but seemed to became smaller. He didn't want to look at him. He was as angry at him as he was with Kusho, with Khada Jhin and himself.

Then Shen sat down and brought a hand to Zed's back, offering him a comfort he didn't feel quite worthy to provide, but his friend just pushed his arm away.

"Don't touch me", he said, with his trembling voice spilling venom.

He didn't see the pained expression that quickly crossed Shen's face, lips pressing into a taut line. The boy looked down, swallowing his emotions with a great effort, and then casted his glance to the pond, where lazy fireflies danced over the surface. They shared no more words, a tense silence between them as Shen pondered about the things he should say and Zed, about those he couldn't.