Chapter 16: The Sound of Glass Feathers
Yuni had always hated silence.
It was too much like being forgotten.
Even now, blindfolded, her small hands clenched and unclenched as she stumbled forward. Her bare feet slid on what felt like smooth wood. She could smell it. Sandalwood. And something else. Something ashen.
The blindfold was tugged away.
And the world returned.
She stood in the center of an old theatre. Red curtains half-drawn, stage lights flickering in erratic rhythms. The velvet seats stretched row after row into a dim haze. The wooden floor beneath her glistened with waxed polish, gleaming with every shift of her bare feet.
She knew this place.
The Orpheus Hall.
The place where her mother used to dance.
"Oh," she whispered. Her knees trembled, but she didn't fall. The stage felt too sacred for collapse.
"Yuni."
The voice drifted from the side wings. Her head snapped toward it, braids swinging.
Her mother.
Not the way she remembered her at the end, pale, too thin, hollow eyes staring from a hospital bed. No. This was the dancer. The flame. Arms carved with callouses, a smile full of warmth and steel.
"Mama?"
Her mother didn't answer. She lifted a hand and turned, walking slowly toward the middle of the stage. Her body glided more than moved, hips rolling with practiced grace. Her feet, as always, left no sound.
"Dance with me."
Yuni's feet moved before her brain caught up. She stepped onto the glowing edge of the spotlight. Her arms lifted. Her breathing evened. The music began. A haunting, wordless tune, played by an unseen quartet. It rose like fog and wrapped around her ribs.
Step. Turn. Dip.
She followed.
They spun together, mother and daughter, orbiting each other like fireflies. The rhythm tightened. Her breath synced with it. For a moment, there was no illusion, no war, no orphanage. Just her mother. Just her heartbeat. Just the dance.
Then, her mother stumbled.
It was subtle. A twitch. A delayed step.
But Yuni saw it.
The second stumble was louder. Her leg buckled. The music jangle, a string snapped somewhere in the dark. The light above flickered.
"Mama?"
Her mother didn't answer. She lifted her arms again and spun. But her eyes bled. Thin trails of red weeping from the corners.
Yuni backed away. The dance continued.
"Mama, stop."
She couldn't. She didn't. Her body moved faster now, jerking like a puppet cut from its strings. Each motion left behind a whisper of red mist. Her joints cracked. Her spine bent at the wrong angles. But she danced.
The music screamed.
And the audience seats were full.
Yuni hadn't noticed them fill in. But they were all there. Every child from the orphanage. Mera. The babies. Rei. Dazuro. Even Kagerō. All watching. Faces blank. Eyes wide.
She turned back to the stage, and her mother was no longer dancing.
She was crawling.
Arms twisted, legs mangled. Her nails scraped the floor, leaving deep grooves in the polished wood. Her mouth opened and closed, like a fish out of water.
"Stop it!"
Yuni ran forward, dropped to her knees.
"Please! Please stop!"
Her mother looked up.
"You stopped dancing."
The words weren't a whisper. They were knives. Cold and slow.
"You let me go. You let me die."
Yuni shook her head furiously. Her braids whipped around her face. "No, no, I didn't. They took you. You were... You were sick. I couldn't do anything!"
Her mother reached out and gripped her wrist. Her fingers were brittle. Like dead twigs. They crumbled under touch. Her mouth opened again.
More words. But this time… they weren't in her mother's voice.
"You could never be like her."
Yuni turned.
Another woman stood at the edge of the stage. Dressed in layered silk. Face painted in ceremonial white. Head tilted.
Her aunt.
Her mother's older sister.
The one who took her in when the war came.
The one who told her to stop crying. To stop dancing. That grace was a weapon only for those who had already won.
"You were a failure in training," her aunt said. "You are a failure now."
Behind her, the audience began to murmur.
"She laughs too much. Isn't she making a joke of her mother's death?"
"She thinks it's all a game."
"Weak."
"Clumsy."
"She'll die in her first mission."
Yuni curled in on herself, hands over her ears.
"You'll die, Yuni."
"And no one will even remember your name."
"Not like her."
"Your mother died dancing. What will you die doing?"
The stage began to crumble.
The boards fell away into darkness.
The light above snapped.
One by one, her audience vanished.
Until only a single spotlight remained, and Yuni sat at the center, alone, breathing too hard, body trembling.
Her hands flexed.
A kunai appeared in them.
From nowhere.
"Fight or fade," said a voice. Maybe her own. Maybe not.
She closed her eyes.
The music returned. Broken. Off-key.
She stood.
And with a long breath, she began to dance.
One step. Then another.
But this time, not to follow. But to remember.
This was a dance she made.
Spins became slashes. Turns became strikes.
A blade flicked from hand to hand. Her limbs glowed faintly with chakra, each movement guided by grief, but not controlled by it.
"I am my mother," she whispered.
"But I am also me."
The image of her aunt cracked.
The audience lit up again.
The whispers turned.
Strength.
Control.
Like a Shinobi.
The theatre burned away in blue light.
And Yuni stood at the center, still holding the kunai, breathing hard.
When the mist cleared and the illusion ended, she was crying.
But not broken.
Never broken.
---
The blood was still warm on Rei's hands.
But it wasn't his blood. Or anyone else's. Not anymore.
He stood in the middle of the ruined courtyard, his academy vest soaked through. The rain wasn't falling. It never did in this place. The sky above him was an eternal bruise, purple-black and swollen with silence.
The building to his left was gone. Gone in the way that meant vaporised, not crumbled. Ash still drifted from the foundation, curling through the windless air.
His throat was dry.
His limbs didn't tremble. He had trained them not to. He had endured burns, cuts, and shuriken slices meant to keep his posture perfect.
But his heart—
His heart was screaming.
"You did this," the voice behind him said.
Rei didn't turn.
He didn't have to.
He knew that voice. It belonged to the man whose shadow had shaped his life since the moment he was marked. The one whose bloodline he was burdened with. The man he was constantly compared to.
Hanzo.
Or at least, the illusion of him.
"You wanted to stand out, didn't you?" Hanzo said, voice low and dangerous. "You wanted to shine."
Rei turned.
The man who stood there wore a mask, but his posture was unmistakable. The heavy aura. The weight of expectation. The dark eyes behind the rebreather.
Rei lifted his chin.
"This isn't real."
Hanzo tilted his head.
"Oh, it's not? The way they looked at you when your chakra lit that disc? The whispers? 'Hanzo's heir.' 'The boy with Salamander blood.' "
The sky above shifted. Clouds churned like boiling ink.
"You thought you could carry the name without carrying the cost?" Hanzo said.
Rei clenched his fists.
"I didn't ask to be born into this."
"But you were. And now?"
Hanzo gestured behind him.
The scene changed.
The courtyard dissolved into flames and ash.
A battlefield appeared.
A mountain of corpses lay heaped in the center. Children, all wearing the same red tags Rei and his peers had been given.
Dazuro.
Yuni.
Kagerō.
All of them.
Burned. Torn apart. Some unrecognizable.
Rei stumbled back, bile rising in his throat. "No."
"You were supposed to protect them," Hanzo said softly. "Isn't that what power is for? Isn't that what a legacy demands?"
Rei fell to his knees.
His hands wouldn't stop shaking now. Not even the training, the posture drills, the endless repetition of stillness could hold it back.
He looked down.
A kunai was in his palm.
His own.
And the blood on it—
Yuni's braids were tangled around the handle.
He threw it away. Crawled back. Covered his face with his hands.
"This isn't real," he whispered again, but the words sounded thinner now. "This isn't me."
"But it could be," Hanzo said.
Then the voice changed.
It was higher now. Softer. A child's voice.
"You were supposed to be like him," the voice said.
Rei turned.
It was himself.
A younger version. Three years old, maybe. Standing in front of a mirror, his face puffed with tears, lips trembling as he practiced his bows.
"Again," a cruel voice echoed from behind the mirror. "Again. Do it again until you stop crying. Hanzo's blood doesn't shake."
The younger Rei bowed again. And again. And again.
Rei watched.
And he remembered.
The endless pressure.
The sleepless nights.
The shame was when he wasn't the best.
The way the instructors whispered when he walked away.
"He's not like Hanzo."
"Too soft."
"Too vain."
"He wants praise, but folds under pressure."
Rei gritted his teeth. "I didn't ask to be compared to him."
"And yet you live in his shadow."
The battlefield vanished.
Rei now stood in a field of mirrors.
In every one, a version of himself.
Some were grand. Clad in armor, respected, powerful.
Some were broken. Crying, discarded and dead.
But all wore the same face.
His.
Hanzo's heir.
Rei lifted his hand.
The mirrors didn't reflect him.
They reflected who others wanted him to be.
He let his hand fall.
"I don't want to be him," he said quietly.
The wind stopped.
The mirrors shattered.
The battlefield faded.
And Rei was left standing in darkness, with only his own breathing for company.
He looked down.
His hands were empty.
No blood.
No kunai.
Just trembling fingers.
"I want to be me," he said.
And then—
Light.
A door opened.
The illusion began to fade.
But the truth would stay.
He hadn't earned his name yet.
But someday, he would.
Not as Hanzo's shadow.
But as Rei.