CELESTIA — CHAPTER 37 : The Weight of What We Carry
---
The morning did not arrive gently.
It imposed itself on New York like a verdict already written, sliding between the towers of glass and steel with the cold indifference of something that has witnessed too many human stories to be moved by them anymore. The sky was a pale grey, almost white — the kind of sky that promises nothing, neither storm nor sun — content simply to exist above the heads of those who still had something to fight for.
In the training courtyard of the UAP Academy, silence reigned.
Not the silence of absence.
The silence of concentration.
---
Murata Kage stood at the center of the courtyard.
His eyes were wrapped in thick white bandages, still fresh, still carrying within their folds the memory of a pain that no one should experience at thirteen years old. The morning wind moved through his dark hair with an almost cruel gentleness, as if the world had not yet understood what it had taken from him.
But Murata had understood.
And he had chosen to stand anyway.
His feet were planted in the ground with the precision of someone who no longer has the luxury of hesitation. His breathing was slow. Measured. Each inhale drew the world into him not through his eyes, but through something deeper — the vibration of the air, the imperceptible weight of shadows, the way silence changed texture depending on what occupied it.
He moved.
Not quickly. Not spectacularly.
But with a correctness so absolute that it bordered on the sacred.
His katana — an ordinary blade, still without a name, still without a history worthy of it — cut through the air in a wide arc. The sound it produced was not the sound of a weapon.
It was the sound of a decision.
*Again.*
The blade rose.
Fell.
Rose again.
Each movement was a conversation between his body and a world he could no longer see but had decided to understand differently. Behind his bandages, where darkness had replaced light, something else was slowly being built — a cartography of the invisible, a map drawn not with eyes, but with skin, ears, and that indefinable thing some people called instinct and that Murata had begun to simply call *self*.
---
A few meters away, a presence.
Motionless.
Monumental.
Musashi did not watch his son the way a father watches a child. He watched him the way a sculptor watches a work that has decided to finish itself. No intervention. No correction. Only that absolute attention, that silence charged with a pride too old to need words.
He let a long moment pass.
Then he spoke.
— Good.
A single word.
But in Musashi's mouth, that word carried the weight of a judgment rendered after centuries.
— Come.
---
They walked side by side through the inner corridors of the academy.
Father and son.
The Seraphim and the blind boy.
Their steps produced different sounds on the floor — Musashi's, heavy and absolute like established facts; Murata's, precise and light like questions asked in a low voice.
They stopped before a door Murata had never noticed before. Perhaps because it did not want to be noticed. It had been there for a long time — carved into stone, framed by ancient symbols that resembled no known alphabet — but it possessed that strange quality of certain truly important things: it knew how to make itself invisible to the eyes of those who were not yet ready to see it.
Musashi placed his hand on it.
The door opened without a sound.
---
The room that stretched behind it was not large.
But it was ancient.
With an antiquity that was not measured in years but in accumulated silences, in stories deposited layer by layer on the walls like sediment. Stone shelves lined the walls, bearing objects wrapped in dark fabrics, sealed chests, bladeless sheaths, stones that seemed to pulse faintly in the darkness like sleeping hearts.
— Basic artifacts are kept here, said Musashi, advancing slowly between the rows. Accessible. Protected, but not unreachable. Celestial artifacts are elsewhere. In places that even most Seraphims do not know.
Murata followed without speaking.
His hands touched nothing.
But he *felt* everything.
The dull heat emanating from a blade wrapped in red cloth. The dry cold of a black metal chest. The almost inaudible hum of a stone resting on a wooden pedestal.
Then they stopped.
Before a simple box.
Dark wood, almost black, without apparent ornamentation. Yet something in it refused to be ignored — a density, a presence, as if the object inside had long since ceased to be a simple thing and had become something closer to a living memory.
Musashi opened it.
Inside, a katana.
Not spectacular at first glance. Not adorned with gold or gemstones. Its guard was simple, almost austere. Its blade, a deep black, absorbed the light of the room without reflecting it, as if it refused to be entirely seen.
— This katana, said Musashi, comes from the year 1300.
His voice had changed. Not in tone. In texture. As if the words he spoke carried something beyond their simple meaning.
— An era when Ragnarok still raged. When the world burned with a fire that the people of today can no longer even imagine. One of your ancestors carried it.
He paused.
— He killed Sovereigns with this blade. Not one. Not two. Enough for their name to still be whispered with fear in certain corners of the Djinn world.
Murata did not move.
But something inside him tightened.
— Its name is Soulriper.
Musashi extended the box toward his son.
The silence that followed was the longest of the morning.
Then Murata shook his head slightly.
— I am not worthy of it.
It was not false modesty. It was not a formula. It was a deep, honest, painful conviction — the conviction of a boy who had just lost his eyes, who had just seen his limits exposed mercilessly before enemies who had not hesitated for a single second.
Musashi looked at him for a long time.
Then he smiled.
Not the smile of a condescending father. The smile of someone who recognizes something he himself once felt.
— You will be.
Three words.
Not an empty promise. Not an easy consolation. A quiet certainty, placed in the air of the room like a fact that had simply chosen to wait for the right moment to be spoken.
Murata raised his hand.
His fingers closed around the guard of the katana.
The weight was immediate. Brutal. Almost insulting for a boy his age — as if the blade refused to be carried easily, as if it first demanded proof of something before consenting to lighten its burden.
But Murata held on.
He sheathed it.
And Musashi, watching him do so, said nothing more.
Some things do not need commentary.
---
On the other side of the academy, where the smells of reheated food and the noise of trays replaced the solemn silence of the artifact room, the UAP cafeteria lived at its own rhythm — loud, chaotic, resolutely ordinary for a place populated by teenagers capable of moving mountains.
Zayn Al-Kage was eating.
More precisely: Zayn Al-Kage was *devouring*.
His tray was a battlefield. Three empty plates stacked to the side. A fourth in the process of being executed. He ate with that characteristic energy of people who treat every meal as a personal competition, elbows on the table, eyes fixed alternately on his plate and wandering around the room with that permanent curiosity that never really left him.
To his left, Cynthia Lefèvre ate with infinitely more dignity.
To his right, Kai stared at his own tray with the expression of a man wondering if the food would return the favor.
— Okay, said Zayn between two bites, with that way he had of treating great existential questions exactly like small ones. If you could have any miracle. Any one at all. What would you choose?
Cynthia looked up.
— Something that would make me powerful enough to never have to watch someone get hurt in front of me again.
She said it simply.
Without drama. Without tears. With that quiet and slightly terrifying conviction that had been her trademark since the manor incident.
Kai thought for a second.
— Something absolute, he finally said. I don't want a pretty power. I want a power that *ends* things.
Zayn nodded gravely, as if these answers deserved his full consideration.
Then he straightened up in his chair.
— Me, he said with the tone of someone about to announce something of paramount importance to all of humanity, I want a Primal so broken that people stop breathing just from seeing it appear.
A silence.
Then:
— A power so completely busted that even I would struggle to understand why it's legal.
Cynthia looked at him.
— That's not really a serious answer.
— On the contrary, said Zayn, it's the only serious answer.
Kai let out something that resembled a laugh despite himself.
— And I will be the greatest Paladin who has ever existed on this planet, continued Zayn, pointing his fork toward the ceiling with total conviction. The greatest. Not second. Not third. First. Definitively. Forever.
— You scored zero at Himari's evaluation, said Cynthia.
— That's a detail.
— A zero is not a detail Zayn.
— It's the beginning of a legend.
---
It was precisely at that moment that a sound reached their ears.
Not a pleasant sound.
Something between the grunt of a prehistoric bear and the noise of an industrial vacuum cleaner confronted with a quantity of food that defied known physical laws.
All three turned their heads at the same time.
Two tables away, a boy was eating.
*Eating* was perhaps too elegant a word to describe what was actually happening. He was engulfing. Consuming. Treating his tray with an efficiency that suggested the notion of *taste* was completely foreign to him and that he could not care less. His hands — broad, thick, calloused in a way that had nothing to do with recent training — grabbed food with absolute directness. Around him, a natural safety perimeter had formed: the other students had instinctively pushed their chairs back without quite understanding why.
Zayn blinked.
— Who… is that guy?
Kai followed his gaze.
— Éric Miyamoto.
— Where's he from?
Kai took a second.
— From prehistoric times. Literally.
Zayn turned back toward him.
— Say that again.
— The UAP found a kid frozen in a glacier, said Kai with the tone of someone who has long since accepted that his life contains information one cannot really prepare to receive. Estimated age at time of freezing: approximately thirteen years old. Estimated era: several million years before our time. Ice age. Everyone around him had perished.
Silence.
Zayn looked at Éric Miyamoto.
Éric Miyamoto attacked a sixth plate.
— So… said Zayn slowly.
— Yes.
— He's literally…
— Yes.
— And the UAP just decided to… defrost him and send him to the academy?
Kai shrugged.
— The UAP does a lot of things we don't understand at the time.
Zayn observed Éric for another long second.
Then he noticed something.
His eyebrows.
Thick. Immeasurably thick. Of a density that suggested evolution had at some point decided to concentrate all its efforts on this single region of the face. Eyebrows that could have sheltered an entire family. Eyebrows that had survived an ice age and wanted everyone to know it.
Zayn turned back to Kai and Cynthia with an expression of total gravity.
— This guy… he said slowly.
— Zayn, said Cynthia with the tone of someone who sees disaster coming.
— His eyebrows have their own zip code.
Kai put down his fork.
— His eyebrows have lived through more things than all of us combined.
— EXACTLY, said Zayn, pointing at Kai as if he had just solved a complex equation. Those aren't eyebrows. Those are celestial artifacts.
Cynthia looked at both of them.
Sighed.
— You two are impossible.
---
The prehistoric man — because it was difficult to call him anything else, even at thirteen — suddenly raised his head, as if he had sensed someone was talking about him. His eyes met Zayn's.
A gaze.
Direct.
Ancient.
Completely devoid of the social awareness one normally acquires growing up in a civilization.
Then Éric returned to his plate.
Zayn turned back to his friends.
— We're going to be friends, him and me, he said with absolute certainty.
Cynthia looked at him.
— Why?
— Because, said Zayn, picking up his fork again, the most interesting people are always those who eat like they've been hungry for a million years.
---
The day continued.
And somewhere in the academy, in a corridor that few students walked at that hour, Murata Kage walked alone.
Soulriper weighed on his back.
Heavy.
Present.
Like a responsibility that had chosen to take the form of a blade.
He stopped before a window.
Behind his bandages, he could not see the New York sky — that pale grey, that promiseless light that had welcomed the morning. But he *felt* it. The pressure of the air. The slight humidity that perhaps announced rain for the afternoon. The distant noise of the city continuing to exist, indifferent, as it had always existed.
He placed a hand on the guard of the katana.
*I am not yet worthy.*
*But I will be.*
He walked on.
His steps made almost no sound in the empty corridor.
And somewhere in the depths of the black blade he carried on his back, something that resembled patience chose, for the first time in seven hundred years, to wake up.
---
*Night would come later.*
*And with it, other things.*
*Things that did not wait.*