[tokonatsu yukari]

The wind turned, taking the campfire’s smoke along with it, wreathing Mori in an opaque, sinister cloud. His silhouette took a stark shape through the veil, giving him an otherworldly quality that transformed speech into sermon; quietly, gently ensnaring Yukari into its depths. She was quiet for a time, turning his words over in her mind as she swallowed a food pill, washed it down with a long drink from her waterskin. It was a simple matter to fill in the sketch he’d drawn of his anarchist ideologies; what gave her pause was the rationality of it all. His demeanor was a far cry from the rantings and ravings of lunatics and outcasts—in fact, it seemed his perspective was much aligned with her own. "Do you have any children?” she asked eventually. "Do you stand up only for your beliefs, or is there family that you seek to protect?” It was easy, she thought, to speak of society conceptually, to discuss the nature and limitation of man in the third person; it was when the philosophical bled into the personal that the lines became blurred, and the true limits of your conviction were tested. The shinobi villages were a blight upon the earth. But the shinobi villages were also what provided a stipend for her son, a home for her family, protection for her mentor: catastrophe, as well as its cure.

Shindera Mori -- 231

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