Ayeno stood amidst the sea of students, his demeanor as impassive as the ancient oaks that lined the temple grounds. His weathered hands, remained clasped behind his back in a posture of silent contemplation as the students flowed through their practiced patterns. Punch. Withdraw. Parry. Each movement, once a source of solace, now did little to settle the disquiet steadily rising within him that he could not quell. A storm gathering out to sea. Collecting the swell. Brooding. Growing. 

The rhythmic cadence of the students' movements filled the training hall like every night before, but tonight there was no harmony to be found. Where there should be the song of discipline, the notes rang hollow, discordant and jarring. Flawless execution was irrelevant. The tranquility could not be found and the melody petered to nothing. Ayeno's expression remained unchanged even as one of the instructors intervened to correct a student's form, an almost indeterminable deviation from the prescribed technique.

Everything appeared as it should be, yet beneath the surface, a subtle shift had occurred. The students completed their routine, awaiting Ayeno's approval before dispersing. The instructors, too, stood in silent vigil, attuned to their master's every word and gesture.

"What are we?" Ayeno's voice pierced the silence, resonating effortlessly throughout the hall despite his years.

"We are the sun," the response came in unison, echoing against the walls. Certain.

"The sun," Ayeno mused, his voice tinged with a hint of skepticism. "Giver of life, harbinger of dreams. Are we truly everything?"

"We are everything," the chorus replied, their conviction unwavering.

"Then are we not also the moon?"

A collective silence followed Ayeno's question, punctuated only by the rustle of robes and the shuffling of feet. Confusion flickered across the faces of the 18 students, mirrored amongst the 5 instructors. 18 and 5; 23. Significant? Perhaps. None exchanged as much as a glance because they knew better, yet the question burned across all of them the same. A hundred repetitions. A thousand. More, and this was something new - a question not asked; a thought not registered. Feelings. Uncertainty. Doubt. 

"If we are the sun, we are indeed everything," Ayeno continued ignoring the palpable unease amongst his charges. "But we are also the moon—the embodiment of emptiness, of absence. We are the ebb and the flow, the light and the shadow."

With a deliberate motion, Ayeno unclasped his hands, revealing a crumpled piece of parchment nestled within his palm. As he released it, the paper fluttered gracefully to the ground, a single word written in his own hand etched upon its surface: "No."

In that moment, a new understanding dawned within the confines of the training hall—a realization that mastery was not merely about perfection, but about embracing the duality of existence, the interplay between light and dark, strength and vulnerability. What is within can be without. 

Ayeno dismissed them with a nod and they filed out bowing in turn as they passed him. The paper remained upright on the floor; none had dared to retrieve it. After the last of them left, 23 to 1, Ayeno squatted and picked up the piece of paper, staring at it. It had come to him in a dream. A grey dream, filled with tall buildings leering over at one another. The sky was concealed by the grime and the misery. The bodies lay in the boxes where they have been placed. He had awoken to a pencil in his hand and the word scrawled across the paper. Would he dream again tonight? He wanted and feared it. The have and the have not. The all and the nothing. The sun and the moon. 

Cobbled streets underfoot. Late evening in June. People are about their business as a man daydreams on a bench oblivious to those around him. His thoughts are jumbled, a riot of memory and fantasy, intertwined. 

An old man staring out of the window of a nursing home, hunched in a chair he calls his own but doesn't own. A clock ticks on a shared mantle heard by all, shared amongst them. The leaves fall from the trees on the other side of the glass. A nurse watches him closely wondering if today is the day. Late autumn sunshine. Tick tock. Untouched muesli in a bowl on a kitchen table. A lifteime spent and almost out of credit.

The scene shifts, same man another time another place. Younger. Not young. A paper lost in the breeze a single word across the front. A message? A warning? Confusion of the importance of the past and a compulsion towards a future unknown, unwritten, searching for a reality that doesn't yet exist and might not ever come to pass. Profound nothings whispered in pages of history. A lifetime of discipline wasted or an imagined creation to escape an unpleasant now. A pipedream of a country never visited and always longed for. Which was real, which was dreamt?

A knock at the door and Ayeno shifts uncomfortably on the bed, grimacing at the ache in his lower back. He rolls over and opens it, greeted by an empty space. Nobody is there but there's a newspaper on the threshold, wrapped tight concealing something inside. He knows what is there and what it is to be used for. He collects the paper and brings it inside setting it gently on the kitchen table, a spoon rattling in a bowl as it is pushed aside like a leaf fallen from an ancient oak tree with the changing of the season.

He pulls back a chair and unrolls the paper, the hardware skittering to a halt on the tabletop with a note on a string looped around the barrel. Scanning the paper Ayeno sees the letters circled on the page and traces them with his finger. M-a-r-a-g-a-r-e-t J-o-r-d-a-n. Not a name he recognises. A frown down at the note answers that question, even though it only contains a single word in the scratched writing of one of his bosses. 

"Witness," he reads aloud.

Same cobbled streets. Same bench. Same passersby going about their day.

The Streets are alive with sound of Ezio bungling an art gallery job. His peers are laughing but Ayeno_Thaik_Wondough is all out of good humour. A failed attempt at a big score and a destiny spent destitute. A lifetime in the gutter. Scuttling for existence. A sense of self lost in a scramble for sustenance. Immolation. What was real? 

"We are the sun." A courtyard full of eager minds, learning discipline. 

"Is this true?"

"And then he ate a very green leaf," the student answered unbidden, standing alone still holding his fist extended in a perfectly balanced strike the way been taught. 

"Why a green leaf?"

"Because he was a very hungry caterpillar." That much was obvious to the little boy holding the story out, smiling at the pages. 

Ayeno reeled, lurching from one vision to the next. He was at the Temple teaching his students, the wizened master, doling out life lessons and passing on generational knowledge. He was the old man looking back on a life spent waiting to draw his last breath, remorseful, regretful, opportunity squandered. He was the father reading the story in the sun, proud, full of joy. He was the son knowing better but pretending otherwise, mischief and potential in equal measure awaiting to be unleashed.

"HELLLLLLLLOOOOO, anyone in there?" Detective O'Malley, lashing out with fists and words. This certainly felt real and the black eye and throbbing in his skull were both quite convincing evidence. "This motherfucker..." O'Malley trailed off raising his fist for another strike. 

"That'll do, O'Malley," a voice from over his shoulder. In his head? No. This sounded closer. Authoritarian. The Captain.

"But, Chief. This one did Margaret Jordan. Whole town is talking about it."

"So what are you beating him down for? Get out there and get me a statement." A dismissal. 

"A statement?" An accusation unsaid.

"Yes, O'Malley, statements. Are you deaf or just stupid? This shit," the Captain said, "is not how we do things. Police, policeman. Statements." A statement.

Ayeno was out of the interrogation room and back on the Streets without two pennies to rub together and enough questions to start a bank. 

"That's just how it is. You have what it takes or you don't."

Ayeno sat on the bench across the Streets watching the father failing to get his point across to his crushed son. Tough love was one strategy but it certainly shouldn't be the only tool in the arsenal and when it was, well...the tears of the child continued unabated. Interpretation is everything. A dilemma for one is an opportunity for another. A puzzle, a chance. A mystery, a risk worth taking and as the old man sat and watched the scene in front of him, he began to try to piece together the jigsaw of a younger man's life. 

​​​​​​"You did alright, kid. The bosses are pleased."

A gravelly voice, authoritative, assured. A teacher. Was he the student now? 

"How do you figure?" Someone asked in his voice. "I was picked up by the police."

A laugh. Not mocking. Camaraderie. "You didn't squeal though, kid, you kept your mouth shut. Everyone gets pinched; how you handle it is what matters."

The man with his voice pondered that for a moment. It had never occurred to him to tell the police what he knew and what he had done. Was that loyalty or self-preservation? Did it make a difference where it had come from or was the right outcome all that mattered? At the end of it all, surely that was only requirement? "That's all that's required?"

"Required. Ha. Listen to you, Your Highness," a laugh, mocking. "You crack me up. Here, take this and get your head down for awhile."

Back on the bench, the envelope vanished. Older. Observing lessons failing to be delivered and relationships being irreparably damaged. He looked down at his hands, seeing and not seeing the blood that stained them. He sighed. Life went on around him.