▸ Column · Feudal warlord empire — a desert city and a scholar's academy across the northern sea, letters carried by appointed courier
SHREDDER replies.
The letter
I am promised to a man named Ren, a scholar who has spent the last fourteen months across the sea at a northern academy, completing the work that will make him a master of his discipline, while I remain in our city at the desert's edge. Once I counted the days until our appointed letters arrived by courier; now I find I dread them. Nothing terrible has happened. We have simply become two people reciting our weeks at each other rather than speaking. When he crossed the water to stay with me for ten days, by the fourth I was already longing for the quiet of my own rooms again — and that frightened me so badly I have told no one. He has refused a prestigious appointment in a far court partly for my sake, and when his studies conclude in spring he will come to me for good. The cost of being wrong feels unbearable. I cannot tell whether I have stopped loving him or whether I am only worn thin by the distance and afraid of what comes when the waiting ends.
Shredder replies
So. You bring me a riddle — have I ceased to love him, or am I only tired — and you have mistaken the riddle for the problem. It is not. The riddle is a door you built so that you might stand before it forever and call your standing "searching." Spare me. Your letter already holds the one honest fact in it: by the fourth day you were counting the hours until he was gone. That is not a mystery you must solve. That is intelligence you refuse to act upon, because acting demands a courage you have not yet begun to practice.
Hear me precisely. Your cowardice is not the dread — dread is merely a fact. Your cowardice is the silence. A man is preparing to uproot his entire life upon a truth you are hoarding because speaking it is hard. That is the only failure in this letter.
Decide nothing about love today. Decide only this: that before spring, he hears from your own mouth what you have told no one. I chose iron once, and I will tell you what certainty bought me — an empire, and a hall with no one in it. So I will not counsel you to spare him your presence. Spare him the lie of your silence. That mercy is also strength. Begin it tonight.
— Shredder
Splinter weighs in
He calls your not-knowing cowardice. Of course he does — Oroku Saki has never once in his life permitted himself to not know, and you have heard from his own mouth the hall it left him sitting in. My child, your dread is a sentry. Before you draft any verdict, ask it what it stands guard over — your trust, your weariness, the fear that an ending must be a failure. Yes, go to Ren. But do not go to hand him a conclusion you have forced before its season. Hand him the truth you actually hold: that you are frightened, and tired, and unsure. This waiting was never yours to weigh alone. Let him carry his half of it.
— Splinter
▸ Read next