Hana had followed the sound of water for three days before she found where it came from.
The jungle opened without warning, vines parting like curtains, and she stepped into a hush so complete she forgot to breathe. A lotus pond lay still and dark at the grove’s heart, its blossoms closed for the night though the sun stood high above the canopy. Beyond it, a waterfall spilled from a shelf of black rock, softening the air to silver mist, and beyond that — vast, patient, half-swallowed by moss — rose the face.
It had been a Buddha once, whole and seated, she guessed, before centuries had claimed the rest of it and left only the head, eyes lowered, mouth curved toward something like peace. Sunbeams fell through gaps in the trees and struck it in bars of gold, so that the stone seemed to breathe with the light instead of merely wearing it.
He stood before the statue as though he had always stood there. A samurai, armor dulled to the color of the surrounding stone, one hand resting on a sheathed blade he had clearly not drawn in a very long time. Hana’s first thought was that he was a statue too. Her second, when his gaze lifted to meet hers across the water, was that she had been wrong.
He did not speak. He did not need to — she understood the vigil in him the way she understood silence in a temple, without being told. He was guarding something the mountain had long since forgotten it needed guarding.
She should have turned back toward the trees. Instead she knelt at the pond’s edge, mirroring him without meaning to, and felt something in her chest settle into a shape it had been waiting years to take.
The sunbeams shifted. When she looked up again, he had not moved — but she understood, with a certainty she couldn’t explain, that he had been waiting for her far longer than three days.