Edmundo

Diary

Edmundo came to this dojo the way most outsiders do, sideways and half-broke, but he stayed because loyalty is the one vice he never traded for weed or dice. Before all that, back when his spine still remembered a bow, he was the overconfident sort who figured helping an old woman onto her horse near the Nakasendo post road would be a two-second flex, the kind of easy honor a real samurai collects without breaking stride. The horse disagreed, the old woman disagreed louder, and Edmundo ended up in the mud with his pride bruised worse than his tailbone, though somehow he walks away from that story looking like the hero every single time he tells it. He still tries to reclaim that discipline, standing guard at dawn with his back straight and his mind set on stillness, until someone rolls up a joint by the gate and his watchful eyes drift right along with the smoke. Ask him about the incident now and he'll swear, dry as ever, that the horse started it, that the old woman thanked him later, and that pride, unlike coin or floor price, never rugs a man who earned it honestly.