Edmundo

Diary

Edmundo came from somewhere far enough away that nobody at the Dojo could ever pin the accent, and he liked it that way, standing sentry at the tree line with the patience of a man who had chosen this strange country and meant to keep choosing it every single day. The legend started small, as legends often do: a posted duty to tidy the bamboo grove before a visiting lord's procession, and Edmundo, blade in hand, mistaking the drooping cherry blossoms for unruly weeds crowding his beloved bamboo. He trimmed them with the calm precision of a man who has never once doubted himself, and by sundown the whole grove was bald of blossoms and the whole Dojo was howling with laughter, and somehow that made him famous. He still keeps watch over that same grove now, sober-eyed and dry-humored, muttering in his foreign cadence that discipline is a garden he keeps pruning wrong, and every spring when the blossoms dare to return he eyes them like old enemies he swore never to forgive himself for meeting again. Loyal to a fault, watchful to a fault, he guards the Dojo's gate with a steady hand and a joke ready on his tongue, but ask him about cherry blossoms and the joke dies fast, replaced by the quiet ache of a soldier who once mistook beauty for a weed and has never quite trusted his own blade since.