Crossing Midnight #4

"Cut Here"
(Part 1 of 2)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

Like his sister Toshi, who accepted the invitation of Aratsu the "Master of Swords," Kaikou Hara accepts service with a stranger to save his parents.  Like the needles and pins she presides over, Nidoru is lean and sharp, but there's an elegance to her, a willful honor foreign to Aratsu, one that recognizes and values Kai's right to choose.  She is masterless, a soldier alone.  And like the ronin, to which she owes much, she seeks revenge for the death of her rightful master Asirosamiro at the hands of the usurper Aratsu.

Nidoru is fearsome and her stitching quite gruesome despite its deftness, but she is so far honorable, and her refusal to bow before the disloyal bully Aratsu speaks well for her.  But she belongs to a world of fable and magic with mysterious and unfamiliar rules.  She speaks with relish and poetry, though she herself may not know it, but it is this beauty as much as anything that makes her and her world so intimidating.

"Where does the boundary fall, after all?  The point of crossing?  It is in a different place for each of us."  (Crossing Midnight #4: 7)

While Kai falls slowly into this strange world as he and his new ally repair his family, Toshi tumbles wildly into hers, a nightmare of Aratsu's making.  Like the intimidation and threats he used to elicit her service, a power play against her will with only death as an alternative, Aratsu takes her very identity:  her name and her will.  He cuts away her past and her future, allowing her to live only in a moment of his choosing.  It's a violation difficult to see coming, and difficult to see a way back from.

[April 2007]