Man is a god in ruins. Drowned in blood and sweat. Empty of tears. And infinitely more perfect...we destroy our world over and over. Build new walls. Break them down. And we have an eternity of death and rebirth. Perfecting, unperfecting. Perfecting, and failing. That is why we aren't weak, if we aren't strong.

The gods are incapable. An eternity of passive death. An oppressive stillness. They sit and watch and rot.

That is why I died. I think. So that I could live.

***

There must be a better man for this job. Tenpou was sure there was someone more deserving. He had un-deserved himself of the honor. And if the general ever found out why, Kenren would kill him. Most definitely. Kill him, instead of embracing Tenpou in his sleep like he was doing now.

There was blood on his hands, he just knew it. After years of sorting through intelligence reports and discreetly directing every division of the Western Army in order to avoid non accidental "accidents," something like this just had to come along right under his nose.

God, he was selfish.

Kenren stirred, mumbled a few curses to himself about a meeting in the morning or something like that and pushed himself off the bed. He himself knew it was just an excuse to leave because Tenpou preferred to wake up alone. And as the general lazily picked around the room for wherever his clothes may be, his superior was staring out the window. Snow, but considering his earlier hallucinations, he didn't care.

It was just an anonymous note, for heaven's sake. A note that he found somewhere in his path saying that something bad was going to happen to Kenren Taishou's regiment at such and such time during such and such surveillance round headed by aforementioned general.

Planted, no doubt.

And if Tenpou had pulled the reins on such a routine mission, it would have been obvious to everyone from heaven to hell that he knew more about what was happening in the bureaucracy than he really should. It was just too early to do anything. Being discovered at this stage was just too dangerous for words. Anyway, it was /just/ an anonymous note. He found them all the time. None of them ever proved themselves to be real threats (Tenpou himself was on the field to see that they weren't).