It never could have been done, if I hadn't lived right where I did.

I mean, my living arrangement. I wouldn't have been allowed to live with no adult supervision at all, and it would have been impossible to conceal the fact anywhere else. I could never have made ends meet; I would have had to pay for heat and light and water that I couldn't afford. And I certainly could not have had a wild, exotic feline for a companion; it was simply too dangerous, and in violation of too many ordinances. But there in the forest, I had alternatives, I had privacy, and I had a friend who, if not human, understood me as well as if he was. After White Blaze came to me, I started to be happy again, and realized how close I had been to falling into a dangerously deep depression. Humans need other humans, to love and to receive love from, or they start to shrivel and die inside. Blaze wasn't human, but he kept me from withering away, emotionally, until I could find my true family.

Of course, I didn't know there was a 'true family' waiting to be found. All I knew was that I was happier than I had been since I was eight, and that lasted until August fifteenth- my birthday. I turned twelve that day, and felt pretty low about it, because there wasn't anything to look forward to. I had gone to the Azu bakery and gotten a half-dozen little pastries, and I had picked up a few indulgences in some other stores as more-or-less presents- but it just wasn't the same as having Grandmother and Grandfather make a fuss over me, or looking forward to seeing what Father had brought me from some far-away country. Truthfully, I was feeling very sorry for myself, to the point where I even wished that school was still on so my teacher could have organized something. I had often envied those students who had school-time birthdays; they got a small party at school and one at home.

White Blaze wasn't used to seeing me so unhappy, and after a while he 'asked' me about it, patting my cheek as I sat on the sofa and tried to read one of the new books I'd gotten myself. I explained what day it was, then what birthdays were, then why we humans put such emphasis on them. Then I had to explain the concept of giving presents, and found that easiest to do by fetching out the sword Father had given to me four years ago. "See, when he was in Tibet, Father saw this cool sword and thought I would like it," I explained as Blaze sniffed it over in his customary curious way. "So he got it and brought it all the way back here and gave it to me, just to make me happy. And it did, too, I was so excited when I opened it... he didn't need to, though. I would have been happy even if he hadn't given me anything, I was so glad to see him..." I stopped and sighed. "So giving presents is like another way of telling someone you care about them. And then they have something to remember it by, to make it more special. You can't really get that feeling by doing it yourself."

White Blaze seemed to understand, and patted me gently. I leaned against him for a few minutes and regarded the sword, feeling very wistful. Father never knew how much enjoyment I got out of that gift... "C'mon," I said suddenly, standing up. "The more I sit around thinking, the worse I'll feel. I'll show you why I like this funny-looking thing so much."

I don't guess tigers need much in the way of sword-lessons, but White Blaze still watched with great interest while I went through my exercises and sliced at the trees around me. It was a hot day and the sun beat down on me, but I hardly noticed- well, that's not accurate, I noticed, but it seemed to strengthen me, not exhaust me as it would anyone else. I had always loved the searing days of summer, just as I loved the heat of the stove or fireplace. It made a comfortable feeling inside me and it was very unusual indeed for me to feel too warm. I lost my low feeling in the enjoyment of practice; much as I liked and respected my sensei, there was a certain freedom to practicing with my own special sword, to my own pace and rhythm. I lost myself in the 'fight', and didn't notice how much strength I was getting into the cuts until I drove the blade into a tree-trunk- heard a quiet clicking sound- and felt the hilt wobble oddly in my hand. Pausing, I opened my hand and looked down- and gasped in dismay as half the hilt dropped to the forest floor.

All my exultation left me and I stood staring in shocked misery. The special replica of a royal blade, the gift from my father- broken! I didn't understand how that could possibly have happened- until I looked back at the end of the sword, still quivering slightly where it was embedded in the tree, and frowned in sudden indignant understanding. The hilt was hollow! It should have been solid, the tang of the blade embedded in solid steel to prevent this exact thing from happening! The blade itself was clearly strong enough, but for some reason the hilt had been faked! "Because no one expected anyone to use it for practice or combat," I grumbled, and added a few discourteous remarks about frauds and cheats as I bent down to pick up the snapped piece of metal. I was wondering if there was any way to mend it when my eye caught something else that lay nearby.

It looked, at first glance, like a largish marble of clear glass, and I wondered why anyone would put such a thing inside a hollow sword hilt. Then, bending closer, I saw the small red character embedded in the heart of the glass, and reached over to pick the thing up. I recognized the word- jin- and as I held it up the sunlight struck it and made it seem to glow. "Jin," I mused. "Odd. Why would...what's...?" I lost track of what I was saying as the character grew brighter, and brighter yet- too bright to look at- and gasped at the silent red explosion that crackled through me. I felt a burst of hot strength, and when I cautiously opened my eyes, my hand was empty.

It was also covered in metal. A white metal glove with a red plate on the back of my palm, and another from the back of my wrist to my elbow. I stood staring, wide-eyed, then slowly turned my head and looked down at myself. It was the same: a white body-suit of metal, reinforced with plates of thicker red metal on my arms, a vest-like section on my chest, some sort of weird hip-guard...and things that very much resembled red knee-length boots.

The thing about having an over-active imagination is that when something really weird happens, your first reaction isn't so much shock or surprise as uncertainty. I stood there staring for several moments, thinking, mostly, 'Huh?' I had not expected anything to happen just because I picked up that little vanishing marble, but then I hadn't expected White Blaze to come walking out of my dreams either. Obviously some very weird things were happening to me, and there was no guessing what they would be or when they would happen. Still, I wondered whether I'd actually woken up that morning or if I was still asleep and having an especially vivid dream. I thought about it for a while and decided that since I had always known I was dreaming, before, that meant that since I wasn't sure now, then obviously I was awake.

Isn't logic wonderful? At causing headaches?

After a while it occurred to me that I was just standing there like a stump, but I wasn't sure what else to do. White Blaze kindly settled the question for me by snorting, padding over to me, sniffing in a sort of disinterested way at the metal, then suddenly throwing his weight against my legs. I went down in a clattering heap to the forest floor and sat there glaring at him for a moment.

"Do you mind?" I asked irritably, and got up again, discovering as I did that whatever it was, it was very easy to move in. Looking more closely, I noticed the joints in the metal; even the gloves had finger-joints and I could make a fist with no difficulty. "Well, whatever this stuff is, it's efficiently made," I mused. "And it's light...and...it's funny, but it doesn't feel like I'm wearing metal. I wonder if it's padded somehow." Curious, I tried to take off one of the gloves and made the slightly unsettling discovery that it didn't come off. "This isn't good," I muttered to White Blaze, who looked supremely bored. "There's got to be some way to take it off. I can hardly go around like this all the time, and even if I put my clothes over it- hey! Where'd my clothes go? Well," I concluded after looking around and not seeing them, "maybe they're the padding under this thing."

White Blaze yawned, then flopped down on the ground and closed his eyes, and I looked down at him with a touch of irritation. I suppose it was a good thing he was taking it all so calmly- much better than if he'd gotten all agitated about it- but he really didn't need to act as if bizarre things happened so often that they had become tedious. "You're not being much help, you know," I chided. "What am I supposed to say to people who ask me why I'm wearing this weird armor?..."

Armor...the word seemed to hang in my mind and I looked down at my hands again. Armor. Armor that appeared without warning, magically...like the armor in the legends that Grandfather had told me so often. Legends about evil demons who caused terrible destruction and legends about magic armor that a few brave people had worn when they fought the demons. Special people with special weapons, the power of the earth and water and fire and-

"Uh-ohhh," I murmured very softly. A very uneasy feeling was settling in my stomach from the notion that was solidifying in my mind. Take a story about magic armor and fire power, and put it alongside a kid who's 'fire-powered' and has just had magic-seeming armor appear out of nowhere, and you reach a conclusion very quickly. "I don't wanna fight demons!" I declared. "I'm going to be a katana instructor!"

Nothing happened, of course, except for a slight twitch of Blaze's ears. I felt a little silly as I looked around the quiet woods and wondered if I was letting my imagination run away with me again. But if it had, it had sure done a good job of it. That armor was real, not something I daydreamed up. Still, it might be that I was assuming too much. There hadn't been demons in...well, so far as I knew, never. But assuming the legends were true and there had been, once, there weren't any now. "Maybe it kinda gets passed along," I suggested to Blaze, who did me the favor of opening his eyes. "Even if it doesn't get used anymore, someone's got to look after it- and naturally it'd go to someone who could use it, if they had to. Not that I would know how, since I can't even get it off, but..." I sighed. "Wonder where that orb-" I stopped, startled, as the armor suddenly glowed red again and then faded out, leaving me in my t-shirt and shorts. The light collected into a glowing ball in front of me that grew smaller and more solid and finally became the glass orb once again. I automatically lifted my hand and the ball dropped into it. "Well, good!" I exclaimed. "Hmm. That was easy, I guess all I had to do was think of the orb...maybe now if I think of the armor, it'll come back."

It didn't. It seemed there was more to the process than I had thought, and after a frustrating few minutes, I gave it up and sat down next to White Blaze. He listened patiently while I grumbled; I suppose if he'd been human, he would have had some words to say about me wanting the armor gone one moment and wanting it back the next. It was pretty inconsistent, but I conveniently ignored that.

At last I got to my feet, picked up the half-forgotten shard of the hilt, and pulled the sword out of the tree-trunk. "Strange," I mumbled, looking at the broken hilt. "Was it made like that on purpose, then, or did someone just take advantage of it? Was it supposed to come to me, or was it really meant to go to someone else?" I started back to the house, muttering more unanswerable questions to myself. White Blaze paced alongside me, his tail occasionally whacking the backs of my legs. "I do know one thing," I concluded as I went up the steps to the house. "I need to go to the library and read those old legends. I remember what Grandfather told me- some of it, anyway- but I don't think he told me everything, 'cause he never mentioned an orb. I don't think. Well, maybe he did and I just forgot..."

I spent most of the evening trying to remember everything I'd been told about the old legends, which really wasn't much. I did recall that no one knew who the heroes who wore the armor were; they had hidden their identities so the demons couldn't hurt the people they cared about. That made a lot of sense to me. I also seemed to remember that each armor went to someone with a certain strength- Light went with Wisdom, I recalled after some effort. And fire...fire must be jin, I decided after studying the orb again and taking note of the kanji. Righteousness. I had to wonder about that- I didn't think I was particularly righteous. In fact, I wasn't too sure I knew exactly what 'being righteous' meant.

When it got dark, I shook off my thoughts long enough to take care of chores- mostly boiling a little water to make something to eat. I still had a little of the food in the freezer, but had started preparing things for myself more and more often as that stockpile got lower and lower. It made the frozen stuff last longer, it was nice to have fresher food, and- not to sound ungrateful, but some of what I'd been given wasn't exactly my favorites. My mind really wasn't on what I was doing, though, so the shrimp I was cooking turned out more than a little overdone. Eventually I went to bed, but lay awake for a long time, still brooding. I woke up very early the next morning and hurried down to the Azu library as soon as I'd had a little breakfast.

Finding what I wanted turned out to be kind of tricky. I'd intended to look through the kids' section, but changed my mind as I looked at the shelves full of books. It was going to take an awful long time to look through all those and see if any were about the old legends. Besides, my pride was kicking in. I was eleven- no, twelve, now- way too old to be hanging around in that area! People would see me and think I liked reading baby books- or worse, think I couldn't read stuff for my own age. 'And it'll just be more of the stuff Grandfather told me, if there even is anything about magic armor. I need a dictionary or something, not kid stories.' So I went to find the dictionaries.

Those didn't help- I didn't need the definition of 'armor' or 'magic', though I did look up 'righteous'. The dictionary seemed to think it meant 'virtuous', which didn't really clarify anything for me. I shrugged and tried the encyclopedias, where I found out more than I had ever wanted to know about the different types of armor in the different eras of Japan's history. I did learn a bit about demons; apparently there were many different kinds of demons, with all sorts of different powers, that showed up in legends and myths- but that wasn't much help. Frustrated, I considered asking the librarian, but I didn't want to have to try and explain why I was interested in magic armor and demons. I thought it over for a few minutes, wondering whether to look in the history section or not, then decided it couldn't hurt- and it wasn't like I had any other ideas. I got up and walked in that direction- passed the card catalog- and paused. I'd never tried to use that before, but it seemed like this might be a good time to start, so I went rather dubiously to the drawers and tried to figure out how it worked.

I finally found what I was looking for, not under magic or armor or even demons, but under legends. There were two books about legends in general- as I had suspected, near the history section- and the rest were about specific ones. I went to the shelves where they were stacked, took down the two general ones and sat down on the floor to read them.

The first book was very old, and so obscure that I couldn't tell if what I was reading was supposed to be literal or symbolic. There was stuff about the Wolf-lord, the Demon-lord, the Spider-lord and the Snake-lord; a lot of talk about 'the nine', 'the five' and 'the four'; something about youja, whatever that was supposed to be; and some very strange stuff about gates and fences and moats- like the moat with no water and the fence with no door. Then there was a chapter about jin, justice, wisdom, trust and life, along with a lot about phantoms, poison, cruelty and corruption. I gathered that 'the five' must be the virtues and the four 'lords' must be the evil, but it didn't really say which lord had which fault; maybe they all had them all. I also picked up the notion that the five were associated with elements, while the four were linked to seasons, but it didn't say anything about how that worked. The third chapter got really weird: black suns, emperors, floating towers, and torn clouds all got mentioned in the first paragraph. I wondered if the black sun might be an eclipse, but I was pretty stumped on the rest of it. The phrase 'fire from heaven' came up a lot too; I wasn't sure if that was supposed to be lightning or real fire. The last part was all about a reflection (of what?) and the pattern of towers in the celestial city of dreams (where?) that I couldn't make any sense of.

After that chapter, I decided I'd had more than enough of that for a while, put the crazy book down, and picked up the other one. It turned out to be an excellent decision. The second book was written by a Dr. Yagyu, and his book was all about his theory that several things we knew as legends had actually happened. The first one was what he called the Ronin Legend, the one that involved yoroi, and I read it very carefully, hoping that this was what I was looking for.

The first part was history: apparently, during the Time of Warring States, a 'greater demon' had broken through from his demon realm to Earth. The doctor noted that many villages had been destroyed during that time; most were assumed to have fallen to the political chaos, but artifacts from some of those villages showed signs of damage done by weapons that were not available to humans at that time. There were not many written records from those years, but most of the ones that had been found made at least some mention of strange weather and odd behavior from animals. Others, it seemed, got a lot more specific than that, and it was from these that the legend of the demon and the warrior who fought it was born.

The legend itself was really spooky; the warring among the humans somehow woke or attracted the attention of this greater demon, who used evil energies to open a door between his dwelling place and Earth. He had claimed the title of Arago Talpa, Emperor of the Nether Realms and ruler of the Dynasty of Evil, and had sent his warriors- evil spirits and 'metal demons'- out into the world to conquer it. There was a picture of one of those metal demons; it looked to me like a robot, or a human wearing a robot costume. The robots had used spears, chains and swords as weapons, but they seemed to have been energized with some form of electricity- something that acted like an electrical shock and left burn-marks on things and people. They had also had some exploding capability, according to the doctor's study of splintered wood and half-melted metal in the villages. I shuddered to think of those mechanical monsters marching through primitive villages and the panic they must have triggered. And that wasn't the worst; the evil spirits that accompanied the androids were not only immune from harm by humans, they had their own evil energies as well. People had been reported to be possessed, weapons had turned on their owners, lightning had been called down out of the sky, and magic fire had sprung up out of nowhere, burning anything in its path.

And then the Emperor of Demons, Talpa himself, had come through the door he'd made. Riding a giant black horse with red eyes and a red mane, wielding a longsword some fifteen feet long, wrapped in dagger-edged armor, he had used both his weapons and his evil magic to obliterate anyone who stood against him. His power had caused earthquakes, made Mount Fuji erupt, called up tornados and whirlpools. Anyone who resisted him was killed; any who didn't resist were enslaved.

It wasn't sounding a whole lot like the legend I remembered, but I did get very uneasy when I read that the place where the demon-emperor had supposedly come to earth was now the center of Toyama. Then I wondered if Azu had been in existence at the time, and if so, whether the demons had destroyed it. Then I turned back to the book to find out how they'd gotten rid of the emperor, for obviously they had somehow.

At that point, the book got distinctly less helpful: all it said was that in the midst of all the destruction, a warrior 'appeared'. A lone warrior, carrying a golden sword, wearing the armor of the Mystic Clan, and accompanied by a rare black-and-white tiger. That kinda got my attention! I spent several minutes speculating about White Blaze, didn't get anywhere, and finally gave up and started reading again.

The warrior with the golden sword was named Kaosu, and he defeated the demon after a brief battle. He banished the fallen 'emperor' back to the realm he'd come from, and all the robots and spirits had disappeared with their master- but the demon's giant suit of armor had remained. The doctor speculated that by leaving a solid object from the evil realm behind, it would perhaps be easier for the demon to reach into our world a second time. The warrior Kaosu seemed to think so too, for he immediately gathered a group of warriors and gave them armor of their own- armor that had been enchanted to counter the evil of the demons. There were five of them, and they were based on natural forces- the elements, each with its own special virtue.

So it was the right legend. And there certainly was a great deal that Grandfather hadn't told me. I was glad of that; it didn't seem like a story I would have enjoyed, as a child.

As I'd thought, fire was associated with jin. Light was wisdom, water was trust, earth was justice and air was the force of life itself, to counter the demon's enjoyment of killing. In fact, it seemed that the demons actually grew stronger every time they killed someone, which made a certain amount of horrible sense. 'So,' I thought grimly, 'whoever wears the armor has to not only defeat the demons, but keep them from killing anyone. Because then they'll keep getting stronger- maybe too strong to defeat.'

The doctor's explanation then turned to what he called 'unverifiable myths' associated with the armor. I didn't pay as much attention to that section until I read about the rumor that the emperor had decided to counter Kaosu's good armor by creating evil armor and giving it to four evil human men to wear. Those must be the the wolf, snake, spider, and demon that the other book had talked about. I still wasn't sure which bad trait went with which lord, but venom sounded like the snake and I was willing to bet the demon was cruelty. The spider was probably illusion, which meant the wolf would be corruption. Unless venom was the spider, illusion was the demon, corruption was the snake, and cruelty was the wolf... I played with the thought for a few minutes, then dropped it. It probably didn't matter much, and I still had a lot to read. Re-read, that is; I went back to the top and started over.

Not that it was terribly enlightening. The doctor didn't seem to know just what the armor did or what sort of magic was in it, didn't mention the orb at all, and pretty much ignored the history between the creating of it and now. I mean, there was no history of it, it was as if the armor had been created and then nothing really happened; maybe it sat in Kaosu's basement for the entire thousand years. If he'd had a basement. Dr. Yagyu apparently noticed that himself, for he had written a sort of apologetic little paragraph saying that he had been unable to trace the owners of the armor and speculated that perhaps Kaosu had put an oath of silence on the bearers. He also suggested that, since it was clearly not normal, there might be a mystical explanation for the absence of it. (I noticed he liked to say mystical instead of magical.) 'Perhaps,' he wrote, 'it waits somewhere unseen until such a time should come that it is needed again. There is then no need to have concern that it might fall into the wrong hands.'

He had a point there, and I put the book down and thought about it for a while. If he was right and the armor came out of hiding when evil was near...

The doctor switched topics a bit then, explaining that each armor had its own weapon- which surprised me, since I hadn't seen any sign of a weapon- and that the helmets and breastplates reflected the element of the armor. I was starting to doubt it was the right legend after all, when he noted something surprising. According to myth, there were actually two sets of each armor, the elemental metal itself, and ordinary steel that had been magically- sorry, mystically- bound to it. The result was that there was what could be described as body armor that was mostly steel, with particular sections 'energized' with element power. Then there was the mystical metal itself, which would connect to those special energized plates when it was put on.

I had to read that through a few times before I got it, and it was lucky I had seen the stuff or it wouldn't have made much sense. "So that means," I muttered at last, "that the white part is the regular steel and the red sections are where the yoroi will...appear, or whatever. That would make sense. I hope." I read a little further, hoping to find out how that happened, but the doctor just talked some about super-attacks the armors were supposed to be able to perform. Then he listed some of the signs that might mean the demon-world was getting active. Unnatural clouds, strange behaviour from animals, unusual lightning. Spontaneous fires or earth tremors, things moving by themselves or breaking for no reason. Wells (or fountains) drying up (or emptying themselves), plants dying, unseasonal snow and ice, hallucinations or illusions.

After that, he switched over to another legend entirely. I closed the book and sat for a few minutes, thinking hard, and finally got up and went to check it out at the desk. The librarian didn't seem to think it odd, just smiled and asked how I was enjoying the summer. I answered truthfully that it was an interesting one, then checked the time. It was after one o'clock, and I had just enough time to get something to eat from the restaurant next door before I was due at the dojo for the day's work.

Oddly enough, I wasn't very hungry.