“You can’t use a sword for gardening!” said my brother. It was a dull heirloom, by right a family belonging, but precious to none.

He didn’t believe as we looked across the overgrown, gust-blown lawn of mother’s last home, at the dead-faced flowers and weeping willows.

He didn’t believe when I snapped the sword in twain, ducking from shards of dull steel, nor when I forged a pair of rough blades from the ruins of incandescent metal.

My brother didn’t like being proved wrong, you see. Such things went from joke to challenge to foundational tenet like water rolling down a hill.

He didn’t truly believe even as I pinned the blades, freshly tempered, into shining shears. He looked upon my blades, and beheld nothing but the potential for violence.

But when those blades cut true, when the first grass fell, he had no choice but to share in my vision of another way.