The mountains were peaceful when Vito was a child. Between songs and between cigarettes, you can still see the longing for that peace, for those mountains. Vito came to those mountains at an early age. His mother had decided that the village was just too dangerous and thrust her son into the arms of the local Shaolin temple. As seasons changed and snows fell and fled only to fall again, Vito progressed rapidly in several different forms of kung fu, rising among the other pupils becoming something of a prodigy, humble as he may be.

Though the debate has never settled, best estimates place Vito at seventeen years old when he received the news. A man, beaten, so badly burned that he what was once a beard was now only spots of singed hair, fell to a heap at the tall gates of the monastery. Throwing his handmade straw broom to the side, Vito rushed to the fallen man.

“Vito?” The man asked in broken Chinese.

“You must save your strength. I’ll fetch a doctor.”

“I don’t have time…” the man coughed out, clutching Vito’s arm with a strength that only the truly doomed can muster. “You must return…the village has been…your mother.”

As Vito found his feet, the sense of inner peace that countless hours of meditation had instilled upon him was lost, washed away in the fire of revenge. Reaching down, he crossed the deadman’s arms across his chest, and brushed his eyes closed. With a whispered prayer for the departed’s soul, Vito turned to look at the monastery.

The guru, normally a frail and old man, loomed large and stern under the arch of the gate.

“Revenge is not the answer, young Striking Cloud.”

“I know, Master.”

“Yet I can see you can think of nothing else.”

“You are as wise as ever, Master.”

“Return to your sweeping.”

Vito stood silent, a few strides from the guru who had guided him spiritually and physically for the bulk of his life. “Master, I cannot.”

The guru stood silent for several heavy moments, “Then you must carry this.” Outstretched in the guru’s arms was a guitar.

“Master?… I do not understand.”

“When the time comes, you will.”

Vito descended from the mountain temple with nothing but the simple orange robes of a monk and a guitar slung across his back. It was three long days travel to the village where he was born. What Vito found was not the simple wooden huts and neatly plowed fields that he could recall from his early childhood, but rather a field of ashes now grown cold.

Vengeance washed over Vito as he fled down into the mountain passes. On occasions he would stop, lean down towards the ground, and find the rope-soled boot prints, the ones that belonged to the bandits who had slaughtered the only memory that Vito truly held dear. The thought of his mother haunted Vito, pushed him to run further, to run faster. He was fleeing those screams as much as he was following those footprints, and his only hope was that they’d end at the same point.

The mountain path emptied in a small village, not so different than the one Vito could almost recall, the one that was now merely scattered, dead ash. Slowing to a walk, Vito entered the village. He could still see the footprints, but he no longer needed them, he could hear the laughter. The only building in town that showed any signs of life, candles burning bring and yellow into the night.

The door burst in, wooden shards falling onto the woven reed floor. Swords were drawn by bandit hands as Vito strode in defiantly. He was quickly surrounded in steel, but years of training had led him to this moment. His movements were sure, as sharp as the blades that threatened his life, and he fought with the same strength and reckless abandon that the dying man had gripped him with. Vito was on a mission.

Bodies fell by the wayside, the mats of the room quickly turning red, but there was just one too many to account for. On his knees, Vito looked up to see the point of a spear hovering mere hairs from his neck. He searched frantically for a weapon. His hands wrapped around the neck of the guitar, the one the guru had given him.

“When the time comes, you will.”

Vito looked down the spear, his eyes locking into those of his would-be-assassin. A bead of sweat trickled from the bandit’s brow. Vito’s hands let go of the guitar, leaping forward to pull that spear away. With a spin, Vito lodged the spear in the bandit’s belly, catching the guitar before it touched the floor.

As he turned to walk away, a voice near death called to him.

“Finish me.”

Vito turned slowly.

“Use the guitar. I beg mercy of you.”

Vito looked down at the guitar, and then over at the bleeding bandit.

“In the monastery, there is an old saying, A time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to reap, a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to laugh, a time to weep, but for those about to rock, we salute you.”

“I don’t…”

“Now I must go rock.”

Though no one can know for sure, it is rumored that because he did not kill that bandit with a guitar, Vito was forbidden to return to the monastery. Perhaps that is a romanticized version of the events, but whatever they may be, Vito now wanders the world, guitar in hand, longing for the mountains of his youth, guitar in hand.