The Shadow of the Blade

by R. R. King

  “The killing is the price I paid for the honor of meeting you,” I reply.

  “Sweet tongue, bitter kills.” He says.

  “I said my prayer and buried the Helpers in the snow outside.” I make my point. I needn’t say more.

  “A man of honor?” The King’s suspicion is imminent. How many men did he ever trust?

  I answer with a nod. Instead of speaking, I lay my three swords on the ground. A gesture of vulnerability.

  “Do you expect me to believe that you killed the Giants, the six of them?” His tone is of mockery, slight and subtle.

  I can’t blame him. The The Six Giants are the only men and women in the Seven Season who have killed many across the land. Very few men claim they scratched or wounded them. A man killed by the Seven Giant after a long fight has a statue of Lavval stone built in his honor wherever he is from, just for lasting a few moments more before getting killed.

  “I have proof,” I say.

  Dragan snickers.

  “It’s easier to lie than tell the truth.” The King’s says.

  His words are few. His thoughts speak louder. I image his face would be his weakness. The part that will give him away. Is that why you’re sitting all tall, all distant, up in in the solitude of your throne, my King?

  It’s hard to read man with no face, but I have been trained to read voices, patterns of speech, and words unsaid within languages that pretend to say anything.

  Still, this time I have to start the conversation. I remind myself that He who talks first has more to lose. But I have no choice. The King is smarter than I think.

  “Though you are not my land’s king,” I begin, twisting the conversation to my wishes. “And though you are my enemy’s king,” I can hear Dragan’s growl, the dragon’s snorts. “I have killed the Giants for you…” I stop, waiting for him to start speaking. My eyes roll up upward, trying to pierce through the guards, reaching for the King.

  “In exchange of?” He catches my bait. Curiosity is a deadly need. He who asks first knows so little.

  “In exchange for my land’s safety,” I squint at the silhouette sitting on his throne. “And enough salt and bread for seven years.”

  Dragan fires a protesting chuckle. Who would ask the enemy to provide food for his land?

  The King says nothing again. A man of power. I respect him even more. Many other kings who think anger and wrath are power.

  A king who knows the power of silence, silences those who oppose his presence on the throne from the Book of Thrones, Domes, and a city Called Rome by Enrico Ludivicus, the one and only.

  “Would you like me to show my proof?” I say, not minding to ask first.

  He who insinuates ideas to lead and mold the conversation his way is a man of cunningness and wisdom. There are no fixed rules in this world, bigger ideas have always been a result of a man’s inceptions of smaller questions from The Paradox of Life by Anonymous.

  “No,” the King surprises me. His tone is sly this time, as if he desires to play a game of thrones and words. “Not the kind of proof you have in mind.”

  I say nothing, but I want to ask much.

  “I assume you have the The Six Giants heads or fingers in your possession,” he continues. “or some similar proof.”

  I nod, though I have nothing. It’s the beauty of not speaking much. A nod implies either answers. I keep my chances open. He thinks it means yes.

  “That kind of proof isn’t enough these days. I will need my sorcerers to confirm its authenticity,” he explains. “A man’s head can be forged and bound by Elurian Magic to appear as someone else’s. It’s hard to believe what you see these days. I will demand another kind of proof.”

  He sinks into a long silence, waiting, testing if I would speak first. A battle of language and speech I believe only he and I understand.

  After all, I am a stranger daring enough to approach the King’s castle and claim I have killed the The Six Giants, men and women predicted to kill the King himself by a thousand-year-old prophecy — unless they’re killed by a fierce warrior called the Shadow.

  4

  Story and Shadows

  In King Thorn’s eyes, I am both a threat and a treat. If I am lying, he would want to know why I lied. If I am telling the truth, he won't hesitate to grant my land all the wishes I ask for. It will mean that I have handed him the power to oppose a thousand-year-old-prophecy wrong.

  I wait, wondering what kind of proof he would ask of me.

  “The story,” he says. “Tell me the story of how you killed each one of them.”

  I squint and bite my lower lip. Something I never do.

  A cunning and wise man this King is. I assume he studies everything about his enemies through the years. He has known about the prophecy of his assassination since he was seven years old. I estimate his age to be of three hundred and eighty million five hundred and twenty thousand breaths old now. I heard he is a healthy man. A healthy man breathes around twenty-eight thousand eight hundred breaths a day. Multiply it by the days of a year then the numbers would add up to around thirty-six years.

  In the Seven Seasons, it’s not necessarily that two men of the same age have lived the same length of days. It is the quality of a man’s healthy breaths that measures the span of his life.

  “I’d tell you the story of how I’ve killed each one of them, if you reward me with advancing one step up with each tale,” I say, staring at the seven layers of guards. “Seven stories, seven steps.”

  “If I so believe you are telling the truth, yes,” he bargains with confidence. He is also delighted by the entertainment I will provided with every story. Telling stories to a bored king and having him decipher facts from fiction between the lines will be amusing. It’s always lonely atop of the throne. “Each story I believe is true will get you closer to my throne. If you finally do — and I highly doubt it — I will believe you and declare the The Six Giants dead. And I will grant you what you wish for your people, and more.”

  “But my King!” Dragan protests. “If he did kill the The Six Giants, word would have already spread in the Seven Seasons.”

  The King rubs his thick beard, considering Dragan’s plausible remark — that’s if I see clear enough from this far.

  “Their people must hide the kill,” I interrupt, rushing into an explanation. But then I remember that...

  He who offers to explain himself is mostly seen as a liar from the Book of Beautiful Lies by Timothy, the Teller of Truth.

  I should have waited, but I continue, “They know the undesired consequences of declaring their leader dead,” — He who digs a hole for himself, rarely stops falling in it — “Can you imagine the people of their Season knowing the prophecy isn’t true. Or that one man like me stood up against it and changed the course of history.”

  “Hmm,” the King sighs. “Though I am not persuaded, I still like you to tell me the stories,” — He who is bored will eventually pay the price of the longing for entertainment — “I would like you to begin with my brother, Rodmordt, ruler of the Season of Rain,” he demands. “You claim you have killed him.”

  “I did,” I say. “A relatively easy task,” I shrug. “But a long quarrel.”

  Dragan laughs, but the King seems to lean forward. “You realize I know everything about the The Six Giants,” the Kings says. “You realize I will know if you lie to me, or?”

  I nod. I bow my head. I have to. The The Six Giants destined to end the reign of King Thorn were his flesh and blood, brothers and sisters. He hated them. They hated him. He also loved them. They also loved him. The paradox of brotherhood. By killing them, I’ve both pleased and offended him at the same time. I understand his struggle between his natural love for his siblings and his eventual hate because of the prophecy.

  Here is the first story I tell King Thorn. A story that could both be a lie and a truth, for no one understands why I am here.

  Part II

  Season of Rain

  5


  Alagor Rodmordt

  The Season of Rain, West of the Season of Snow, South of the Seas of Silence, Ruled by King Rodmordt.

  Alagor Rodmordt was a man of few words. Tall, beardless, and with long black hair, which he braided into stiffened locks in the act of rebelliousness fashion. No one else was allowed to braid their hair in his land.

  He only wore one outfit. Night and Day. In mirth and sorrow. A yellow robe. One piece. A fabric made with the wool of Per’uh’sia, in a land thousands of seasons afar.

  They had knitted his outfit with threads of gold, buttoned it with the most expensive Lavval stones. Precious and black with a light tinge of sunshine. The Per’uh’sia people had found a way to knit sun rays into a fabric, giving it the bright yellow color to it, and a perpetual warmth against the cold rain. A task that took twenty thousand of their sunny days, and the lives of thousands of slaves who had to swallow sunshine and blow out strands of golden thread from their guts again. Dark magic that had not been known in the Seven Seasons.

  The outfit fitted Rodmordt’s body. A bit tightly, some would say. But he owned a fit figure and wore nothing underneath. Alagor Rodmordt was rumored to have had a body no God could have sculpted. Muscular, defined, and incredibly flexible.

  He never smiled. Never. But was expressive in many artistic gestures. In a land cursed by eternal grey rain that doomed it to eventually sink lower into the earth — a curse that would only be lifted by killing King Thorn, or the land was destined to sink into burial in a hundred and three years of Elurian Time — Rodmordt had an obsession with music.

  An unusual obsession, some would say.

  When it was a time of peace, he sent expeditions to faraway lands to collect all kinds of rare instruments. He learned how to play them, taught his people, and spent his time indulging in the beauty of the melody.

  Alagor Rodmordt was bound to the beautiful Ellianna of No Eyes. Bound was their term for marriage, for one was bound to never love another in the Season of Rain.

  Ellianna was blind.

  It was said that Rodmordt loved her for that. She couldn’t admire his body nor his beauty with the absence of her eyes. So she must love him for something beyond the mask of flesh, a term he used to explain matters of the heart.

  Rodmordt was eccentric, and like most men I killed, I admired him.

  6

  Blind Ellianna

  Ellianna was the first woman to have been taught to play music by Rodmordt. Each new instrument was his loving gift to her. She may have had no sight, but her hands were pulling the strings to his heart’s passion. Her breaths were blowpipes for his brain’s wisdom. All witnessed by the power of melody.

  Ellianna’s music enchanted the Season of Rain. Rodmordt built the highest tower for her. A tower where she played at the bottom near a well. Her music echoed to the majestic acoustic of Lavval stones, reflecting every note of her melodies in spiral waves, all the way up the opening at the end of the tower. The process amplified the music and made it audible for everyone within a day’s walk to hear.

  Rodmordt’s men filled the well with Womb Water every night. The water’s density, freshness, and height greatly affected the overall sound. The spiral walls and the resonance of water waves gave reason for the musical instruments to become alive. You would be out there in the Season, listening to Elliana’s strumming and think you have been lifted up to the moon. The melodies weren’t only notes, but invisible hands that touched you while you listened.

  Legend had it that birds heard her melodies and wept.

  When rain poured heavily in the Season, distorting the flow of melodies, muffling its sound, Rodmordt’s men had to light up the room at the bottom of the tower. Torches of fire were dug in the earth inside the room. Ellianna had to tolerate the heat and the foul smell of water sometimes. But it was all worth it.

  She continued producing magical melodies, strong enough to ring against the dropping of water from the skies. Even smarter, she sometimes manipulated the rain’s chaotic scatter into a rhythmic tempo, and blended it into her melodies.

  It was said that the universe faltered under Ellianna’s melodies and changed the course of weather in places outside of the Season of Rain.

  The locals said her music healed. Music had always healed in the Seven Season, all but in the territories it had been forbidden — I shall talk about this later in the Season of Silence.

  In every place in the realm, people produced a different kind of music than Ellianna’s, because no one ever played against the rain. But she did.

  With her long black hair, sticking to her cheeks and her body, she looked like a sorcerer. She had beautiful green eyes, complimenting her pale skin. Long thin fingers that gifted her with a peculiar strumming of strings. Long nails to play the Qui’tha’ra, an enchanting five-string instrument, she’d cherished the most.

  One day, Rodmordt’s troopers came back with an instrument no one had seen before. A huge thing where Ellianna had to sit on a chair and embrace it in her arms. She had to pick its long strings which were stretched against a curvy huge bone-like structure. The troopers said it was called a Harp. This one in particular, was the Harp of Hallows.

  The Harp was the hardest instrument to play, especially in the rain. But Ellianna mastered it, and fell in love with it. Not only did the instrument produce the sweetest of melodies, but it felt as if strumming another person’s heart. The very act of having to embrace it with her arms proposed such emotions.

  For hours, Ellianna would play the Harp. The people of the Season of Rain would dance, tapping their bare feet against the watery marble floor of the Terrace of Teardrops affront Rodmordt’s castle. They would clap their wet hands against the rain, barely producing a sound, and would sing words muffled by the dropping water from the sky.

  From afar, it seemed like a melancholic act. But it satisfied the souls and nourished the essence of beings. Rodmordt like to call it Pan’tho’mi’ma, referring to an act of silence he’d watched on the traveling circuses he used to attend as a child — and the way most people interacted in the Season of Silence. He used to attend them with his brother, King Thorn, long before the Break of Brothers happened.

  Rodmordt watched his people with pride. In a land where there was no sense in being outside all the time, let alone singing in the rain, his people didn’t care. It was the local’s protest against nature. The epiphany of man’s triumph against obstacles, and the beauty of men and women weaving their bodies to the waves of melodies.

  It was magic like no other. Not Dark Magic. Not White. Not grey like the color of rain. It was a colorless magic, one that needed no witnessing eyes. One that only needed a heart and good imagination.

  The magic had filled the air for years, all until King Thorn’s warriors raided the Season of Rain in hopes of killing Rodmordt, the man who was destined by laws of a prophecy to kill his own brother.

  7

  Art of War

  Blood didn’t mix with rain. Too much blood and the rain looked confusing to the eyes. Like a painting of gloomy prediction and foreshadowed morbidity, if that ever made sense. A lot of blood was shed in that war. So much that a man’s eyes would elude him to think the sky was raining red when it was only spattered in the air.

  Rodmordt’s people had not fought a great battle, for they had feeble souls, softened by the wetness of rain and the sentiments of music, not much the characteristic of warriors.

  Most of Rodmordt’s people died. And though he fought a great battle himself, he ended up escaping so to fulfill the prophecy one day and kill his tyrant brother king who ruthlessly rules the neighboring Season of Snow, the only Season that had access to the Binding Beads, a powerful magic that made him not only king of the Season of Snow, but all other Seasons combined.

  A few months later, Rodmordt and Ellianna returned to their remnant of a land. They re-built every brick and street, mended every soul, and encouraged the faithless to have faith in the prophecy.

  Within a few years, the Seaso
n of Rain grew much stronger.

  But this time, the feeling was different.

  A heart once torn is rarely capable of loving like it once did. Its beat would always be heavy and restless and slower than it used to be from Of Organs and Limbs: A study of anatomical humanity, not human anatomy by Rudolf Von Tier.

  Instead of music filling their lives, Rodmordt taught his men the Art of War. He taught them not to weave their bodies to the music, but to stand still and alert, strong and ready for their enemies.

  Rodmordt still never smiled. He rarely expressed himself either. His eyes grew dull, looking into nowheres - there isn’t one nowhere, but many; again, another story for another time.

  His jaw tensed, fixated on the day he would avenge his people. Rodmordt’s flexible body made him a unique warrior. He could maneuver stabs, and he could fight seven men at once. He didn’t even use a sword.

  He used a flexible long pole. It was made of Lavval iron. Seven million souls strong, but seven years flexible — a measurement I never understood.

  His weapon was of no match, though it had no razor-sharp end and wasn’t capable of stabbing.

  Rodmordt would weave his body like a belly dancer, jump high like no one else could, and duck until he was flat on the ground. No one was capable of killing him. Instead, he waved his pole, so its long end flipped like a snake’s tail, and then hit hard.

  Sometimes he could knock down a man with hit from his pole. Most of the times Rodmordt used the pole to misdirect his opponent’s strikes.