by Sam Sykes
“As do I,” Mocca replied. “I have wanted to know nothing else since I first contacted you.”
“Talk sense!”
“Listen to sense.” Mocca’s voice rose barely an octave, yet the sands shook beneath him. “All I have told you is true. All you suspect is true. Yes …” His face hardened. “You are a weapon. And you are a weapon designed to kill me.”
Lenk felt the sword on his back grow heavier, as though it heard a conversation it yearned to be a part of and leaned in. And his hand ached, as if begging to hold it once again.
“And that is why I approached you, Lenk,” Mocca said, “that is why I guided you to Rhuul Khaas. That is why it had to be you.” He held his hands out. “All I have planned, all that I can do for this world, all the lives I can save … it will mean nothing if I cannot convince you that I am worth saving.”
Lenk froze, staring at the man in white blankly.
“You were made to kill me. You were made to end what I have planned. But you haven’t yet.” He stepped toward Lenk. “You haven’t slain me. You haven’t condemned all those who would die in the wars to come should I be unable to stop them. Weapons are designed to kill, Lenk. You could kill more than any one man in history, forgotten or otherwise, with just one stroke of your sword.”
He held his hands out wide and gestured to his chest.
“Run me through. Cut my heart out. Or hack off my head. Kill me. And send them all to their deaths, including her. Fulfill your purpose.”
And Lenk wanted to.
Despite everything, all that he knew and all that he feared, he wanted to tear his sword from his scabbard and plunge it into Mocca’s chest. He wanted to stain the sand red and watch the life leave Mocca’s eyes. He wanted to keep hacking until he was too tired to stand, too tired to think.
Because that was what he knew. That was what killing was. It was quick, it was messy, and then it was over. It made sense.
And he wanted so badly for this all to make sense.
And his hand slid up to the sword on his back. And his jaw clenched. And the tears on his face grew cold. And, despite all that he knew and all that he feared …
He let his hand fall. And his head followed. And soon, his body slumped to the earth.
“I can’t,” he whispered.
And he felt hands on his shoulders, guiding him back to his feet. And when he looked up, Mocca’s eyes were bright and his smile was warm.
“You could,” the man in white said. “But you won’t. A weapon fulfills many purposes.” He nodded slowly. “And this one … is not yours.”
Lenk had fought demons before. Not just demons but those depraved few who came to bow at their altars. In all the bodies he’d left behind him, both from earth and from hell, he rarely stopped to consider what would make a mortal bend the knee to a creature from hell.
Not until now, when he looked intently at Mocca’s face. For when he looked into Mocca’s eyes, they sprawled with a vastness that could never be contained in a mortal frame. And in his stare, Lenk saw a knowingness, a certainty that was so broad and so deep that Lenk could not help but listen to Mocca when he said he was more than a weapon.
And he could not help but believe him.
And yet that comforting knowledge lingered in Mocca’s stare only for a moment longer. The stare of the man in white was drawn up, toward the statue of Darior, and the darkness of his stare went alight with fear.
“What is it?” Lenk asked.
Mocca took a step backward and drew tense.
Lenk’s sword came to his hand as he whirled about and stared up. There, upon the shoulder of the great statue, a stare more hateful than that of the dead god’s eye fixed itself upon Lenk. A shadow stirred. A blade flashed. A pair of eyes, cold and blue as a winter that claims an infant, looked down upon him.
“Shuro,” he whispered.
She was draped in shadow, but he didn’t need to see her to know her. He could feel her stare as keen as any blade. And though she said not a word, he could almost hear the hatred in her breath as she raised her long, thin blade.
And leapt.
She landed on the sand soundlessly and took off toward him. Her face betrayed no emotion, as pale and rigid as a corpse, as she rushed toward him. Yet her eyes were alive with anger.
“Shuro, wait!” he cried out. “Let me explain!”
How exactly he planned to explain betraying her to release a demon she had been training her entire life to kill, he wasn’t quite sure.
But, then, he didn’t suppose any of that really mattered.
After all, it wasn’t like he could talk faster than she could eviscerate him.
She picked up speed, bent low as she rushed toward him. She took her blade up in both hands, narrowing her eyes upon him.
He slid his feet apart and planted them on the earth, ready to take her charge.
Watch her, not the blade, he told himself. Watch her, not the blade. She’ll tell you how she’s going to strike.
He watched her rush. He watched her close the distance between them in another breath. He watched her body tense, her arms draw back, her legs leave the earth.
NOW!
He swung a vicious chop, aiming for her torso.
And he probably would have hit her.
Had she been going for him, anyway.
She didn’t look at him, she looked through him. And as his blade went arcing, she darted below it, past him, behind him, faster than he could blink.
In fact, he had just gotten around to blinking when he heard the scream behind him.
Funny, he thought, but he always expected demons to die with a lot of fanfare—corpse turning to dust on his blade, flesh burning away in a bright flash of light, that sort of thing.
But when he turned around, all he saw was a dark patch on Mocca’s robes blossoming as Shuro jerked her sword out of his side and he slumped, motionless, to the ground.
His body acted before his mind could catch up. Before he could even stop to think about how badly he was outmatched, he tore off running in a spray of sand. She whirled on him, raising her sword. Not high enough to keep his shoulder from barreling into her, though.
He bore her to the earth—trained as she might be, she was still small and he had at least twenty pounds on her—and seized her by the throat with a fury that he hadn’t expected to feel, his sword driven by a panic that wasn’t there this morning.
The thought of Mocca dying—of all that he promised dying with him—made him raise his sword high and bring it down upon her.
Shuro barely twisted out of the way, her hand lashing up to catch him in the chin. In the moment that he reeled from the blow, her leg shot up and her knee caught him in the belly, knocking him off.
They scrambled to their feet, blades held high. But when Shuro found her footing, there was something off about her. She stood a little too unsteadily, her sword was held a little too tightly, and her anger was plain on her face.
“What have you done?” he asked.
“I killed a demon.” Her voice was cold, straining to smother the rage boiling in her throat. “As I was meant to do.” She flicked Mocca’s blood from her blade. “As we were meant to do.”
“He was going to fix it,” Lenk said, voice hysterical. “He was going to fix everything!”
“Is that what he told you? Six words?” She narrowed her eyes. “Is that all it took for you to betray me?”
“I … I didn’t …” He let that thought die; there was no way he could deny it. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I was ready to kill him, like you were, but then he said—”
“He lied,” Shuro interrupted. “Demons lie, Lenk. Demons always lie.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“It is in their blood. As it is in our blood to kill them for—”
“Will you shut the fuck up and listen?” Lenk gestured out, away from the square and toward the distant desert. “You’ve been up in a monastery this whole time, so you have no idea what’s
going on out there. There’s a war. A big one. One that’ll take more lives than any demon could. He could have stopped it,” he roared. “He could have saved her!”
The words came to him without thinking, ugly and desperate things that tumbled out of his mouth and lay twitching on the sand. And when Shuro heard them, her anger became something soft, something wounded. But only for a moment.
“Not for lies, not for promises, not for a woman can you trust a demon,” she hissed, raising her sword. “Not ever.”
She came rushing toward him, swift as a shadow chased by firelight. He barely had his sword up in time to block her as her blade lashed out. And he barely missed her blade when she twisted away from him and slashed at him, catching him at the arm and drawing a deep cut.
He snarled, swung, found only empty air. She was twisting again, darting behind him, thrusting. He leaned over, avoiding her blade more out of clumsy luck than skill, and she punished him for it by lashing out again, drawing another wound on his leg.
He whirled, backed away from her, tried to put distance between them. She was too quick, too nimble up close. But even as he moved away, he could feel it, a tremor coursing through his body. His sword felt heavier, and his leg trembled as he put weight on it. Her cuts had sliced something out of him, left him a little weaker.
She wasn’t trying to kill him. She was trying to disable him. Out of mercy, maybe. Or maybe she just thought a quick kill was kinder than he deserved.
Either way, keeping her at a distance was his best chance, he knew. And so did she. Her blade struck like an asp. He kept backpedaling, blocking what he could, suffering her cuts when he couldn’t. She lunged for him; his sword came up to block but only succeeded in driving her blade away from his shoulder and up toward his brow.
Skin split. Blood wept into his eye. And as he staggered backward, he saw her through a haze of red.
Even as furious as she was, her stance was strong, her movements effortless, the sword merely one more part of her body. They had lived together, trained together, spent years becoming one in that monastery of hers.
And that was when his eyes widened.
She came darting in again, blade ready. But he let his eyes drift away from that sword, slick with his own life, and looked down to her legs. She came in close; he felt the wind of her blade as she lashed toward him. And then, he lashed out in kind.
Though not with any blade.
He shot out a foot and let the hard toe of his boot crack against her shin. She let out a cry, the kind of pained shriek that came from people who had never been hit before. Her gait stumbled and she came crashing into him.
He seized her by the collar with one hand, trapping her sword with the other. And by the time she had regained enough sense to look at him, all she would see coming was his forehead as he smashed it against the bridge of her nose.
It felt almost refreshing to have blood on his face that wasn’t his own.
She dropped her blade, tearing away with a scream as she darted back from him. It wasn’t that she was delicate, he knew. She was simply surprised. She had trained for battle all her life, doubtless read every book, studied every form, learned every lesson she could on the subject of the sword.
But some lessons were best taught in back alleys and tavern brawls. Some lessons were best learned from scars from dirty knives and broken bones setting from sucker punches.
And Lenk had been learning these since he could first hold a sword.
And yet when she staggered away, holding her bloodied nose, she did not return to press her attack. She did not even raise her blade against him. He wasn’t so stupid as to think he had beaten the fight out of her with one dirty trick.
Certainly not after she looked at him with tears in her eyes.
“Even now,” she hissed, voice quavering. “Even after everything that happened, I wanted to forgive you, Lenk. I wanted to believe that you were tricked, that it could be fixed.”
“It’s going to be fixed,” he said, lowering his blade. “It was, anyway. Shuro, understand—”
“That’s why I asked them to let me come first,” she said. “That’s why I asked them to give me a chance.”
His blood ran cold. His eyes widened. “Who?”
He didn’t have to ask.
Not as he heard feet crunching on sand behind him.
He whirled about. And there they were. Leaping from the walls, landing lightly on the sand, sweeping toward him. Blades bared, their steel the same color as their hair, their eyes all the same shade of piercing blue.
Like his.
Men. Women. Boys. Girls. About a dozen of them. Most of them young, with faces both fresh and hard, free from scars and full of harsh angles, like blades fresh from forges. They came sweeping up to him, arraying themselves in a semicircle. Their blades were raised high as they all slid into the same fighting stance that Shuro had held, but they approached no further. They merely fixed their cold gazes upon him.
“Khetashe,” Lenk whispered.
“No,” Shuro said from behind him. “We have no gods, Lenk. All we have is our duty. And each other.” He glanced behind him and saw her staring at him. “We can … it’s not too late. We can try to make this work.”
Swords.
Somehow, it always came down to swords. No matter how hard he tried, he could never put it down. And now, knowing all this—about Darior, about himself, about Shuro—even if he did put his weapon down, what good would it do?
He would still be one.
Better to just give in, then. Better to just go with Shuro and these people. Try to do some good as a weapon, do what he did best, do what he was made to do.
“NO!”
He all but tore the word from his mouth and thrust it into the ground. His blade was up, held out before in a show of defiance as he turned to face them all, meeting each of their cold stares with one of his own.
“I’m not one of you,” he snarled. “I don’t fucking know what you are, what you call yourselves, but I’m not one. I don’t give a fuck what god died for me, and I don’t give a shit what he intended for me. I’m not a weapon. I’m not a sword.” He held his blade up above his head. “This is. And I will use it to tear each and every one of you fuckers apart, and no god alive or dead will be able to fucking help you!”
As far as threats went, that had to be one of his better ones, he thought.
And it was rather polite of them to allow him a moment to appreciate it as they simply stared at him. But as time went on, and he came to consider just how small his single blade looked against so many of theirs, he began to wonder what they were waiting for.
And then he realized they weren’t staring at him, but up toward the sky.
In one breath, a great shadow fell upon Shuro. In one more, it had swallowed the entire courtyard. And in one more, she was flying through the air.
A great flash of bronze and emerald. The sound of the earth shaking. A great cloud of dust as something fell very quickly from very high up. Lenk shielded his eyes from it as the sand blew past him.
And when it cleared, he wasn’t sure what to call what he saw. Except its name.
“Oerboros,” he whispered.
The creature rose up, his magnificent ten-foot height diminished by the withered stoop of an emaciated and scarred body. In spindly arms, he clutched a massive piece of metal vaguely resembling a sword. Blood wept from his arms, his chest, his legs, wounds that would never close.
Yet even the ruin of his body could not tarnish the glory of his wings: ivory feathers and emerald scales glistening with a light that wasn’t there. They twitched around him, still alive and full of vigor. His face, a bronze mask cast in an expressionless stare, looked down on Lenk impassively.
Oerboros. The last living Aeon.
“Mortal,” he said, voice distant and chiming like a brass bell. “My apologies for my lateness.”
“What are you doing here?” Lenk asked.
“Oh, let’s not pretend you don�
��t know.”
With one tremendous stride, Oerboros walked over Lenk’s head and waded toward the warriors. They backed away, blades held up defensively; they might have been trained to fight otherworldly horrors, but actually seeing one in the flesh, however withered, was something else entirely.
But that fear was only momentary. In another moment, in a soundless charge, they found their nerve and rushed toward the Aeon, blades bared and thirsty.
His mask betraying nothing, Oerboros raised his massive weapon and began his bloody business.
Lenk saw it only in fragments: blurs of metal as he swept his blade back and forth, bursts of dark red as their blades bit at his withered flesh, crimson staining the magnificence of his wings. And over the screams of the dying and the roars of his agony, he almost missed the sound of feet on sand as Shuro rushed toward him.
He whirled, saw her cold gaze narrowed not on him, but on Oerboros’s back. Without thinking, he lunged to impose himself between the Aeon and the woman. His sword caught hers, tangled each other up as she pressed close to him and he tried to shove her back.
“After everything, you still fight,” she snarled. “The demon is dead. This one will follow. It is over, Lenk.” She broke their deadlock with a savage kick to his belly, driving him backward. “There’s no point in fighting further.”
The quaver in her voice almost made him think that was a plea. Or maybe a threat? It was hard to tell, what with his breath having been knocked out of him.
Either way, she was right. Mocca was done. Oerboros couldn’t stand against so many. There was no sense in fighting just to spit in a long-dead god’s eye.
His body, though, didn’t seem to believe him: the hands that tightened around the grip of his sword, the feet that took off at a rush, the lips that hurled the last roar he would ever take.
Those parts seemed to think this was a fine thing to die over. And they were speaking quite a lot louder.
Who was he to argue with them?
He came at her with his fury, his scream, his muscle. She met him with silence, with swiftness, with steadiness. He swung in vicious arcs, each one more than enough to kill her. She darted away, ducked low, stepped to the side, barely moving at all.
