by Andrew Rowe
But I got better.
Within about two years, I was one of Res’vaye’s top three students in terms of basic swordplay. He’d taught me elements of three different styles — Aayaran Instant Striking, Terisgard Low-Blade, and Selyrian Cutting.
I felt unstoppable. Surely, even a true Thornguard couldn’t match me.
Hah.
I remember when one of Res’vaye’s former students came to visit. Taer’vys Ironthorn wasn’t the most powerful sorcerer in generations, nor was he the most naturally skilled swordsman in his grade.
He was, however, the most dangerous person that Res’vaye ever trained.
I’d been told numerous stories about Taer’vys over the years. Most of them were lessons about how someone who started out from a humble background could outpace a prodigy with sufficient effort. Some of those stories were your usual sort of examples meant to motivate students to work harder, of course, but I enjoyed them regardless.
The most interesting stories were the ones about how Taer’vys had managed to use unusual strategies to beat superior opponents. Not just in training — Taer’vys had a record of hunting down everything from turncoats to assassins to unfathomably dangerous monsters.
And so, predictably, I challenged him as soon as he came to visit.
“A challenge, eh?” Taer’vys gave me a wolfish grin. “I hear you’ve got a dominion bonded sword, kid.”
I tensed. I’d been practicing with the sword for years — in private. Res’vaye had forbidden me from using it around anyone else until he felt I was ready. “I do,” I admitted.
“Interesting. Show me.”
I glanced at Res’vaye nearby. He nodded.
I drew in a sharp breath. “It’s, uh, dangerous.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “It’s a dominion bonded sword. Of course it’s dangerous. Wouldn’t be a very good sword if it wasn’t.”
In spite of how obvious that sounded, it was a bit of a surprise to hear someone say it.
Until Taer’vys, everyone had focused on how I should avoid using the dangerous sword. But from the gleam in Taer’vys’ eyes, I knew he felt something that few others would have admitted.
Experiencing terrible danger was a part of what made life worth living.
I went and retrieved the sword.
We moved to the center of the training area. All the other trainees cleared the way.
Taer’vys and I both had our swords at our hips. I was tall enough to actually wear the scabbard on my belt at that point, but it was still large enough of a weapon that it almost dragged against the ground.
Our hands hovered near the weapons. We focused, and the whole world around us faded.
“Good,” Taer’vys said. “Now draw.”
***
I lost.
And I lost badly.
Taer’vys laughed, picked me up off the ground, and slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re going to be a real terror one day, kid.”
He visited a few more times after that, ostensibly to visit Res’vaye.
I challenged him each and every time.
I never cut him once, deliberately or otherwise.
But on the last try, I did, just once, manage to cut his sword.
“Good.” He held the half-broken blade in his hand. “Very good. You’re getting better.”
A new blade appeared to replace the broken one, seamlessly merging into place.
Metal calling; he’d summoned metal from another plane to rebuild his weapon. It’s a skill I had no talent for at all.
And then, with his rebuilt sword, he proceeded to soundly beat me again.
I still felt pretty good about the experience, though. And after seeing that a sufficiently skilled opponent could handle a fight against me without getting injured, I’d gotten more confident about my ability to use the sword safely.
I’d improved my control over the aura substantially, too. I could, with concentration, constrain it to only extending a couple feet in front of the blade.
Maybe, I thought to myself, I’m finally ready to use this thing.
***
“The essence devourer lair is three miles south of here. You should be able to clear them out and return before sundown,” Res’vaye explained. “We estimate there to be four of them inside, all adolescent. You don’t want to handle that many all at once. Use the lures. Avoid unnecessary risks.”
He gave me one final look. “And don’t use the sword. I know it’s tempting, but you shouldn’t need it.”
I grunted. “I understand, sir.”
I headed south, along with my partner, Arkhen Vale. Arkhen was one of the other top students, and together, we were currently being considered for entry into the actual Bladebreaker Division.
Hunting these monsters would be our final exam.
It wasn’t our first experience with hunting monsters — but in the past, we’d generally gone with larger groups, and usually with either a teacher or at least a full Thornguard escort.
In this case, we had neither.
“Don’t see what he’s so worried about.” Arkhen mumbled as he walked. “You’ve gotten a lot better with it over the years.”
The other veteran students had seen me training with the sword on many occasions, even if I tried to keep it private. I’d do it early in the morning before we were supposed to begin our practice, or late at night, but I was hardly the only student who snuck off for secret training of some kind. We’d run into each other regularly.
As I said, all the Bladebreaker recruits were dangerous. In Arkhen’s case, he was an alchemical genius. In specific, he was a poison specialist...and not all of the poisons he enjoyed making and testing were strictly legal.
Our instructors obviously knew about our training habits, but they turned a blind eye. Bladebreakers were taught to be effective, and sometimes that meant using methods that were frowned upon by others.
“I have gotten better, haven’t I?” I grinned. “But I don’t think we’ll need it. It’ll be more of a challenge with regular swords, anyway.”
“True enough. And I do know how you love courting death.”
“Guilty.” I laughed. “I’ve heard she’s single.”
Please ignore my inane teenage banter. My banter quality has significantly improved since then, I assure you.
Anyway, we made our way to the lair. It was a pretty ordinary looking cave, with the exception of the animal corpses lying just outside and the strong aura of death emanating from within.
I frowned at the bodies. “That’s...a rather lot of animals. And some large ones. More than four essence devourers would need.”
“Maybe they’ve been here for a while?” Arkhen shrugged. “Doesn’t matter much, anyway. I bet we could handle a dozen.”
I couldn’t disagree with that. “True. But maybe we should report back if something has changed...”
“Bah, don’t be absurd. We’ll just look better if we bring them ten heads instead of four.” He glanced back at me, apparently reading my expression. “You’re worrying too much. And hey, if there really are more, it’s a good excuse to show off that fancy sword.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re even more excited about that than I am.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to be supportive of my friend. Speaking of which, do you want to do the honors?” He pulled a vial off a bandolier he wore across his chest. It was a pretty common style for combat alchemists; apparently they’d picked it up after some famous foreigner had shown how effective it could be.
I shook my head. “Nah, you can toss it. I’ll get ready.”
I drew the very mundane sword that was sitting on my right hip and moved into an ambush position on the side of the cave. I still had the Sae’kes sheathed on my other side, but I had no plans to use it.
Arkhen threw the lure.
The bottle shattered, emitting a visible cloud of gas.
I don’t know quite what the gas actually contained. Whatever it was, it apparently was someth
ing that essence devourers “sensed” as being a high concentration of essence — which was, as their name implied, their food source.
Essence devourers weren’t very dangerous when they were young, largely because they weren’t very smart. They were insectoid, looking roughly like a cross between a bee and a praying mantis. Adolescents were about half human height. Their blade-like hands could cause injuries, but the real danger was their stinger. It was how they drained essence out of a body, and even a brief sting could cause long-term harm.
They weren’t much of a threat to armed and well-trained humans at that size. Part of our job was to wipe them out before they got larger. They grew to colossal sizes if left alone long enough and developed magic in the process.
Anyway, young ones would usually rush toward the lure, and we’d dispatch them without much of a headache.
We waited. Nothing came out of the cave.
We waited a little longer. Still nothing.
An hour passed.
“Think someone already got them?” Arkhen asked.
“Possible. Or they’re bigger than we expected and smart enough that the lure didn’t work. Or just too deep in the cave.”
Arkhen reached into a pouch at his side. “Only one way to find out.”
I heard a crack, and he pulled a glowstone out of his pouch. It was a useful item that provided several hours of light. With his other hand, he drew his own sword and led the way into the cave.
I examined the animal bodies as we passed. The wounds on them seemed off to me. Too many claw-like marks and nothing that looked like stingers.
And they’d been half-eaten. That didn’t make sense — essence devourers just consumed essence, not bodies.
I frowned. “You sure this is the right cave? Those look like something else killed them.”
“Scavengers got to them after they died. You’re overthinking it.”
I examined the cave as we walked deeper. It was dark and damp inside, but the ceiling was high enough that I could move without any difficulty. It was possible that it had simply formed naturally that way, but something about the roundness and smoothness of the walls bothered me. Maybe it had simply been smoothed out by water, but...
The ground below us collapsed.
We both yelled expletives. I grabbed at a wall, trying to will the stone to reshape to make me a handhold, but my stone shaping wasn’t nearly as good at that age.
It didn’t work.
We hit the ground hard.
“...Ow...”
We both groaned and mumbled.
The glowstone rolled out of Arkhen’s grip. Fortunately, it didn’t lose its luminescence.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only thing that was glowing.
There were softly glimmering eyes all around us, swiftly moving closer.
And essence devourers didn’t have glowing eyes.
I managed to get to my feet just before the first of the plague beasts was on top of us.
Plague beasts came in a lot of varieties, but they shared a few core characteristics. In large part, they looked like larger versions of natural animals, but with some subtle changes. Horns and scales, for example, on creatures that wouldn’t normally have them. Jaws dripping with the lethal diseases that gave them their name.
And, as I remembered upon striking one with the ordinary sword that I was still gripping, a near immunity to mundane weapons.
In spite of my strength, my sword had no effect at all. Against plague beasts, magical weapons were ideal. Barring that, a silver weapon would have done the trick — many monsters were vulnerable to specific materials like that. But I didn’t have any silver weaponry on me, since I’d been planning to hunt something completely different.
The plague beast that I’d struck looked like a horned bear. An ordinary bear is quite dangerous enough without any additional modifiers being necessary, and with near immunity to weapons and some additional defenses, it was ludicrous.
A near-casual swipe of his paw smashed me back into the nearby wall. I bumped my head hard and felt blood trickle down the back of my head.
The second plague beast was a horned snake, and it very nearly managed to bite my legs while I was distracted by the bear. I kicked it, which fortunately had enough force to carry it a few feet away. It hissed angrily, but started slithering right back toward me.
Meanwhile, Arkhen was underneath a horned wolf. He had his sword between its jaws, and he was trying unsuccessfully to push it away. “A little help over here?”
He grabbed for his bandolier with his other hand, but he couldn’t reach anything.
I side-stepped another swing from the bear.
Flame.
I hurled a tiny sphere of fire at the wolf. My flame calling was elementary at best, but it didn’t need to be much. Plague beasts, much like normal animals, were not fond of being lit on fire.
The wolf was fast enough that it actually leapt out of the way, then turned its attention toward me.
Good.
Meanwhile, the bear growled and lowered its head, stomping its feet. I wasn’t an expert, but I was pretty sure that meant it was about to charge.
Arkhen pulled a potion off his belt, preparing to throw it to help me. Then he yelped and dropped it.
In the low light, he hadn’t seen the horned essence devourer that had crept up from his side.
Prior to that, I hadn’t known there were plague beast versions of essence devourers. But there apparently were, and if an ordinary plague beast wasn’t bad enough, one of them that had the ability to drain magic was definitely considerably worse.
“Aah! Get it off me!”
I couldn’t help. I had a horned bear charging at me.
I threw myself out of the way of the charge, pressing myself against the opposite wall. The bear trampled over one of my legs in the process, and I felt an intense blossoming of pain and slumped down.
Worse, I’d hoped the bear would charge into the wolf — it didn’t. The wolf nimbly ran on the wall to avoid the bear, then came down on top of me a moment later.
I lifted my sword and swung.
Silver.
Shifting the weight of my sword was the most common technique that I used. Adding magnetism was one of my favorites.
A rarer application of metal sorcery, but one I’d familiarized myself with, was subtly altering the composition of the metal to give it the properties of another.
I couldn’t actually make a steel sword into silver.
But I could make it burn a plague beast like silver weapons did.
I jammed the sword into its throat. The wolf hit the ground, rolled, and pulled the sword right out of my grip.
So, when the snake came for me, I was weaponless.
I managed to roll out of the way of the snake’s next bite, then grabbed at its neck. It slithered and coiled around my arm, opening its jaws wide.
Body of Iron.
It bit down.
Its teeth didn’t break my reinforced skin.
A moment later, I snapped its neck and tossed it aside. Even if it shared the same resistances to weapons as the others, snakes didn’t have very strong bones.
Arkhen was on the ground, urgently smacking the horned essence devourer. He’d managed to splash it with some kind of potion, too, but it barely seemed to notice.
He was weakening by the second, and the bear was in between us now.
And so, I did what my instincts instructed me, and reached for the sword at my side.
Unlock.
I pulled the Sae’kes free. Immediately, the aura cut into the ceiling. I concentrated, restraining the aura, and I aimed.
A shockwave of destructive force rippled across the cave.
I’d aimed high with the knowledge that Arkhen was on the ground. Both the horned bear and the essence devourer were above him.
My shockwave did exactly what I’d expected — it flew outward and tore the bear and the essence devourer in half.
In the low light of the
cave, Arkhen and I hadn’t seen each other very well. And I’d failed to communicate what I’d planned.
And so, just as the shockwave was rippling out, he was raising his arm to throw another potion.
Arkhen didn’t scream when he lost his arm.
He just whimpered for a moment, curled up, and began to cry.
***
Arkhen was a skilled alchemist, as I said.
Skilled enough that he’d brewed and brought healing potions, even though those were relatively rare, where I came from.
I knew him well enough to know where he carried them, and I force-fed him one.
He survived that day. But that destructive force had completely obliterated a part of his arm — no healing potion could fix that.
And by the time we got him back to the base, it was too late. The attempts at reattachment, both mundane and sorcerous, completely failed.
Neither one of us graduated to the Bladebreakers that day.
Arkhen was sent on to the Support Division, where he worked as an alchemist. Without his sword arm, he’d couldn’t be trusted to handle the physical dangers the Bladebreaker Division often handled. It seemed absurd to me, but even the sorcerers and intelligence operatives for the Bladebreakers were expected to be able to handle themselves in a physical fight.
And I was deemed unworthy to serve in the Thornguard at all. I’d not only failed to follow orders, I’d very nearly killed my friend in the process.
I was lucky they discharged me rather than throwing me in prison or worse. They were lenient because the monsters in the cave hadn’t been the ones that were initially reported, but they ruled that I’d made an error in judgment.
They weren’t wrong. If I’d retrieved my other sword, the silver blade would have been enough to fight the bear and the essence devourer. Arkhen was having his essence drained, but that was a slow process, and I could have gotten the bear’s attention. Another blast of flame would have gotten it to focus on me, and maybe I could have pulled the essence devourer off him, too.
In truth, I’d wanted to use the sword.
I wanted to prove to both Arkhen and myself that I was ready. That all my training had made me good enough to wrestle with the destructive power it contained and bend it to my will.