Interlude
THE BLADE
Let me tell you now the tale of how a hero dies.
The girl was seventeen years old. She was not yet a hero.
She was not yet a chosen one. She wielded not a blessed blade, but a chipped short sword that she pulled off a corpse.
The gods did not yet know her face or name, even though they had already destroyed everything she knew.
Even though she was currently begging them to spare the precious, tentative life that had been growing within her.
Had been.
Because now the girl was bleeding, and badly. Blood soaked her trousers, no matter how many times she changed the rags. Pain racked her abdomen, fever breaking out over her skin. Her hand held her stomach, slightly swollen, and so unusually still.
The girl prayed to any god who might listen to her. To Ix, goddess of childbearing, to save her unborn baby. To Atroxus, god of the sun, to bring the light back to the sky. To Vitarus, god of abundance, to stave off starvation. To Acaeja, goddess of fate, to send her someone who would save her.
The sun had freshly fallen. The war had just begun. The vampires feasted upon humans like starving dogs unleashed. The girl traveled miles and miles, searching for safety, searching for help, bleeding all the way.
The girl was going to die.
This was not a matter of opinion. I see all, and I know that if the girl had not acted as she did, she would have died alone in the wastelands, fallen victim to any of a hundred different mundane atrocities.
She would have starved, or she would have been killed for the copper coins in her pocket and the chipped sword at her side, or more likely, she would have bled to death, her would-be child dragging her down to the underworld.
None of these things would have been some unique tragedy. No one was left to mourn her. Everyone she had known or loved was gone, and the few that remained would have reacted to her death with nothing but a sad sigh, a “too bad.”
But that was not what fate had in store for this girl tonight.
She had dragged herself to one final house in the distance.
There had been smoke rising from the chimney, and that single sad trail had given her the strength to go just a little farther and a little farther.
She imagined all the people who could be in that house.
A farmer who might have food. A healer who might have medicine.
Someone who had none of those things but would know where she could find them.
She had survived vampires and monsters, soldiers and thieves, and she vowed to herself she would not die here, and she begged her child not to, either.
“Hold on a little longer,” she whispered. “Hold on.”
She practically collapsed at the house’s doorstep, hand lifted to knock. But before she could, the door flew open.
The most beautiful woman the girl had ever seen stood before her.
No, she was not the delicate, feminine sort of beauty that had been prized before the sun fell.
She was beautiful because she was so clearly strong in a world in which everyone else was weak.
She wore leather armor lined with gold, etched with intricate scenes of battle and victory, clearly modeled after the Goddess of Justice.
She had long golden hair that tumbled over one shoulder.
Her face was strong and angular, fair eyes like ice.
And she had a sword at her side—a sword that the girl immediately recognized. It was an unmistakable blade, large and ornate, made of pure gold that glowed like the sun that had abandoned them.
Everyone knew that sword. The Goddess of Justice had gifted it to a worthy human warrior, now, when the world needed their help most.
The girl nearly wept in relief.
“You’re the Vindica Ultis,” she breathed. This was an honest-to-gods hero. Now, the girl was certain that the gods were, in fact, watching over her.
She staggered forward, and the hero stepped back, looking at her up and down with a wrinkle over her nose.
“I need help,” the girl said. The words spilled out of her in a frantic slur. “I’m bleeding. I need a healer. I need medicine, I need—”
But she found herself staring into the glowing pointed tip of the blessed sword.
“Step back,” the hero said.
The girl stopped. She raised her hands, letting her chipped iron sword clang to the floor.
Ah, she thought to herself. She thinks I’m a raider. Fair enough. The girl had faced many of them in the last few weeks.
“I’m not here to rob you,” she said, and pulled open her jacket, revealing the small roundness of her stomach and the blood soaking her trousers. “I just need—”
The hero’s face changed. She pushed the girl back. “Are you insane? Walking around out here bleeding like that? The fallen ones have come ashore just miles away.”
The girl processed these words with rising dread.
Vampires. And she was bleeding so, so much.
“Then where can I go?” she said. Her eyes stung despite herself, and she knew it made her look young and weak.
The hero’s face did not change. She did not lower her sword.
“Not here,” she said. “I cannot have vampires at my doorstep now.”
The girl peered over the hero’s shoulder into the cottage. It was modest, but warm and safe. There were several bags laid out on the table. One of them was partially open, revealing glass bottles that, she knew, likely held potions and medicine.
She felt a sudden, sharp pang of kinship—no, jealousy—for the raiders she had encountered on the road. It was so close. Right there.
The hero followed her gaze, and her eyes hardened.
“Do you know what this is?” She lifted the blade, and the girl nodded. “This is Zefiah, the Blade of Retribution, gifted to me by the goddess Shiket herself. I am the Vindica Ultis, and I have been given a task of justice. My purpose is divine.”
It took the girl a moment to understand what the woman was trying to say.
“I don’t need your medicine,” the girl pleaded. “I just need help. Passage to the next town, to somewhere with a healer, or maybe—”
“There are no more healers,” the hero said dismissively.
The burning behind the girl’s eyes grew stronger.
“Yes, there are,” she said. “There are healers. The vampires didn’t kill all the healers.”
The world tilted. The girl had been traveling a long time while bleeding, dragging herself along by sheer willpower, drawn by how damned close that cottage on the horizon was.
Now, her body betrayed her. A vicious wave of agony radiated from her abdomen, and she found herself leaning against the doorframe as the world went white.
The first sense that returned was the sound of the hero’s voice, snapping, “I told you to get back.”
With great effort, the girl forced her head up. For the first time, she recognized the way the hero was looking at her. With not just indifference, but disgust.
The girl choked out the only words that came to mind. “My baby is going to die.”
A flicker over the hero’s face. Perhaps, with these words, the hero questioned herself. Perhaps she was even ashamed.
She said, “It’s for the best.”
The words were true. But that didn’t make them any less painful.
Many years later, the girl would see rage as an intrinsic part of herself. But she was not always an angry person. Now, at those words, a spark lit, deep in her stomach, surrounded by the perfect kindling of pain.
She ground out, “I am going to die.”
The hero’s lips thinned. Pity flickered in her face. She looked the girl up and down. She said nothing.
And yet, still, the girl heard the unspoken echo:
It’s for the best.
The spark caught. Smoldered.
“Please,” she begged. “Help me—”
Another excruciating wave of pain. Her legs gave out. She sagged against the doorframe. When her vision cleared, when she forced her eyes open again, the glowing gold sword was again thrust in her face. The pity she had glimpsed in the hero’s face was now gone.
“Get away from the door,” the hero said. “Leave your pack.”
The girl stared at her.
“Put the pack down,” the hero said, slowly, as if the girl had not understood her. “And walk away. I am sorry. May you have a swift and painless end. And may the afterlife welcome you.”
The girl didn’t move.
She realized that the hero had decided her life was not worth the inconvenience of a warrior on a divine quest. That this small kindness to a powerless person was worth nothing at all.
And this was what they called a hero.
If the girl could have seen herself that night, she would have recognized the look on her face. It was a look that many people would give her in the years to come. It was a look that the man that she would one day come to love would give her, too.
Everyone looks at their heroes that way, in the end.
The girl’s hands clenched in the dirt. Her fingers closed around a loose cobblestone, so hard they trembled. The smolder burst into a wildfire. A fire that would keep on burning and burning and burning for ten years.
The hero began to turn away.
But before she could close the door, the girl let out a roar and ran at her.
The hero was a great warrior. This was why Shiket had chosen her. But she had seen no threat in this pregnant, dying teenager. She did not see it coming when that rock came down on her perfect, blessed face.
She let out a shriek of shock and pain. The two of them crashed to the floor together, and the girl just kept hitting, and hitting, and hitting—rock against skull, against face, against nose, against jaw, against blood and meat and bone and cracked shards of all of it mixed together.
The hero flailed, tried to fight back. She landed some strikes, opening some scars that the girl would carry for the rest of her life. But the girl felt none of them.
And then, when the hero lifted her hand weakly in her final last effort, when she called to the blessed blade that flew across the room, the girl let out a feral roar and seized it from her.
Golden light flooded the cottage. The power of the blade swept through the girl’s broken body. Suddenly, her pain was gone, and her rage was strength.
And this, as she lifted the blessed sword, as she brought it through the hero’s heart, was retribution.
The hero’s body jerked violently, and then went still.
The girl heaved deep breaths, sagging against the blade. She stared down at her handiwork. The rock had caved in half the hero’s skull and one eye. A few teeth were haphazardly scattered through the morass of gore and bone. One eyeball bulged, out of place, to one side.
The Vindica Ultis, great chosen warrior, divine hero, was dead.
The girl choked a sob. Another terrible contraction had her keeling over. The shock of what she had done left her trembling.
She thought to herself, I killed a divine warrior. I killed her.
A voice that would come to be as familiar as her own unfurled in her mind for the first time:
{No, child. You took your retribution.}
A great white light burst beyond the door. She stumbled out into the night and looked up into the sky to see rainbow wisps swirling overhead.
And there, as the girl swayed in the doorway of that shack, covered in the blood of her unborn child and the blood of a divine hero, she met the goddess Shiket for the first time.
“What have you done?” the goddess boomed, when she saw the mangled corpse of her chosen one. Her anger was, indeed, more akin to frustration than grief—a goddess who had invested resources in her new toy and was annoyed to see them wasted.
Still, this was no small thing when it came from a goddess herself, let alone the most warlike and violent of them all. The girl cowered, certain she was ready to meet her death.
But that strange voice said, {Ask her, goddess, if she regrets what she has done.}
The goddess paused. She turned to the girl. She said, “Do you regret the blood you have spilled here tonight?”
The girl was silent. Her hands clutched her abdomen. Blood continued to soak her trousers. No one cared about that blood. No one cared about the blood of the good, innocent people she had just seen slaughtered. Why should the hero’s be worth any more?
It was impossible to lie to a god. But even if she could, the girl would not have her final words be false.
“No,” she said. “I don’t regret it.”
And perhaps the goddess glimpsed that wildfire, that flame that would burn eternally in her from this night, in the girl’s eyes. Perhaps she found it interesting, even though—or because—it was the very flame that would one day burn her to ash.
{She is hungry,} the blade said. {I feel it in her, goddess. Let her drink.}
The goddess looked at this girl. She was nothing like what a chosen hero was supposed to be. She was young and untrained and didn’t even hold her sword correctly. There was no greatness in her.
But there was that flame.
So the goddess said, “I shall grant you the gift of mercy, mortal. And you shall be grateful for it every day you will live after this. I will allow you to hold the sword, as she seems to have taken a liking to you. But you shall wield this power to do my bidding without question, for as long as I shall need you. And one day, this blade will be the thing to end you.”
The girl let out a choked exhale. She wasn’t sure if this was a punishment or a gift. Later, she would decide, both.
“Yes,” she choked out. “Yes, goddess.”
The goddess drew closer, her face darkening with fury. “But never forget, mortal murderer, why you wield this blade. You may hold it, but that does not make you my chosen. Others will call you the Vindica Ultis, but the title does not belong to you. Never forget that. Because I never will, either.”
The girl started, “Wait—”
But the goddess was already gone. She did not even give the girl time to plead for her unborn child.
This is how fate changes.
If the hero had lived, if the web of fate had lined up just so, she may have gone on to turn against her goddess, too. She may have slain Srana, and Kajmar, and, one night, she would have been able to wield the blades of her former goddess to kill Nyaxia.
But that, of course, is not what came to pass.
I witness such events more times than any being, mortal or divine, can count. I have learned that many have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it looks like when fate changes.
Sometimes, it is a cataclysm, words breaking or re-forming, the birth or deaths of great legends.
Sometimes, it is a starving, bleeding teenager killing a sacred hero with a rock, and then the whole world suffers.