Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 65 - Missing Pieces

He’s not wielding me. That was the blade’s first thought as Baraga’s desperate fight replayed through its mind with more clarity than ever. Even as it watched the warrior dance a brutal dance with the orcs, cleaving them left and right with more skill than strength as he fought beside his friends on the parapet of the weather fortress, he did so with a sword that flashed silver in the sunlight.

It was not a black sword. It was silver, and no runes glowed along it. That upset the blade for reasons it had trouble putting into words. It wasn’t even that the man was using a different weapon. It was the fact that it was impossible for it to remember something that it wasn’t there for.

With growing dread, the blade scanned the scene, looking from Baraga’s back to his companion's hands and even the ground around all of them. Perhaps I was knocked out of his hand, the blade thought, even though it knew that was impossible. Perhaps he’s using his second weapon until he can retrieve me.

There was no secondary weapon, though. There was just a dwarf wielding a battleaxe, a halfling woman, and a couple of men in armor with Baraga fighting for their lives.

A realization was slowly dawning on the Ebon Blade, and it fought it with everything it had. It couldn’t accept it. There was only one common thread in most of its memories, including this one, and as it considered that, its mind began to seize as if something was gripping its heart and twisting.

But I don’t have a heart, it thought, as the scene began to twist and blur. “I’m a sword, not a…

The scene shifted. It was sometime after the battle at Dwarfs’ Fist, but not too long after because its wielder was wearing the same clothes, and it could see the half-healed wounds.

“You understand that no matter how you bring the beast down and slay it, this must be the weapon to deal the final blow,” the King said, handing Baraga the matte black blade to the kneeling warrior. “My mages tell me only that will be enough to power the spells inside this thing.”

Until that moment, its old wielder had been quiet and respectful, but as he examined the blade, he flashed the older man a cocky grin and said, “With a weapon like this, it would be easier to kill anything than let it live. This thing is a monster.”

As he spoke, he addressed the King, but his eyes wandered to the beautiful princess who sat on a stool near the throne. The blade wasn’t looking at her, though, or even its wielder. Despite the fact that they were in one of the grandest halls it had ever seen, it could only look at itself.

It wasn’t itself, though, not yet. It was that blade, but that blade was not it. There was no light in the ruby. There were no runes on the flat of the blade. There was no hint of magic. It was just a weapon.

This meant that it wasn’t here any more than it had been at the previous battle, and these weren’t its memories. As the King blessed the man’s mission and wished him luck, Baraga moved to speak with the princess, but the blade couldn’t hear a word they were saying.

Blood that it didn’t have thundered through its ears that didn’t exist to blot out the sound of conversation and flirtation. If it was remembering someone else’s memories, then what did that mean? It knew, but it didn’t want to know. Still, that dread certainty could only be suppressed for so many seconds.

How could I? I can’t… It can’t be. Its mind warred against itself as it struggled with all of this.

While not quite emotionless, the blade was rarely subject to such emotional extremes. If it had a heart, it would have been as hard and as sharp as its edge. It had no defense against the realization that it might have once been something besides a blade, though, and it was only when its memories reorganized to the fight with the dragon that it was able to push away those conclusions a few seconds longer.

The Ebon Blade couldn’t lose itself in the ebb and flow of battle, though, not when its eyes were locked on the sword. Baraga’s plan to lure the thing with a flock of sheep so that he could fight it in a rocky meadow with boulders for cover might have been a good idea, but it wasn’t half as interesting as the dead, blank sword he was using to fight it. His friends were tucked away here and there, with bows and wands to fight it, but they were just there to distract it. None of those weapons could hope to penetrate the behemoth’s rusty armor.

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The blade watched the fight progress just as it had in its other memories. This time, the details were more vivid, and the action more brutal. It saw Baraga charge his left hand to the bone just to strike the killing blow through the beast’s giant eye socket. Even then, though, the blade’s ruby did not light up for more than a moment. The events offered it no hope that this could be a fluke somehow, and it was increasingly forced to believe that it might have once been the man that it had thought of this whole time as its first wielder.

The celebration that followed and the wedding feast did nothing to change any of that. It knew the betrayal was coming. Whether it was the Ebon Blade or Baraga, it knew what was going to happen next, and it made the weapon feel sick as the hero went through the motions of being rewarded and turning the blade back over to the King, only to be beaten and bound a few hours later after he’d been allowed to get good and drunk.

“Why? Why are you doing this?” Baraga shouted. “We’ve done everything you asked! We saved the city!”

“You did,” the King answered as his men wrestled the warrior into submission and bound him in heavy chains. “But there’s a special sort of magic in your soul, Baraga, and we can’t have that falling into the wrong hands.”

“Bastard!” Baraga yelled. The blade felt his rage echoing inside of him as he spoke. “At least let my friends go. They’ve done nothing wrong!” ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

“You’re right,” the King nodded as the warrior and his friends were dragged from the room, “But that’s not the way magic works.”

The blade barely heard him. It was still coming to grips with the things it was learning, and once Baraga was dragged to forge he’d seen so many times before, and the blade was heated up so that the runes could be applied, well, it couldn’t hear anything at all. There was too much screaming.

It only occurred to it belatedly that those screams weren’t coming from it or from the made it had once been. They were coming from the other people who had been dragged into this, Baraga’s friends. I don’t know them. The blade told itself. I never knew them. They aren’t my friends.

While all of that was true, it was, it didn’t change the fact that every one of those people that was being magically tortured to death in some nearby room was as much a part of it as the wielder. It wasn’t the soul of a single man. It was a composite thing made up of a dozen dead heroes, but not one of those heroes could stop what was coming as the terrible ritual took shape. The thought made it sick as echoes of those torments coiled through it from dimly remembered parts of its mind, but none of that could alter a single detail about what was coming.

People died, souls were captured, and the runes on its blade lit up one at a time. That was enough to make it roar in outrage as its red-hot blade was finally quenched in the hero’s heart. That was what finally made its ruby come to brilliant life, as the dark magics that powered its very existence sprang into life for the first time. That was a horrifying look in the mirror, and as it thought of the metaphor, it suddenly remembered the horrible mirror it had shattered so recently.

Those witches were surprised I was fighting through those people because I should have cared about them, it realized dimly. They were my… Baraga’s friends. They’re part of me, but I don’t remember them at all.

They should have known. Their souls had been sliced and diced the same way that its had. Still, the fact that it didn't was the trigger that caused its nauseous, churning emotions to finally explode. The blade's soul, broken as it was, began to vomit then. Even as the memories tried to turn toward other events, the magic that held it in this fugue state shattered, and for a moment, it could feel fragments of the people that it might have once been before it had become the weapon that it was now. It could feel Ral’en’s regret that he’d never said goodbye to his sister and Marana’s sadness that she’d never told Baraga how she really felt. Names and sometimes the faces associated with them swirled through the very center of its being as it tried to look at who it really was from a dozen different perspectives at once.

All of those were washed away by the pain of as many deaths, though. Each time the Ebon Blade used this ability, it could feel the jagged pieces of its soul grinding painfully together as it sought to reform, but this time, that didn’t happen, as it broke what was trying to reform apart again.

The idea was simply too repulsive, and being borne in the grip of another was too much for it to bear. That was how it found itself lying on the stone of the fortress where Var’gar had collapsed, but after a quick check didn’t appear to be dead.

Did he see any of that? The blade wondered, or was my anguish simply too much for him to bear?

The orc was strong, but the pain of being tortured to death a dozen different times at once was more than anyone could hope to bear. The blade couldn’t, and it was made of metal. Metal quenched in the blood of heroes, it spat.

It took Var’gar several minutes to recover, but the blade appreciated the solitude. It wasn’t enough time to come to grips with any of this, but it would be enough to gather its wits and try to figure out what it was supposed to do with this new information.