Beatification II

“To fear death is to grant it power over you. To welcome it as an old friend is to escape the shackles forced on you at birth.”

- Irmingard Fenne, the Bloody Sword

Laurence had only known the road for two years, and yet already she could conceive of no other way to live. It seemed a distant thing, the town she had come from. Montfort might as well be in another world entirely. These days she found an urge began to itch if they even stayed in the same town for too long, as if slowing burned at the soles of her feet. Yet this journey of theirs, it was making her restless in another way entirely. Her teacher had said that they were travelling to Iserre to meet an old foe of his, the Ranger, but not why. Laurence was not one to let questions go unasked, though, so she pressed every time they made camp.

“Is it because she is your lover?” the young girl bluntly asked.

Men did stupid things, when cocks got involved. Sometimes stupid in a good way, but usually not. Saint Ortega, ten-sun duellist and sole master of the Lament school, choked on his bottle of swill as he began hacking out a wet laugh.

“Gods forbid,” Ortega finally got out. “She is a woman besides, Laurence. My tastes run otherwise.”

She’d not so much as guessed. He’d never shown much interest in anyone, really, though Laurence suspected some of that had to do with the amount he drank. It’d always been too much, but since they had begun their journey south he was as a one-man brewery.

“Then why go at all?” Laurence asked. “Never seen you answer to anyone before.”

Ortega wiped his face, sparse beard still dripping with wine.

“Nor will you ever,” the Saint said, the calm sound of his voice beyond boasting. “There is simply a conversation waiting in Iserre that I wish to finish.”

Laurence’s eyes narrowed.

“You said something just like that, when I asked you about the sword,” she accused.

Not the slender longsword he used, but the other one. The beaten-up scabbard and ratty leather-wrapped hilt he carried around on his back but she had never once seen him draw.

“I’d hoped you forgot,” Ortega casually admitted.

Laurence of Montfort really wasn’t the kind of girl to ever forget anything, so the joke was on him. Still, he was her teacher. Her master. Respect was due, even if he insisted on being a drunken vagrant.

“I know I’m a student,” Laurence said. “That I don’t get to make demands. But it doesn’t feel like our other journeys, this one.”

If he still drew a line after that, she would find her silence. She owed too much to do otherwise. The older man sighed, tucking the half-empty bottle into the crook of his handless arm. He went groping behind him, into the grass, and in the moment that followed the beaten-up sword was on his lap. The bottle went down into the grass, sloppily corked, and Ortega considered her seriously.

“You are my student,” the older man said. “So I will show you this, once, and tell you its tale. But no more than that.”

Laurence gravely nodded. He unsheathed the sword, slowly, and to her surprise and fascination it was no wreck. It was the finest longsword she had ever seen, its steel pale as milk and perfectly smooth. There was no guard, but peeking out from under leather wrap was a grip made of something that looked like bone.

“This blade,” Saint Ortega told her, “is known as Sublevacion. In the legends of my people, it is known as the Sword of Rebellion. The tales claim it was forged by Fortun Arles himself, from the bones of a great giant he slew before leading his kin into rebellion against the Gigantes. It will never grow dull nor break so long as its wielder does not lose will, and there is not a thing in Creation it cannot cut. Be it magic or Light, all knows its bite.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Laurence admitted.

“It has been lost for centuries,” Ortega said. “And so the legend it hardly known beyond my people. But many a real – and later prince – in the south have claimed to have found in years past. There are still many who believe wielding Sublevacion is a mandate to lead all the peoples that were once the Arlesens Confederation.”

A king’s sword, she thought. So what was he doing, dragging it around like a lump of wood?

“How did you come to wield such a blade?” she asked.

“I went looking for it,” Ortega laughed. “When I was a young man, the Lone Swordsman still. It is a long story, and grim in many ways, but I sill simply say that my first attempt to retrieve it from the deepest depths of the Brocelian was a hard defeat.”

Laurence could not quite believe him, even though she knew it must be true. She had never seen her master defeated, not even once. Most of the time he did not even take the fights seriously.

“Yet I believed I needed it, that having it would make me the finest swordsman alive,” the older man said, pulling deep at his wine. “That it would let me hear the Breath at last. So I made a bargain with a most dangerous woman for her help.”

“Ranger,” Laurence whispered.

He nodded.

“And the repayment of that favour,” Ortega said, “is to come on my fiftieth nameday. I am many things, Laurence, but above them all I am a man of my word.”

She clenched her fingers. Perhaps it would not be wise, to cross a woman sounding as dangerous as this Damned was, but she disliked the thought of giving in to Evil so easily.

“You must be too,” Ortega gently told her. “Else what clouds you will cloud your blade as well. Steel has no patience for liars, my dear.”

He polished off the last of the bottle and tossed it behind him, sheathing the sword. Laurence had found it hard not to stare at the blade. It was, she thought, the single most beautiful thing she had ever seen. But she had asked as much as she dared, and so the conversation ended. They moved deep into Iserre as the days passed and winter came knocking at the door, to the eastern reaches that bordered the Waning Woods. It was wild lands here, little like the tame and wealthy places that the House of Milenan ruled over closer to Lake Artoise. They found a pretty grove away from the road where there was little to hunt but many chestnuts to roast and made camp there.

Ortega drilled her relentlessly, harder than he ever had before. Thrice Laurence thought she’d been about to die to his blade before he finally deflated and ceased sparring entirely.

“I had thought fear might undo your block,” he admitted. “Yet is seems not. It is no worry, Laurence, no failure. Yours is simply to be a winding road.”

For all his reassurances, she could not help but feel she’d let him down. She sulked for most a day before returning to camp, finding him seated in the afternoon chill by the fire. It had snowed for two days, lightly but enough to blanket the world in pale, and now after a quiet morning it was beginning to snow again. Her teacher looked serene in the dappled evening light. His haggard green coat was pulled tight around him, close enough Laurence would not have known him to be missing a hand, and though he had a flask of liquor in hand he was smiling softly as he watched the snowflakes drift through the woods. The beard and long matted hair leant him a noble mien, if you didn’t look too closely.

He made for a striking enough sight that Laurence hesitated for a moment, long enough for someone else to step into their small clearing.

A woman, tall and slender. Black of hair and almost golden-skinned, but for all the grace of her movements she was barely better dressed than Ortega – tanned leathers and a brown cloak, a vest over a shirt of silver mail. She had two short swords at her hips and a longbow on her back, a side quiver hanging off her belt. The Ranger barely left footsteps in the snow as she walked, as if somehow she’d become light as air. Laurence’s teacher glanced at her, unsurprised, and smiled. He raised his flask, which drew a light laugh out of the stranger.

“Are you offering?” she asked.

“I’ve drinks enough for two,” Ortega smiled.

More like two hundred, Laurence uncharitably thought. Her feet shifted, and though no branch cracked the Ranger glanced in her direction before cocking a brow.

“Not so Lone anymore,” the Ranger said.

“Days pass,” Ortega shrugged. “You might say I am now Drunk instead.”

Laurence swallowed a gasp. Gods, how had she not seen it? He had claimed to no longer be the Lone Swordman, but he had never claimed to have ceased being of the Chosen.

“You’ve gotten interesting,” the Ranger noted, then looked Laurence’s way. “Stop hiding, little mouse. No point to it.”

“I’m not a mouse,” Laurence growled, boldly coming out. “And I wasn’t hiding.”

The Damned looked faintly amused, but after a cursory glance stopped paying attention to her. Not wanting to shame her teacher, Laurence went so stand behind him properly. Ortega smiled at her, then tossed the flask at the Ranger. She pulled at it, letting out a pleased little sigh afterwards.

“Brandy?”

“From up north,” Ortega said. “No one makes it quite like the Bruseni.”

He rolled his shoulders, afterwards, and it parted his cloak slightly. Enough that, for the first time, his missing hand was revealed. The Ranger stilled, flask still in hand.

“Fought one of the Slayer’s Blood near the Brocelian,” Ortega idly said. “Didn’t see the sword hook coming.”

The Ranger sighed, then tossed him back the flask. He caught it easily.

“Sometimes the bargains don’t bear fruit,” she said. “We’ll call it done, then.”

Hard, cold anger flashed across Ortega’s face.

“Repeat that insult,” he said, “and we’ll be fighting for a different reason entirely.”

The Ranger did not speak, but the look she gave him was skeptical. Laurence puffed up with anger too, even though she would rather he didn’t fight the Damned at all. She felt… dangerous. Like a mountain path on a moonless night, or a swim too far from the shore. The dark-haired man unsheathed the legendary blade on his lap, Sublevacion, and tossed away the sheath. He left the bare blade, perfect and pale, across his lap.

“You asked me once,” Ortega said, “what I thought such a blade would do for me.”

“You gave me your answer,” the Ranger reminded him.

“And now I have another.”

Stump and hand went to the flat of the blade, smooth and sure, and the Drunk Swordsman pressed down. After a moment of utter stillness the perfect white steel broke, shattered in two, and the halves of a priceless blade of legend fell into the snow.

“Not a thing,” Saint Ortega said, meeting the Ranger’s eyes evenly.

Slowly, the woman began to smile until it split her face like a scar.

“You have gotten interesting,” she repeated.

The bow was tossed to the side, and with it the quiver went. Laurence’s teacher rose to his feet, taking up his simple steel longsword as the hem of his green coat brushed the snow. He turned to pat her shoulder, smiling.

“Watch,” Ortega said. “Listen. Learn.”

“I will,” Laurence quietly swore.

And when they left here, she would be able to hear the Breath. It was another great gift he was giving her, to be able to see a duel between Chosen and Damned. If she could learn nothing from that, what could she learn at all? Her teacher kept the sword at his hip, sheathed, but offered the Ranger a grandiose sweeping bow that she returned with a laugh.

“Shall we do it properly then?” he asked.

“By all means,” the monster smiled.

“I am Saint Ortega,” the Drunk Swordsman said. “My school I named Lament. I claim no other honour.”

The Damned unsheathed her blades, one after the other.

“I am the Ranger,” she simply said. “I hunt those worth hunting. Rejoice, for you qualify.”

And then they were moving, without so much as a word. Like ghosts in the falling snow, the Ranger first darting in close but then giving ground when Laurence’s teacher nearly took her head off with a blindingly quick unsheathing stroke. The monster was smiling. So was the saint. Back and forth they paced, never leaving the clearing or missing a step. It was the Drunk Swordsman who first drew blood, a cut on her cheek that should have gone through her eye instead, but three passes later she sliced deep into his leg. Yet he was winning, Laurence thought when she could see them at all and not simply a whirl and snow and movement.

The Ranger was quicker and stronger, but her teacher was… she’d never seen anyone move like that before. It was as if his every stumble was blessed by the Gods, sparing him steel or setting him up for a stroke, and even when she disarmed him with a clever trick of blades he drunkenly laughed and speared her belly with the empty sheath before snatching the sword back from the air and smoothly pivoting into another blow. He was winning. The third would was suffered by the Damned, a thrust on her flank that went through the mail, and she let out a little gasp before she laughed.

“Ah,” the Ranger said. “Tricky. But I have it now.”

And she did. First she began to parry the blows she’d once had to avoid, as if she could now see the odd angles her teacher struck by coming, and then it got worse. She began moving just like him, blow for blow, and Ortega was not as skilled defending against it. He took the fourth wound, then the fifth. And as he slowed from the blood, panting but clear-eyed, the Ranger shook herself as if she’d been asleep the whole time. And when they exchanged blows again, she was somehow better. Her movements were quicker, the evasions even more closely chained, the timing just a tad more finely picked. And with her own teacher’s swordsmanship she slew him.

“Almost nothing to transcend,” the Ranger praised, and ran him through.

Laurence did not realize she was screaming until the sound had ripped itself out of her throat, her teacher falling to his legs with a wet gasp. The Damned slid out the short sword and took a single step back, flicking away the blood on the snow and Laurence ran forward. She knelt by her teacher as he began to topple, smiling faintly as he turned to her.

“Did you?” he rasped.

Never had Laurence felt so ashamed in her life, but all she had heard was grief and fear and the pounding of blood in her hears. She shook her head. But he did not curse her, did not look disappointed even as the light died in his eyes.

“My dear,” he said, chin resting against her shoulder. “What a wonder you will be, when you learn to listen.”

And he rasped out a long breath, leaning against her. He never breathed in. Eyes stinging, holding her teacher’s corpse close, Laurence met the calm gaze of the monster studying her. And the fear was there, still in her, but something hotter burned in her gut. Indignation at what this… thing did, what it was. What it so carelessly took from others for its own obscure purposes.

“I’ll kill you for this,” Laurence harshly swore. “I’ll killyou, one day.”

The Ranger smiled, as if pleased.

“Your name?”

“Laurence de Montfort.”

“You know my Name, Laurence de Montfort,” the Ranger said. “Take your time. Ask for me when you’re ready.”

The monster laughed as she walked away, vanishing in the snow. All she left behind was her parting words and small footsteps soon filled by the falling snow.

“I’ll be waiting.”

--

Saint Ortega of the Lament School was buried in a small thicket, his grave marker a slender longsword driven deep in the ground. His only student took to the road with the broken halves of a legend in her pack, wandering wherever the wind took her.

--

It was some months before Laurence realized she was not simply a wanderer but the Wanderer.

There had been signs. Odd coincidences. It grew beyond denial when a river bridge broke and she was forced to stay overnight in a town, wandering in just before nightfall and finding herself hosted by the only family willing to take in a stranger – hours before a crazed fantassin who’d been attacking the townsfolk broke through their door. She took the man’s head after a duel, finding him utterly made but an even finer sword for it. Laurence had never given her name, so they called her ‘wanderer’ instead when giving profuse thanks, and the word felt like a pleasant finger being trailed down her spine. She had been, in her own way, Chosen.

Even the fucking Gods wanted the Ranger dead.

Laurence often let the road guide her, but it was southwards she travelled. She followed rumours of monsters and rogues, slept under trees often and in stables when she could. What little coin she had she won from the people grateful she had stepped between them and danger, as well as the occasional sword trick to entertain children. That got her into trouble with a five-sun duellist who accused her of ‘dishonouring her sword’, so Laurence de Montfort beat him soundly and marked his face before ripping the embroidered suns out of his tunic. She was the last of the School of Lament, she would not let her teacher’s name die by staying unranked. Her limbs were quick and sure now, her stride like a cat and her senses sharp, but the Wandered did not go hunting for Damned. Not yet.

First she had to see about getting Sublevacion forged again. Her master had snapped the legendary blade before duelling his foe, but Laurence would not make that mistake. Ortega had been… gallant, in the way that stories told you about. Romantic, in his own cynical way. If there was a speck of romance in Laurence’s soul she had yet to find it, so if putting that sword back together would help with her shot at the Ranger it was what she do. Fair play, gallantry? Madness. Someone people just needed killing, it was pointless to make a game of it.

Yet no simple smith would do for the task of forging anew such a sword, Laurence knew, so as she moved southwards she pricked an ear for rumors of Chosen on the discreet end of things. Those that could craft wonders, she’d been made to understand, tended to keep it quiet. Otherwise kings and monsters got a little too interested. One lead was more promising than the others, near the border between Creusens and Aequitan, and she followed it to the end. What she found was… not what she’d wanted. Bandits and criminals had gone missing from nearby towns, but not to the kind of hard-handed justice that her teacher had introduced her to.

They were being kept in a lair, in cells. Being experiment on. Laurence had not set out to find a Damned, but she had anyway.

It was no epic fight between Good and Evil. She killed his two mercenary guards over the length of three passes, then kicked down the door to his quarters. It was just a boy, she found. Sixteen, seventeen? The Salutary Alchemist, he said he was. And going through his lab, she saw that while his basement was a dark thing he was trying to make good out of dark gifts. Antidotes and plague cures, potions that could mend wounds even Light could not. And still she came to stand over him, sword in hand.

“They warned me it would end like this,” the Salutary Alchemist rasped out, resigned.

His eyes were red. He’d wept and tried to hide it when she returned.

“Go on, then,” he said. “Get it over with.”

There were three enemies no truce could be had with, she’d been taught. Time, love and evil. Only one of these could be cut, and so it must be wherever it was found, but still Laurence hesitated. She thought of small town to the north, of the trial she had taken in Souquet and failed. The willingness to cut, Master Guillaume had demanded of them. She had refused, that day. Refused to cut chickens and pigs and a stray dog. Was she now to cut a boy instead, murder him in cold blood?

She gave him a black eye instead.

“Give your prisoners to the nearest gaol instead,” the Wanderer said. “And from now one you use animals, Alchemist. Else I come back for another visit, do you understand me?”

She left him to his promise of doing better, feeling lighter for it, and returned to the road. That first encounter had lifted a veil of sorts, for she began encountering Chosen and Damned afterwards. Laurence travelled the south, going from one evil to another. Always there was some corpse, some monster, some criminal that no one else could touch. And though she kept to the ways that Ortega had taught her, she lent her blade to more than that. She helped the Unconquered Champion put down the flock of rampaging wyverns that were ravaging Orense, then battled the Wicked Binder at his side. When the Exarch of Penthes sent the Myrmidon to hunt down the daughter of a disgraced rival in Salia, she duelled him thrice and forced him to withdraw.

In Tenerife she ran into the Drake Knight, a tall stout man by the name of Isodorios, and together they unmasked a merchant lord and warlock trying to start a war with Helike. Three villages were burned by mercenaries, an eerie ritual trying to wake ‘the shadow of an ancient dragon’ was stopped and in the wake of it all Laurence took her first lover. They parted ways on good terms, a few weeks later, and she returned to her wanderings. Years passed, bringing with them monsters and heroes and always fresh blood on the floor. The Wanderer’s legend grew until it outpaced even her feet, her reputation spread far enough that others sought her to fight evil.

Through it all, Laurence de Montfort asked for neither gold nor titled nor songs praising her name. All she wanted for the help she gave was the simplest thing. She’d look the Chosen in the eye and ask a simple thing: teach me a trick. She learned the flicker-blade from Isodorios, to strengthen her limbs from the Hunter, to parry arrows from the Knight Errant and fight blind from the Duellist. With every passing season her arsenal grew, but the thing she wanted most still eluded her. Laurence had toppled three official schools and in doing so earned nine suns, but the masters of the trade refused her the tenth: only those who could hear the Breath could claim to be Saints, and she could not.

She settled for second best instead. She sailed to Ashur where the Blacksmith, an exile from Foramen in the Dread Empire, forged anew Sublevacion.

The Wanderer should have known better than to take that as a simple boon. Mere days after the blade was made whole again, she stumbled across a trail of odd tales from eastern Valencis. Strange creatures seen wandering the night, leaving no tracks, and entire villages disappearing without warning. Emptied without a trace. She pursued, for there was the scent of evil to it all, and after a month of chasing fae stories and a brief diversion to accidentally topple a bandit clan she found what she was looking for: the dead. It had been a mage behind it all, one who’d found fragments of the Kabbalis Book of Darkness. A monster who used spectres to smother entire villages in their sleep and raise them as servants.

The Necromancer was raising an army, for she had ambitions of empire.

It was the most brutal fight Laurence had ever been in. To reach the Necromancer in her fortress in the Brocelian she had to cut her way through an army, then through ghosts and ghouls and monsters as she attacked the keep. Only for the Necromancer to mock her, even as the Wanderer cut through her spells to open her belly with a blow.

“I won’t die,” the Damned laughed. “I am made of death, Wanderer.”

It was no idle boast. Though Laurence broke the army and fortress, the Necromancer was back half a moon later and slaughtering villages again. Laurence caught her on the move, ran her through, but it didn’t stick. She spoke to priests but they had no answers. A wizard she trusted, though, had a hint: she must have bound her soul to her works, he said. Instead passing on, the soul moved to inhabit another corpse. And it was true. Six times more Laurence slew the Necromancer, but every time she returned in a different corpse. And when the Wanderer came for a seventh, at last her strength failed. It had been an ambush, and she’d been run through a gauntlet of monsters all night. As dawn slowly approached, the Necromancer came and gloated. The fear had gone out of the Damned a little more with every fruitless death.

“It was amusing, our game, but I tire of it,” the Necromancer told her. “I have great works ahead of me and your meddling keeps me from them.”

Panting, on her knees, the Wanderer weakly leaned against Sublevacion.

“I am a sword,” Laurence of Montfort forced out, “in the hands of the Heavens. You will go no further.”

Yes, she thought. That was right. All her life, she had tempered herself into a blade. She had not proved worthy of the tenth sun, of hearing the Breath, so she was no true swordswoman. But a sword, oh she could still be sword.

“You have remarkable talents,” the Necromancer said. “I would offer you service, but it would almost be a waste. Would you not agree to a truce, Wanderer? We need not be at odds.”

“A truce?” the Wanderer rasped.

“Indeed,” the Necromancer replied. “Shall I perhaps take my campaign to Orense instead of Valencis? I will not stray beyond those borders, if you leave my work uninterrupted.”

“Do you think it makes a difference,” Laurence of Montfort quietly said, “where you butcher innocents?”

The Necromancer sighed.

“And how many of those have you saved, with all your sword-swinging?” the Damned said. “Precious few. What have you achieved save for carving away at their corpses? Innocents die, Wanderer, a thousand a day without Creation ever batting an eye. I give them a purposeful death, at least, as the foundation of a new and better world.”

Laurence felt sick, for the Damned was not entirely wrong. How many empty villages had she walked through? Too many. Every corpse she’d cut was someone she had failed to save.

“A truce, Wanderer,” the Necromancer gently suggested again. “Orense, yes, and perhaps only one village a month? I am not unwilling to compromise.”

It’d be fewer deaths, Laurence knew. Even if the Wanderer now rose to her feet and won it all, toppled the odds, the Damned would be back. It was the sensible thing, to take the deal. It’d save lives. And still, the words would not leave her lips. Laurence de Montfort looked at the Necromancer, tall and hooded and too pale to be alive, and she saw a hundred foes. Fae and monsters and men, all with a smile and a story and a reason. All with blood at their feet that she had come too late to stop them shedding. A truce? She felt like throwing up. How could there be a truce with people who were at war with all the world, who ate away at Creation like wild dogs tearing a child?

She thought of her teacher, standing in the snow as he was run through. Saint Ortega had lived as himself, never once compromising even in the face of death. And Laurence, Laurence wasn’t the same as her old master. She knew that. He’d known that. But she would heed that lesson, now. She would not die as anything less than herself. Slowly, leaning on her sword, she rose to her feet.

“Pointless,” the Necromancer sighed. “Wasteful. What can you do, even if you cut me?”

Spectres and corpses advanced, a tide of fang and sword. Laurence took a stumbling step forward. The Damned wasn’t wrong. How many times had Laurence cut her, only for the monster to return? And still she stepped forward, light-footed under the stars. The dead came for her but the Wanderer wove through them, a ghost among ghosts, and came with a raised blade for the Necromancer’s head. The mage smiled mockingly at her, unmoved.

“Nothing,” the Damned said. “You can do nothing.”

Laurence laughed.

“I was once a fool,” she said, “who cut nothing. Let us see if I am still that fool, at least a little.”

And it wouldn’t be enough, to just cut her, but Laurence would swing her sword the way she always had. Sublevacion could cut anything, her master had once said, but it’d not been true. There were things you couldn’t cut. You needed a stronger hand than that. Not to wound or carve of cleft but to… sever. Yes, Laurence thought even as she raised her hand.

She would swing and sever.

It was a prayer under starlight, a wish whispered to night. Laurence de Montfort swung and Sublevacion sang, passing through flesh and… something more. The Necromancer screamed, screamed in fear, and there was a billowing of black smoke.

Oh, Laurence thought as she dropped to her knees. The dead dropped with her. It’d been only a single note, but she had heard it. Beautiful.

Her soul had whispered, and the word it had whispered was Sever.

--

She limped back to Valencis, looking for the Salutary Alchemist. There were wounds on her that would scar badly, if not tended to with potions. He’d moved to the capital during the secant plague and was good about giving potions to Chosen without asking for coin, so it was a touch of luck she’d not been too far. She didn’t find him, though. Instead she found guardsmen grabbing a homeless man off the street in the middle of the night. An abduction. And once she began pulling at the threads, the whole rotten city came falling apart.

The Salutary Alchemist had begun experimenting on people again and they were all covering for him. Soldiers, merchants, magistrates, nobles, priests. They began hunting her, naming her a murderer, and Laurence was left to wonder how far up it really went. One corpse at a time, pushing through traps and lies, she got to the end of it. The Prince of Valencis himself. The prince of rot and blood, half a corpse and kept alive by potions only one man could make. She dragged him out of his bed. On his own throne, in the dark of night, Laurence beat him bloody until he spat out where the Alchemist was hiding.

Good, she could end it now.

“You laid hands on royalty,” the man hissed through broken teeth. “It will be the end of you, Wanderer. I will see to it that-”

Sublevacion swung down, a head went rolling across the marble floor and Laurence became a regicide. She did not look back. The hunt was not over. His lair was beneath the city, through the sewers. She waded through poisons and monsters, but in the end she found him. The trembling, sickly boy that’d become a trembling, sickly man.

“I could make us all immortal,” the Salutary Alchemist screamed, scuttling away through a sea of broken glass. “Laurence. Laurence, please. I didn’t really mean to hurt anyone. A year, a year is all I need and I can make us all-”

She thought, then, of a pale face under starlight. A truce, the Necromancer had offered. Only one village a month. Evil made orderly, pretending to be civilized. She knew better than to hesitate, now.

“There can be no truce,” Laurence de Montfort snarled, “with the Enemy.”

Blood splashed. It did not wash out the river already spilled. She had been, as always, too late.

--

“I hear you’ve been asking for me.”

Laurence was soon to be thirty. She had learned what she could from all the teachers she could find and the Breath still eluded her. It was time, she’d decided. Time to settle accounts with the Ranger. Yet before she’d found the Damned, damnation had found her. The woods were quiet in the afternoon gloom, eerily empty of life. The Ranger had made no noise as she approached, wearing a tattered old cloak over her leathers.

“So I have,” the Wandered said.

“Are you ready, then, Laurence de Montfort?”

Sublevacion left the sheath with a hiss.

“Try me,” Laurence said, baring her teeth.

The cloak whispered as it fell to the ground, the Ranger baring her blades as the two of them fought to be the first to close the distance. The Wanderer pulled out all her tricks, every last thing she’d learned in years of dragging herself from one horror to the next. Isodorios’ flicker-blade was the first – her sword rippled then struck as a snake, an application of Choosing-strength that often took an enemy’s head before they’d realized they needed to parry.

The Ranger mirrored it perfectly.

“Free Cities,” she mused. “Heard you’d visited.

She swept down her sword with impossible strength, scattering leaves and dirt to blind them both. The Ranger matched her fighting blind, then threw in a kick to the stomach. Laurence tasted iron against the roof of her mouth. The Duellist’s favourite trick-parry, slapped aside. She lost out in brute strength and reflexes both. She cut a tree and the Ranger cut at her through it. One after the other, she emptied every single trick of the trade she’d learned and her enemy contemptuously swatted them aside. The Ranger was growing increasingly irritated.

“Is this it?” the Damned scorned.

“Sever,” Laurence hissed.

She cut the air, a tree and one of the Ranger’s blades with the blow. The Damned sighed, rolling her wrists as she made.

“Even at your best, all you do is cut with blind hate,” she said.

Yet there was wariness in her face as she eyed the screaming cut that still hung in the air. Laurence grinned, focusing inwards again as she raised her blade and - the broken blade went through her stomach, then ripped down. Her fingers fumbled against Sublevacion’s hilt, the Ranger ripping it out of her grasp. Laurence fell to her knees. The Damned considered the blade, for a moment, then with wistful look she snapped it. The pieces she dropped, casting a look down at the Wanderer as she bled out. The look in those eyes… Is that all, it whispered. Is this the sum of you? And with one last sight, the Ranger walked away.

Dropping down into the earth, Laurence felt her strength ebb away. More that that. Her Choosing, too, the favour Above had shown her. Nose in the ground, she looked at the two pieces of perfect white steel abandoned before her. Darkness was closing in, a foe she could not defeat. She breathed out raggedly, eyes closed, and in that moment at last she heard it. The Breath. The current of Creation, revealed to her as she began to leave it. Was it the end? It did not matter. It burned in her gut, the callous cruelty she’d seen in the Ranger. That no one would ever call her to account for it. Resolved hardened as she looked at the twice-broken sword  – once by a good man and once by an evil woman.

Steel, even steel of legend, always broke. There was only one way through, and in this world or the next, she would see it done. It was not an oath or a promise, not anything less than a decree.

Laurence de Montfort would make herself into a sword that would destroy all Evil.