Short Story - The Sword Of Light And Shadow

Named for a Magic card, and written for this writing prompt 

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There's a certain vibe that you get from Heroes.

They do the good deeds.  Help whoever they run across, improve the  world, push back against the whims of fate to make things just a little  nicer.  Usually they glow, too?  The glowing doesn't seem super  important but a lot of heroes have a kind of light-based effect  somewhere in their toolkit.

For my brother, it was in the sword.  The sword didn't make him a  Hero, but it was Heroic in some abstract way.  It doesn't like that I've  taken it.  You might be asking how a sword could like anything, and  honestly, I do not care to explain the ins and outs of living weapons  and looping fates to you.  You'll pick it up, or it won't matter.  Now  listen.

The sword glowed for him, because he used it to fight back the  monsters, and secure the lands for a time of peace.  And I loved him for  it, even if he was a bit of a pompous ass sometimes.  But there's a  deeper question of what Heroes do buried in that statement: He fought back the monsters.  He secured this land, and only for a time.

Where did the monsters come from?  Why did he stop at the border?

Why do Heroes fight and fight and fight and never change anything?

The sword doesn't like that I've picked it up, because the sword  really fucking hates it when people question things like that.  Heroes  are useful because Heroes are too busy getting stuff done to ask those  kinds of questions.  Or maybe the ones that do end up like my brother;  mysteriously without aid during a surprisingly violent outburst of  monsters from a place that was supposed to be completely sealed off.   Being a Hero didn't save him then, though I think that might have been  because he had nothing in the moment to protect.

The sword also doesn't like me because I don't need to protect  anything at all to use it.  It doesn't glow for me.  There's not a scrap  of light anywhere on me.  But there is a magic that our people are not  supposed to be able to use burning in my blood and fired in my bones,  and the sword is a point of focus, and it is angry.

But that's okay.  Because I am angry too.  Something has gone  horribly wrong in this world.  The Heroes never lose, but they never  once, in the last four hundred years, have gained a single length of  ground.  There is an artificial stagnation, something treating us all  like animals in a menagerie, and there are lies on top of lies that  shroud the whole affair.  I cannot even trust that the monsters are  really monsters.  Maybe they have their own Heroes.  Maybe  there is a reason no one but the Heroes have ever seen them and lived  through the fight to talk about it.

Maybe they glow.

I don't know.  I'm willing to accept that I am naive in some ways.   The sword hates that too.  The sword rages against the idea that I am  willing to accept failure, accept new information as I find it.  The  sword is so blindingly angry that I am adapting, that it's almost an aura of its own.

This was my brother's sword.  It glowed for him.  Told him he was a  Hero.  And then sent him to his death.  And I don't even think it's the  sword's fault.

There is something blackened and corrupted at the heart of this world.  And my brother's sword and I?

We are going to start cutting.