A fleet covered the core several days before his father’s familiar found him. Marroo stood in the bookstore the day the message came. He stood at the counter with his eyes turned through the big front window to the sky where Leviathan shadows blotted out the light, hundreds of them, vast and angular where the occasional beams of light peaked through to reveal their shapes in silhouette, made indistinct by distance and the umber haze that filled the sky. Each vast shape moving steadily to anti-turnward through the turbid air.

In the resulting twilight the little glowing sword of his father’s familiar looked like a dust mote blown through a sunbeam from a different world as it fell from the sky towards Marroo. It lost a bit of its luster as it passed through the window to alight on Marroo’s shoulder, then flickered and disappeared as the clip on his shoulder gave a little beep for his attention. He hesitated before he touched the clip.

He checked to see that the few customers browsing the shelves for new distractions from the darkness outside would be alright without his help for a few minutes then put one finger to the little clip on his shoulder. His finger came away attached to a tiny filament of light that unfurled in front of him to hover in the air. Later, he would remember the way it looked in the twilight, the glow of it and the slant of his father’s handwriting, slashed across the display in letters drawn from light. The impression of something heavy happening far beyond his ability to see or sense with his spiritual eyes, far stronger in the unnatural light than the sense imparted by the words themselves. Words that were, impossible, impossible even to imagine, let alone believe.

“Rose adept says there’s not much time.” The letter told him, the letters skewed and uneven in their author’s impatience, marred by a jagged line that didn’t belong. “Come.” It said after the line. “As quick as you can.”

Jansen took a long time getting to the bookstore to relieve Marroo. Marroo rose from the store’s counter several times to abandon it and it’s two customers, but each time he sat down again with a glance towards them to wait just a few more minutes. When one of them brought a book to the counter to pay he barely absently counter out five times as much change as they were owed and had to count it out to them again.

There was an aircab waiting for Marroo when Jansen finally arrived and set Marroo free. He followed the little sword of his father’s familiar to the rooftop where it was parked and slid into a seat. The fleet parted in the sky, momentarily, so that light peaked out as though through a chink in layered armor vast enough to block out the sky. It’s outline appeared in silhouette across the upward curve of the horizon, like lightning drawn out across a continent too distant for Marroo to even give it a name, before the layers of migrating constructs closed ranks to block out the sky.

The familiar chimed as it sank into the aircab’s controls, and it lifted them into the sky.

His father looked terrible.

At first he thought that the blood that covered him must be someone else’s, that wouldn’t have been an unusual sight, but his father coughed as Marroo stepped into his room in the Rose Tower and the hand he used to cover it came away spattered with fresh bits of blood.

“You took your time.” His father grated, the gravel in his throat far worse than usual as he wiped his bloody hand on the front of his robes.

He glared at Marroo, but Marroo didn’t know what to say.

His father started coughing again and turned back to the window through which he’d been looking when Marroo came into the room. The cough was a terrible lung dredging thing. When it didn’t abate after the first minute his father bent and put his hand on the window frame to steady himself as he drew up more blood from his lungs. Marroo saw the red of it spatter his father’s hand and when he looked around he found more on his father’s coat hung across the back of a chair, and decorating the scabbard of the sword that leaned against it.

When the coughing finally stopped Marroo’s father leaned against the window with both arms and heaved for breath.

“Don’t look at me like that.” The gravel in his voice was even harsher after the coughing. “I’m dying boy. Do you expect me to look strong?” He gave a little cough and straightened himself, as though he did expect it, even if he’d told Marroo not to. He began to cough again and this time Marroo felt the cough in his father’s spirit, something deep and utterly wrong, like rust at the core of a sword that had always seemed strong.

“You’re letter didn’t say.” Marroo said.

“No.” His father spat between coughs. Marroo felt him pull his spirit in around himself, almost contract and compact it until he felt like a normal human being to Marroo’s senses if he didn’t probe. When he did, he could feel the fire of his father’s spirit raging as though in the midst of a tornado at the center of his being and flickering alarmingly. “Why else would I go to the Rose Tower?” He snapped.

Marroo opened his mouth to reply, but his father put up a hand. “Don’t.” He coughed. “I don’t-” He coughed and sucked in a long wheezing breath, then sat on the bed. He shook his head and banged on his chest while his cough brought tears to his eyes.

Marroo just stood there and watched, feeling his father’s spirit rage inside of him while his own twisted itself in knots around him.

“Can’t they?”

Darro shook his head. He coughed one last time, then closed his eyes and held his breath.

“Venom Adept.” He spat at last. “Nothing you can do, once they get it into you, at least according to the Rose Adept.” He waved his hand at the door to his room then gave a little cough before he clamped his lips tightly shut and shook. When the cough subsided he looked at Marroo.

“A lot of men. Vanahara family.” He grimaced and clutched his chest to keep from coughing. “Meant to, send a message.” He coughed, once, shook, held still. “They’re dead.” His eyes flashed and he wheezed for a moment before he looked away and went on. “Didn’t expect the adept though. Didn’t know there was a new one, in the city. Only six others I know. Don’t fight them. Not paid well enough.” He coughed. “Didn’t expect Venom.” He spat red phlegm onto the floor and looked up at Marroo with bloodshot silver eyes. “Athash will be disappointed.”

Marroo met his father’s watery silver eyes and realized for the first time how old his father looked, not just from the coughing and the effects of the spiritual Venom he could now sense swirling in his father’s breath but from simple time. Hair once a perfect black had gained a speckling of gray, and his beard no longer had the luster which he remembered from their early days of training.

His father coughed and wiped blood from his chin. When he tried to stand he lurched sideways and Marroo, yanked from the paralysis that took him on stepping into the room, grabbed him to keep him from falling. He didn’t help his father into the bed so much as push him into it while the aging adept coughed and shook and his eyes watered from the pain. He wouldn’t lay down but shook his head when Marroo tried to make him. “Bring me my sword.” He grated.

Marroo went around the bed to retrieve the blade from its place against the chair. He could feel the spiritual weight of it even from across the room, like an echo of his father’s spirit, sharp to every sense and on every plane, honed by years of channeling his father’s icon. His own contact with the icon resonated with the contact and Marroo forced it down as he brought the sword to his father.

“Been here before.” His father muttered as Marroo brought it around to him. “In the pipes. Too many times, thought I’d die.” He coughed. “Never did. Always, made it out.” He gripped the sword, hard, as though it was all that still held him there. “Not this time.” He grated. “Not with a sword, this time.”

He coughed weakly as the sword began to shake in his hands.

Marroo stepped away as his father shook and looked for anything that would distract him from the man laying on the bed in front of him. He wanted to run, but his father’s voice held him, as it always had, even as the man in front of him pressed an agony stone between his palms.

“Rose adept says, take a long time. Go like this.” His father shook as he fought his cough. “They say-” He coughed, hard, and red dribbled from his lips as his hands shook around the scabbarded sword.

Marroo threw himself around the bed, found a cup beside a sink in one corner of the room and filled it while his father pushed out more blood between clenched teeth. He shook his head when Marroo brought it to him, turned his head and waved the cup away.

“No.” He said.

“You have to.” Marroo told him.

“No.” His father said again.

Some of the water spilled on his father’s chest and Marroo realized that his hands were shaking as his father turned to glare at him.

Marroo forced himself to turn and set the cup onto the bedside table as his father coughed.

“I didn’t bring you here, for water.” Darro told him. He clutched his sword to him and looked away. He wiped the blood from his beard and looked at it in disgust then shook from another cough he refused to bow to. “Adept shot me.” He grated. “Believe that? With a gun. Shot me through a door. I cut the bullet from the air, but he’d touched it with his icon, made it so it touched my spirit and now, my spirit is going to kill me.” He shook then held still. “Athesh will be disappointed. Didn’t get him. He got away, before this.” He waved at himself and started to cough again.

“The rose adept,” he began, only to cough abruptly, staining his beard red once again.

“The rose adept.” Marroo prompted as the coughing stilled.

“The rose adept,” his father began again, “says, there is a chance, but not,” He coughed, hard, before he squeezed out “not with my cultivation.” This time, as the coughing slowed Darro snatched the cup from the bedside table and downed the water in one go before handing it back to Marroo while he coughed some more and covered his mouth with an elbow. “More.” He rasped. “Please.”

Marroo went to the sink while his father’s coughing subsided, but when he returned his father didn’t take the cup. didn’t look at Marroo either, or cough, or do much of anything except breath and look down at his sword.

“I’m dying.” He said, and for the first time that Marroo could remember his father’s voice didn’t sound as though it were scraping out of him. “The adept.”, he gave a little cough and some of the gravel in his voice returned, “That’s what the adept says.” He looked down at his sword and coughed.

There was a knock at the door and his father’s flared as he lashed out. “Get out!”, he bellowed. Cuts appeared in the wood of the door and there were fast footsteps away as his father coughed hard and hauled his spirit back into the tight ball he’d compacted around his core. He wheezed, and Marroo watched in horror through his spiritual senses as bits of his father’s lungs actually fell away and died at the touch of the spiritual corruption circulating through his channels.

He lifted the sword in trembling hands, stared at it for a moment, then jerked it from its sheath so that he held nothing but a hilt and a naked blade.

He held the sword out to Marroo. “Take it.” He coughed.

Marroo took a half step back and Marroo’s father shook the sword at him. “Take it damn you.”

Marroo set the cup down, then reached hesitantly for the sword. His father pressed the hilt into his palm then clamped both hands around Marroo’s, just as he’d once clamped the agony stone between Marroo’s palms.

“I, am an Adept of the Sword.” His father rasped. “A full cultivator, in communion with the Icon of the Sword.” He squeezed Marroo’s hard enough that Marroo’s palm bit into the sword’s grip. “I have taught you everything I know, but there is one, last thing, I can give you before I go.”

Marroo tried to pull away but his father held on. “I don’t want your sword.” Marroo whispered.

“It’s not the sword I’m giving you.” His father shook the sword in their joint grip and Marroo tightened his hold on it then met his father’s bloodshot silver eyes before they closed. “It’s, me.”

Marroo felt his father’s spirit turn within him, not in the tornado he usually summoned when manifesting his blades, but in a long exhale that had nothing to do with his lungs and everything to do with the sword in front of them.

His father’s spirit poured into the blade. It’s connection to the Icon it represented had always been strong, thanks to his father’s constant use, but as Darro’s spirit filled it that connection deepened and the blade seemed to sharpen beyond the limits of mere steel.

It shone in Marroo’s spiritual vision, not the way all blades did, but like the core itself, a star at the center of what it meant for any object to be sharp. It gleamed between their hands and even the reflected light of its edge seemed to cut the eye that saw it. It sharpened until it was as sharp as any object could ever become and still his father poured more of his spirit in, more, until the steel seemed to overflow and Marroo felt breath radiate from it like the storm of invisible blades his father’s spiritual aura had always been, and still his father poured out more, and more, and more into the sword until his own spirit began to dim, then gutter, and finally go out.

His father sagged as his spirit disappeared and Marroo had to catch him and haul him back onto the bed, careful to keep the sword away from anything it could cut. The breath still swirled around the blade, begging to manifest its true-self with every swirl of the spirit instilled in it by his father’s outpouring of breath.

His father coughed as Marroo set him on his pillows, a weak convulsion of his lungs that didn’t even bring up any blood. One hand remained wrapped around Marroo’s palm on the sword hilt, but so weak now that Marroo didn’t even recognize the touch.

His hand slipped and fell to the bed. His eyes closed.

“She served me well.” He rasped. “Carry her with pride.”

Marroo held the sword and clenched his jaw tight shut as he looked at the hollow shell his father had become.

“I will always be with you.” Darro rasped. “Wherever you carry her.”

Something stung Marroo’s eyes and he blinked back tears as his grip tightened around the sword. “Why?” He demanded before his throat closed and he choked on the rest.

Marroo’s father coughed weakly and opened his eyes to look up at Marroo. Marroo remembered a hundred times those silver eyes had pinned him to the floor with their strength. They seemed empty now, tired. Darro didn’t even glare, yet those silver eyes pinned his son all the same.

“Why what?” His father asked.

Marroo forced his eyes away while the sword in his hand thrummed with power.

“I never wanted your sword.” He whispered. He felt his own spirit curl around the sword where it touched, memories, of cuts and slashes, of hands that were not his own and a boy, no older than six, who stood before him and learned to block the blows aimed at his head.

“Why give me all this?”

Darro coughed and closed his eyes. “Eido, your brother, should never have died.” He rasped. “My fault, really, for being soft. It won’t happen to you.” One hand reached up and wrapped weak fingers around the hand that still held the sword. “Not while I’m with you.”

His grip should never have been so weak.

Marroo tried to turn to put the sword away, but his father’s grip tightened just slightly around his hand.

“Stay.” His father whispered. “Don’t leave me. Not yet.” He coughed weakly, and Marroo felt bits of his father break away inside as he held onto his son’s hand.

“I don’t think, that I will keep you, very long.”

So he stayed…

Until the very end.