By The Sword - Homepage

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We marched.

And marched, and marched, and marched some more.

In all honesty, I was starting to think it was all we could do. With the rough mountain path under us and the consistent thump of metal boots on stone, we’d fallen into a rhythm. My body had started moving on automatic. And at this point, I didn’t know if I could’ve stopped it if I’d wanted to.

Since leaving Norn, we’d followed the road as it petered off into little more than a path. It had descended off the isolated plateau that Norn sat on and taken us into a valley at some point. The misshapen stone barriers had quickly given way to large open spaces and staggering mountains on both sides.

Down below us, after a slope lined with cliffs, ridges, and vegetation, was a river. It cut through the rock like a blade of the world itself. It separated our legion from snow-capped peaks that, even from such a distance, still made us look puny in comparison.

And as I looked around, I did have to admit that the scenery was beautiful. If I ignored the dull aches in my legs and the crippling boredom, I could almost enjoy it. Rolling winds that blanketed the valley. Rushing water from the river down below. Shifting rocks in the mountainside next to us. And even the faint screeches of birds I could hear if I strained my ears.

It was nice. I had to admit that no matter how annoying the terrain was. The world around us was a treat. A nice change of pace from the tight, twisting forests I’d spent so much of my time in for the past few months.

Though, as time waned on and progress came slowly, I couldn’t stop coming to one fact.

I was bored.

After setting off from Norn, the calm focus that had dawned over our party had gradually worn off. It had chipped away into dull commotion again. The knights had begun chatting—trading anecdotes and reaffirming the positions they’d already been assigned.

I hadn’t cared about it at first. Since we were in the backing party anyway, Kye and I had kept ourselves respectfully removed from the conversations. We’d chatted idly amongst ourselves with nothing interesting to talk about anyway.

Obviously, there was still doubt. There was still worry and dread about what came next. But neither of us particularly wanted to hear it anymore. We’d been living it for the past week straight. And even though each new piece of information changed it, nothing seemed to get rid of it entirely.

I didn’t think anything would. Not until we faced our task head-on. Not until we either came back successful or made sure that the world knew it was impossible.

We all hoped for the former, but the latter scenario wasn’t easy to shake.

Shaking my head, I sighed. I blinked myself alert and tore my eyes off the river below. Looking forward, I squinted at the hunched line of more lightly armored knights. They were the ones who had previously been Norn’s scouts. Beyond them, the knights in plated armor marched at the tail-end of the main group. The main armed force of our legion.

None of them were talking anymore. It seemed that even after our strict determination had slipped away, they still couldn’t hold up against the painful mundanity of our task.

Though even with the silence, I couldn’t particularly focus. I couldn’t feel any of the serenity or peace of mind. Not with the white flame still sifting through my mind.

Its bout of calmness had given way after less than an hour on the road. After indulging in its wonder for a while—watching through my eyes at the beautiful scene—it had gone back to its musing. Back to searching for whatever it wanted among my memories.

Every time I tried to reach out to it, I got burned. And since I had no way of getting at it from another angle—no way of spiting it—I just let it be. I simply watched it dig through memories in the back of my head as an idle observer.

The more I focused on it, the more prominent the feeling became. Like a slight itching feeling at the back of my head, I could feel nearly every mental movement the white flame made. It was annoying, but I’d endured worse from the terrors. So I didn’t push it to stop.

As I watched it more carefully, I saw the movements as well. With my attention turned inward, I could see the memories it was pulling up and comparing as though trying to hopelessly reconcile the two.

It flared, flickering in frustration as the memories resisted. They felt incompatible. And the white flame couldn’t figure out why. It latched onto both and experienced them again as though searching for answers in the details.

One was fractured and skewed like shattered glass reassembled with mismatched pieces. I saw myself training in the woods with a blade in hand, grumbling angrily. The words falling through the memory’s cracked fog escaped me, but the image shined in crystal clarity as white fire erupted from the steel of my blade.

I blinked, shaking my head lightly to remind myself of reality. Of the current reality, with knights filling my vision and a mountain path under my boots. I had to stay grounded, I told myself.

The white flame, however, had no such reservations.

Shifting its attention, it latched onto the second memory. The tendrils of its fire crept around the faded surface and tried to bring it to life. It was trying to remember it, I realized.

This memory was different from the other, yet it felt oddly similar. Through the blurred and faded haze, I saw myself again. I saw a sword in my hand and heard my voice. This time, the words were confident and determined instead of angry. Hopeful instead of discouraged as I watched myself train in the fields of my home kingdom.

I still couldn’t hear the words, though. They escaped me as the memory fell away at a glacial pace while also fading in the blink of an eye.

Narrowing my eyes, I tried to hone in on the memories further. I watched them as carefully as I could without getting in the white flame’s way. Because despite the fact that they were both from the perspective of my eyes, I wasn’t even sure if they were of the same person. They seemed… distant, for some reason. As though the similar situations had come from vastly different circumstances.

Sword—the white flame said.

I jolted, my eyes stretching wide as the word processed in my head. It radiated through my mind with pure meaning as though the sound of it didn’t exist. It was more like a thought than anything, yet it felt foreign. It had come distinctly from the white flame.

Flitting my eyelids, I dropped my hand to the hilt of my blade. My fingers wrapped around the leather grip as I gritted my teeth and turned attention inward. As I made another attempt at the memories, struggling to understand what the fire inside my head was trying to do.

“What are you…” I muttered. The words slipped out thoughtlessly.

The white flame froze, flickering silently. Then it blazed and retreated from my probing eye. It blocked itself off again and reinforced the action with a word.

No—it said, accompanied by a wave of discomfort.

I grimaced, nearly stumbling on the uneven ground before I shook it off. Movement still registered in the back of my head, but it felt dull. Distant. The white flame didn’t want to hear from me anymore, it seemed.

Swallowing my pride, I straightened up. I let out a rough cough to clear my throat and tried to relax. To slump my shoulders down and let the wind ruffle through brown locks of my hair. No matter how much my body wished it could comply, the task wasn’t as simple as it sounded.

“What’s with you?” Kye asked, her words plinking against my skull like a pebble thrown simply to remind me of her existence. I offered a weak smile, the tips of my ears already flushing red.

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to make the declaration not sound like a lie. Judging by the way Kye raised an eyebrow at me, I was only halfway successful. I sighed. “Really just bored, I guess. I don’t know how much more of this marching I can take.”

Kye smiled, bobbing her head in an instant. Flicking her eyes out, she scanned over the mountain ridge lining our left side, the rest of the backing party along with the rest of the knights in the legion, and then over to where our rocky path descended below only a handful of paces to our right. Then she shot a glance back to me, wholly unimpressed.

“I get that,” she said, lowering her voice a few notes. “Even all of this”—she gestured to the mountain valley off to our side—“gets samey after a while. Plus, my legs hurt.”

I chuckled, rolling my shoulders and stretching the muscles in my legs. The slightest pain lined my strain. “Yeah. We’ve been marching since not long after the crack of dawn, and I don’t know how much further we’ll even go. And with the fatigue, and the boredom, and the worries… it’s a little much.”

Kye’s gaze softened at that, her shoulders slumping. “None of those three seem to be going away anytime soon.”

“Doesn’t look like it,” I admitted, my voice lowering as I tried to shift my attention away from a certain fiery presence. Instead, I actually focused on what I was saying. The worries pressed back down in an instant as if they’d been waiting for the opportunity. “I can’t stop thinking about our chances with all of this.”

Kye half-heartedly glared at me. She stiffened her shoulders and didn’t hinder the smirk as it broke through. “Don’t worry as much, then. We have the best chances possible because we can’t afford not to.”

A sharp breath escaped from my nose. I nodded. “I guess that’s true.”

The huntress beamed. Then she turned, stepping closer to me while letting her boot scrape against the rock below for a moment. “I do get it though. I can’t stop thinking about everything we’ve done in the past few days.” She hesitated. “It’s… a lot. But my brain keeps going back to that party of knights.”

I narrowed my eyes. “The ones that killed a dragon?”

In front of us, two knights turned. They perked their ears and squinted at me for only a moment before turning back around. Sunlight glittered over the chainmail on their backs.

Kye held a careful smile, leaning in toward me. “Yeah. The ones Lady Amelia mentioned. I can’t stop thinking about the injuries she described. I…” She stopped herself, her face contorting. “I went to the apothecary’s building to ask about it, and everything she mentioned is correct, I guess. The knights really do have some strange kind of insanity that tortures their brain whenever the word ‘dragon’ is even mentioned.”

I swallowed. My throat felt like sandpaper. “Really? No… exaggerations at all?” In truth, I hadn’t expected Lady Amelia to have stretched the truth, but it was hard to accept. The fact that any creature could inflict such specific psychological damage…

It didn’t sit right.

“Nope,” Kye said shortly. “And after recovering from the burns and other physical injuries, they appeared largely fine. But their mental states are… strange, apparently.” Kye tilted her head. “I didn’t stay to find out anything more specific.”

A shudder crept down my spine. I shook it off, trying to melt the worry away with the afternoon sun. It wasn’t effective at all.

“I started talking to avoid worries, not add to them,” I said and shot Kye a glare.

She smirked. “Well, you should’ve known better. Remembering why we’re even out here marching in the first place is good enough to stoke that dread.” I chuckled, and her smirk only deepened. “But… it hasn’t taken that stuff off my mind. It brings me back to Tahir too much.”

My posture stiffened at the name and the emotion behind it. Cringing, I allowed myself a shallow nod as I remembered her stories about Tahir. He’d been a ranger, as far as I knew. One of the most powerful Sarin had ever seen because of his magical adaptability. He’d been friends with Kye, even.

And he’d died on their first trip to Norn.

“Right,” I eventually got out, my voice straining. “He, ah. He killed a dragon too, didn’t he?”

Kye nodded, her face oddly resolute. “He did.” She hushed her voice even more, flicking eyes up to the knights ahead of us. “One that the Knights of Norn had decided not to warn us about when sending us to help them deal with threats. We’d come on good faith, and they had…” She shook her head. “He faced the dragon alone without us—and he warned us never to go find it again.”

My fingers tightened on the grip of my blade. “He didn’t make it, right?”

“Right,” Kye said, her tone cold. Then, however, she sighed and rolled her neck. “That was… a long time ago, though. I just… Tahir’s mind was scattered too after he faced the dragon. At the time we’d chalked it up to the fact that he’d been bleeding out but…” Her face tightened. “Now I’m not as sure.”

A thin smile grew across my lips. As I walked on, step after step, the white flame slowly removed its blockade. It slowly came back out from its mental hiding place. But my attention was occupied elsewhere.

“It makes me remember all of the stories about dragons I’ve heard through my life,” Kye said. I blinked, rising from my thoughts and turning back to her. “The conventional ones as well as the more obscure things. People have never really understood dragons, so a lot of crazy gets mixed in with the real.” She stopped for a second and shrugged. “I don’t know if any of it even is real, to be honest.”

I nodded, pushing the fear down and letting the weight at my waist calm me. “Some of it has to be. There is too much of it—and too much that falls in line with the destruction they’ve wreaked already.” My brain flashed back to the intimate stories the knights had told of some of their own brothers getting rent to ash.

Kye tilted her head. “I suppose, but some of it is outright strange.” A breath of amusement fled from her lips. “I mean, one that I heard as a rumor when I was little said that the dragons weren’t even from the world itself.” Her face scrunched for a second. “Or, well, that they originated from the world, but not the one that we live in. As though the world has more… layers to it?” She didn’t know. “Something like that, at least. I remember the idea that dragons and their kind were initially an experiment by one of the world’s Servants.”

I furrowed my brow and scrunched my nose. Her words processed in my head, but they didn’t make more sense after time. They still sounded… far fetched. Even after everything I’d learned about dragons thus far, it felt unreliable. It felt like the kind of thing paranoid people would come up with when faced with the unknown.

“I’m sure there are thousands of versions,” I said, rolling my shoulders. “Like with dragon’s blood”—Kye widened her eyes at the mention—“there are probably more theories about dragons themselves than you could count.”

Kye chuckled, her eyebrows raising in surprise. I smiled, inclining my head only the slightest bit forward. She broke out into a laugh.

“Maybe so,” she said as her amused bellowing died down. After it did, she smiled at me for a second before something dawned on her. Her eyebrows dropped. “You met with a dragon though, right?” Her voice came hushed and low, barely a whisper on the wind.

I almost froze. Anath’s image propped itself up in my mind and I had to clench my jaw to push it away. Her cold words whispered back through my ears over and over like voices inside my own mind.

I shuddered. “Y-Yeah,” I muttered. “I did, but…”

Thoughts churned through my head at a snail’s pace. As I considered it, her implied logic did make sense. With everything we knew about dragons, I almost mused that I should’ve been more damaged by the simple interaction. Yet…

“She wasn’t entirely a dragon, though. Only partly—as she made perfectly clear.” Her ward of clarity reminded me of its existence as a solid rock in the sea of my chaotic thoughts. It was still there, then. Sitting dormant. “It was a… different situation.”

Kye fixed me with a curious glare. I curled my lip and scrunched my face further, trying to work through it all myself. Eventually, the huntress spoke again. “You met with her in the woods, right? With her?” I nodded through gritted teeth. “What happened afterwards?”

“She left after our conversation,” I said. “Just vanished into the trees, as far as I could tell. And I—well. It was cold, and I’d simply let it be so I wouldn’t die.” Thinking back on it, I remembered the waves of pressing mental pain I’d experienced at the… words she’d used. The names? Were they names? I didn’t know anymore. “Though, I’m not sure I got out entirely unscathed.”

A chuckle escaped my mouth. It was void of any joy.

Kye bobbed her head in silence before letting the smirk come back. She sighed and ran a hand through her hair before shooting her gaze back forward. “If you can get through an experience with one of those creatures, so can I. Can’t be that hard.”

With a dry chuckle and a single nod, I dropped my eyes back to the ground. I let her comment lead us back into silence for fear of continuing the conversation as it was. Because with it all, the worries were only coming back. It wasn’t peace as I wished it would be.

So I let myself focus on boredom again. On exhaustion and fatigue. On the sounds and sights of the slowly-progressing world around us.

And eventually, I went back to the white flame.

The tickle in the back of my head was there. It scraped my skull ever-so-softly. The white-hot presence that had previously walled itself away from me was back with its normal task. It was sifting through memories again—all of the broken, old, and faded ones alike. Each time, it would take multiple of them and inspect them with its fire. It would try to order them or combine them as though to make sense of the fact that they existed at all.

I gritted my teeth as it kept up. The longer it tried, the more frustrated it seemed to be getting. And with its increasing frustration, the tickle turned more and more into a scratch. One that only rose my annoyance as we marched on.

Narrowing my eyes, I focused inwardly again. I searched through the lifeful black void of my mind and watched the flame. In its grasp were two memories again. One broken at sharp edges and one faded into fog.

It tried to understand the memories, replaying them over and over in an effort to reconcile the experiences. But as was becoming obvious, it wasn’t making progress.

The sharp and fractured memory saw me falling to my knees. On a rock in the middle of a forest, I sat sobbing. My body fell onto a large stone in weakness. I didn’t seem to care, only crying out in cracked, unfamiliar words. Through the memory, I couldn’t figure out what they were—but they were tied to loss. Tied to the images of people close to me, along with a sense of resignation as though from life itself.

Stretching my neck, I pushed my boot into the stone a little more forcefully. To ground myself, I thought. I couldn’t get too caught up in the memories. That was all they were, after all. Memories.

So after reaffirming my connection to reality, I turned my attention back to the white flame. I watched it replay the other memory—the one shrouded in fog.

Except this time, it wasn’t a thick, faded fog. It was thin and newly formed as though the images playing in front of my eyes were important enough never to be forgotten. I stood at the edge of a tree line in front of a serene walking path. My path, I remembered. My eyes flicked over to the skeletal form of the beast only a moment later. I sneered at it, readying my blade before charging.

The memory cut off there as the white flame held it again. I winced as my consciousness was thrown for a loop. It took me far too long to regain my mental footing. And once I did, the pain only got worse as it tried to combine both memories. As it tried to connect them somehow, even though they had never been meant to connect.

Death—the white flame said.

I grimaced, letting out an annoyed grunt. In front of me, I saw Kye turn around. She fixed me with a peculiar glance that I didn’t pay attention to. Instead, I tried to reach out to the white flame and halt its strange actions.

It froze again. It flickered in silence. But this time, it didn’t wall me off. Alternatively, it perked up in fear. In a sudden sense of surprise.

“What are you—” I started before biting the words off. Kye blinked at me for a moment, but I didn’t look her way.

My ears twitched. Something was different.

Grabbing the hilt of my blade with an ironclad grip, I scanned the scene. I scoured the grey rock around our still-marching procession for anything out of place. And when I noticed Lionel and Laney scouting on the left side, I’d found it.

They weren’t as relaxed as normal, I realized. They were tense and ready, almost like they’d been spooked by something.

I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. Perking my ears, I listened to the world again. This time, there was no rolling wind. No flowing water. No shifting rock. Not even the screeches of mountain birds in the distance. It was all still and quiet like the world itself was holding its breath.

My eyes widened. I turned, flicking over the stone ridge to our side. Dozens of paces ahead and past the cover of a shielded path, I saw a light. A puff of smoke and a slight glow of red fire.

The white flame returned, draping itself around my neck. This time, it had no intention of seizing control. It simply poured its fire in with mine.

Just in time for me to break out into a run.