Sikhaya barely cried when Darro laid the boy out on the table in front of her. She clapped a hand to her mouth and stared down at him with glassy eyes while red-squad soldiers deployed to keep the house safe and put out the fires peeked in through the doors on either side of the living room. Marroo didn’t seem to understand, when Darro took him from the guard who’d taken responsibility for him. He’d barely begun to babble words and sounds to go with the picture books Sikhaya read to him, but Even those wordless sounds abandoned him as he gazed down at his brother and the blood soaking through his shirt. When Sikhaya began to shake, Darro took Marroo into a neighboring room where he knelt and set the boy on his feet in front of him.

Marroo could barely stand on his own. Pudgy hands gripped Darro’s shirt to hold him steady as Darro put one finger under Marroo’s chin to lift big silver eyes to his own. “Your brother is dead.” He told Marroo. His voice still grated from the poisons he’d inhaled while he was in the black, as it would for the rest of his life, making it painful for him to speak, despite his cultivation. “He’s gone to sleep, and he isn’t waking up.”

Marroo just looked at him, and Darro felt, all the rage, all the bloodlust and hate that had driven him through the mercenaries and the Hair-Vipers like their namesake through a rat’s den, transform in his son’s eyes into a love so intense that it felt more like rage.

“We’ll make you strong.” He promised his son. “Strong enough, that you’ll never ever have to be afraid.”

Behind him, his wife began to wail as Darro’s world was cut in two, into the futures that could be, and the ones he could not allow to be.

And the memories went on,

And on,

And on.

Violence hung from him like a cloak. It ran from his sword in red rivulets and clung to him with bloody hands from bloodier memories of the men and women he killed.

He killed thousands, cut them down, chased them through busy streets and narrow alleys, bright malls, and tunnels that echoed with their running footsteps. He fought men with guns, with swords, with exotic weapons and improvised objects that never deserved the name. He killed them alone and by the dozen, in their beds and on their feet, atop city towers and in their shadows along the street.

His son cried and ran from him the first time they tried to spar. He hid from the pain, hid behind his mother’s skirts as she hid from Darro behind her books, and didn’t understand that the pain would make him strong. He put the training stone into his hands when they began again and clasped the smooth stone between Marroo’s palms while tears leaked from the boy’s eyes. “I will not allow you to be weak.”

He watched his son open his meridians, taught him to fight, tried to teach him to kill.

“You’re stealing him from me.” Sikhaya told him after Marroo won some childish fight. “You’re turning him into a monster.”

He met her eyes and pulled words from a throat that seemed to burn each time he spoke. “I’m keeping him safe.”

To which she had no response.

At night, when he tried to touch her in the apartment where he hid them after Veshtu’s treachery, she rolled away from him to look out the narrow window in their bedroom. When he pulled her under him anyways she locked her arms and glared up at him. “I’ll leave you.” She hissed. “I promise I’ll leave you.”

“Why?” He demanded.

She yanked at his hands and he let her go, rolled to a sitting position while she rolled away again to face the window. She hugged a pillow across her chest and when he put a hand on her shoulder she arched away from him. “It hurt too much.” She whispered. When she turned to bury her head on his chest there were tears in her eyes. “Never.” She said. “Never again. Never ever ever again. Promise me I won’t have to do it again.”

“I can’t.”

She threw a pan of boiling water at him when he touched her again. Whipped it right off the burner to swing it at his face. He threw her against the wall on instinct as his spirit split the pan into fragments then he froze halfway through the steps that would have cut her limbs from her torso while she slumped crying to the floor. “You promised!” She said through the tears. “You promised you would never let anything hurt me!”

He just stood over her as the tears flowed and the puddle at his feet steamed amidst the bits of broken pan.

“You should kill yourself.” She said when the worst of the crying had slowed. “You should just kill yourself, if you really meant what you promised me when you took me.”

He stepped out of her way when she finally bent to clean up the pieces and sop up the steaming water. He watched her in silence until he turned to go, but her voice stopped him halfway through the door.

“It should have been you.” She said. “It should have been you instead of Eido. Then I’d still have my sons.”

When Darro found Marroo hiding behind his mother’s books he wanted to burn every scrap of paper in the house. “You’ll make him like you.” He growled.

“You think you’re a better example? He broke another boy’s ribs, Darro!”

“Better than hiding behind these!” His spirit swept across the bookshelf next to their bedroom door, stopping just short of manifesting to cut them into shreds as he stalked along them, noting the names without caring about their contents. He pulled one down flipped through it until he knew it was as unrealistic as he’d expected. He snapped the book shut and shoved it onto the shelf. “These people aren’t real!” He rasped. “You can’t fix your life by pretending to live someone else’s.”

She glared at him from the chair where she’d curled up around a battered old book as the Midnight Plains brought the night. “Is that what you think I should do? Just, fix everything? Make everything alright?”

He stared at her and she looked away.

“Yes.” He grated.

“My son died.” She said, and looked back at him. “How am I supposed to fix that?”

“You barely noticed when he was born.” Darro snapped. “You have to move on.”

She looked at him, but didn’t seem to see him. “I can’t.”

When his son dropped the stone from his hands Darro picked it up and placed it back in his palms. “There will always be pain.” He told him as he folded his hands around the boy’s and stared into his eyes. “You have to be stronger than it.”

He found a note folded on their bed in the aftermath of her death and sat with it for a long time, spun it between his fingers while he remembered the smiling girl he’d taken from the flesh-house in the underground, the happiness they’d briefly found in the big house and the daylight, before he held it before him for his spirit to shred into unreadable strips.

You made my life miserable, he thought as he laid his hands on the clear coffin in which she was laid to rest. He looked down at her while his son wept inconsolably behind him. Our sons were the only good thing you ever gave me. Our sons, and a few good years. I won’t let him end like you. He felt the weight of his promises to her slide from him as he turned to his son and pulled words from his lacerated throat. “Come and say goodbye to your mother.”

That last weight endured, but only for a little while.

“What does the sword do?”

“It cuts.”

The day Marroo touched the icon shivered in the sword’s memories. The blade hummed in Marroo’s hands as he saw, through his father’s eyes, as he manifested his first sword of breath and hurled it toward his father’s face. He felt his father’s laughter as pride towered within him at the knowledge that his son was now as powerful as he could make him, a pride that lingered as the breath carried Marroo through last battles, pain, and the last memories of a coughing up blood while he waited to give his last breath to his son. Pride, and a love so intense as he lay dying, that it might have been rage.

A figure stood in front of Marroo when he opened his eyes at the top of the ruined tower to escape his father’s memories. It floated in the air in front of him, coalesced from the storm of manifested blades that roared around Marroo in the aura of the blade in his hand, a dark silhouette sharper than broken glass and with two silver eyes bright with condensed breath.

“Why!” Marroo shouted at the figure. He lashed out with his own spirit, and the manifested blades cut straight through the geist. They sprayed broken swords like guts from its side before the breath reformed and the shape hovered whole before him once again.

“Why?” Marroo demanded again, although he knew, knew that this was not his father, knew it despite its spiritual presence, that it was just a haunting, a construct built from memories and the will his father pressed with his spirit into the blade as he died. “Your powers ruined your life!” Marroo shouted at his father’s last breath. “Why give them to me? Why make me like you?”

The father thing shaped from swords and spirit drifted in front of him without answering while the wind howled through the broken tower and the grass whispered in the wastes far below.

“Battle comes.”

The voice was like a distant whetstone drawn across a rusty blade.

“Why?” Marroo asked again.

The geist raised one sharpened arm in answer and Marroo looked to the horizon to see an aircab careening towards them, a spiritual aura like a poisonous sun rising as it fell towards them in an uncontrolled dive.

“Battle comes.” The geist whispered again, then blew apart to join the breath orbiting Marroo in a storm.

Marroo closed his eyes as the shade dissipated into his spirit and felt his hand tighten around the handle of his father’s sword. “But I don’t want it to.” He answered.

The careening aircab shot downwards suddenly as a smaller shape hurled itself from the falling vehicle. Marroo felt his father’s spirit churn through his own meridians as it recognized the rotten aura hurtling towards them across the desolation and he added his own spiritual power to it. Marroo screamed as he pulled back the sword he’d come here to dispose of and shoved his soul through it.

The grass and brush trees beneath the tower shook at the tide of spiritual power caught up in the blade as Marroo swept it back, the power of two adepts combining into the blade that only amplified their power, the whisper through the weeds transformed to a roar as Marroo swung and the breath shot out across the wasteland accompanied by a gust of wind that tore up weeds and shook dust from the shattered ground as it warped the very fabric of the world.

A wave of corruption rose to meet the sword cut as it reached the approaching adept, it must have eaten away the edge of the cut because that adept didn’t separated into two falling halves as he fell towards Marroo, instead it slammed him backwards with enough force to send up a plume of rubble from a new crater while Marroo scrambled down from his perch to throw himself at his bike.

A beam of corruption chased him as the gyros spun and Marroo hopped into the air, but he still held his father’s sword, and a flick of his spirit was enough to dissipate the pursuing technique before he dove over the edge of the building and was away.

Dawn broke as he re-sheathed the sword and slung it over the back of his bike, the pale light from the core throwing the city into shadows as he left the wastes and pulled his spirit back into its veil before he wove a path through the towers towards home.