“That weapon can kill me.”

Beatrice flinched as that simple statement reverberated through the room. All the arguing, the posturing, the anticipation of battle - everything was overshadowed by Rhys who had not even raised his voice. Because there was a sudden but intense edge to his tone.

“I would expect so, mage,” it was her cousin to recover first, channeling all his bravado as he brandished the black great sword. He had no right to hold it. “Ervul’kar’tish has slain greater than all of you combined, held in worse hands than mine. What is a little corpse princess and a few magical rats?”

“Ervul’kar’tesh,” Rhys corrected the pronunciation of all things. “The Forsaken Son, Severed from Heavens. I know. I know who harvested the firmament used to forge it. I remember the names of the three stars plucked to be devoured by it. As I do recall the smith’s tragic story.”

And Beatrice finally realized what was wrong with him. The thing that made him suddenly spill in a few sentences more secrets and mysteries than she had been able to tease out in two weeks. It was a simple emotion, really, just not one she had ever associated with him. Something not expressed a single time during their journey. Not upon the gallows or when facing assassins. Not even when a whole army had surrounded them. Rhys was afraid.

“That is…” the knight commander frowned. Most of the room had not realized that, instead they were baffled by the earlier exclamation. “Agh, enough words. They will change nothing. Each of you is market for death anyway.”

“You have one chance to leave,” Rhys decreed, his eyes locked so intensely on the blade they could perhaps even really pop out of the skull. “A single more step forward and I will hold nothing back.”

“Try me,” Dalbert sneered and took that fateful stride.

Rhys did not speak again as the world broke. In less time that it took to blink, Beatrice felt like she had been dragged underwater, drowning in a rampaging current. As if her blood had frozen and then began to boil at the same time, trying to rip its way out of her veins. Logically, she knew neither of those things were happening, but to her senses it felt that way. Time had slowed down to a crippled crawl and everyone was forcefully captured within it.

Except Rhys. The old necromancer moved with only a slight stiffness, while the entire room was as if shackled. He took several steps towards the knight commander, reaching beneath his robes. And as Beatrice stared at his back, she was barraged with fractured visions. Brief glimpses of Deeds beyond imagination. She saw mountains burning, reduced from towering peaks into pools of slag. The very skies, petrified into rock and collapsing. Packs of pale, dead dragons, haunting prey. And then a thousand other, more than that. Too many to behold.

“Who…” are you? She wanted to scream, but the pressure was too overwhelming, just that single word making it out of her mouth already felt like a miracle. She felt the blood swelling in her eyes from what she had just witnessed, only stopped from freely flowing by the unrelenting pressure. Nonetheless, she was a spared a single glance and an answer.

“I am the champion of no cause, sovereign of no crown, hero of no tale,” Rhys declared, withdrawing the hand from beneath his clothes.

In it, he held something akin to a scepter, except rather than forged with metal, it had been crafted from a thick arrangement of scales in a myriad of colors. And instead of a head, there was a blood shot eye imbued into the top, tense veins of blue blood visible on it as it flickered around the room. For a moment Beatrice beheld a slit, lizardlike pupil glance her way filling her with crushing instinctual dread. Thankfully

“I am just the coward who lives.”

The scepter focused on Dalbert, frozen practically in the middle of his final step. Then the Knight Commander literally melted. Metal and flesh slid off the bones, mixing into a heterogenous slush at the floor. It had happened in an instant, leaving only a still upright skeleton - frozen in time like everyone and everything else.

The scepter then refocused on the blade, the eye’s blue veins bulging even further. For a few silent moments, nothing happened, until eventually the great sword began to vibrate. Bit by bit, the movement intensified. Then, with a deafening CRACK her family’s heirloom, that blade that should never have left a vault except in the darkest of days, shattered.

Moments later, the pressure finally ceased and Beatrice felt like she could breathe again. Her eyes freely bled, and she was half deaf, but that was not enough to distract her. She used the table for support, watching as the skeleton of who had been her cousin collapsed while Rhys walked over to the hundred tiny shards scattered across the ground. The man stared at them for several seconds, watching as the three glowing jewels - were they actually stars?? - faded into nothingness. Then turned and left into the tunnel system.

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Fighting through nausea and trembling knees, Beatrice rushed after him. She made it into the tunnel but didn’t catch a glimpse of where the older necromancer had gone. Wanting to curse, the princess forced herself to calm down. Rhys did not know the tunnels well and would likely want to avoid witnesses. Unless he decided to become invisible again. But she couldn’t assume she had already lost. So instead she urged the Change to become a flickering flame that would provide light, then rushed down the fastest path she knew towards that garden in the inner city they had stopped at just a day prior. Her stumbling sprint was infuriatingly slow, but in the end she just barely made it, spotting a flash of light just as the trap door closed behind Rhys.

“That was unbelievable!” she rushed up the ladder and shouted at his departing back.

“Ah, I suppose a smooth departure was too much to hope for,” he turned but actually waited for her to catch up. “And you look quite terrible. As if you have seen something you really weren’t meant to.”

“You could destroy armies,” she barely registered the comment. “Large ones, several of them. And you could do it easily.”

“Or so you believe,” Rhys still half-heartedly refuted.

“If you wanted to, you could be a king of any nation. Or all nations,” she continued. “You could have anything at your whim easily. Whatever you desired… why aren’t you?”

“Fine, let’s take that though into its logical conclusion if that will make you understand,” Rhys shrugged. “I challenge a nation and destroy their army, what happens next?”

“They scramble to gather a second,” she quickly concluded. “But after that they would have no choice but to surrendered.”

“No, after that every other nation in even the remotest proximity forms a coalition to subdue the ‘evil’ threatening all of their rules,” Rhys shook his head. “I destroy those again. What happens after.”

“They try assassins, if they wouldn’t have already,” Beatrice thought. “Then also try to gather more armies. But eventually they will run out.”

“Exactly, and therein lies the problem, newt,” Rhys nodded. “Because once they are out of armies and learn their assassins keep failing they will get desperate. Do you know what desperate kings do, Beatrice, when they feel the crown slipping?”

“Anything,” she realized. Her cousin had also stolen the now destroyed blade when he had felt desperate. It had been no coincidence he chose to strike just upon her return, no matter how he knew.

“That is when they crack open the forbidden tomes and unseal weapons of wars exactly a single battle older than history,” he nodded grimly. “When fools exhume the Dragon Tombs and learn to pluck stars from the firmament again - as if there weren’t good reasons for why both were scoured from memory. Before you know it, we will have another era of legends.”

“That is a stretch,” she surmised, not even sure what half the terms meant.

“That is a possibility,” Rhys disagreed. “I have seen it happen, more than once, actually. One idiot with too much power pushes too far for too long, and then the rest of us have to dodge city killing spells or worse. Where every other village has a living legend with an ego unwilling to acknowledge anyone else in the world is as special as them, so they battle without a care for collateral damage. And when a thousand more arms like the sword I broke get released into the world.”

“Weapons that could kill you,” she said, remembering that brief but intense fear she had seen in him.

“I will always admit to being a coward,” Rhys did not even refute. “If I have it my way, there will never again be another Dragonking or Star-eater Lord. It is much safer to prevent the most dangerous things from being born rather than dealing with them afterward.”

“So you just run from even the slightest risk?”

“Heroes can die for their tales, I am content listening well after,” he stated, then paused. “Well, any other questions about my ambitions of staying alive?”

“I never understood the whole newt thing,” she sighed, changing to a less serious topic. Because it would eat at her to not know. “But it seemed rude to ask.”

“Ah, I suppose it is a bit culturally outdated,” Rhys nodded, much happier to elaborate on that. “It comes from my homeland. There used to live a species of giant lizards with a particular quirk. Namely, that in the first few years of their lives, their young were practically indistinguishable from most dragons of the same age. A few famous myths involved that fact - every village boy likes to pretend they could turn from farmer to hero with just a bit of cuckoo luck. So we had a saying: When you rear a newt, make sure it won’t change your life.”

“And which am I?” she smiled at that.

“I have known you for a few weeks,” Rhys shrugged. “Dragons and lizards both take a while to mature.”

“Maybe you could help nudge the odds further,” she tried.

“No,” and got the expected answer.

“Then what about…”

“I really should get going before I have to shake off further followers,” he interrupted her. “You get one last question, Beatrice, make it count.”

So she paused to think it through. It was certain that after he answered he would turn and leave, never to return. So many thoughts were surging through her head, but most Rhys would certainly not answer. She pondered for several seconds before realizing that one question truly eclipsed them all. For every moment she thought about it, her mind only craved an answer more. And so, she asked: “Will I ever meet you again?”

“Hmm,” Rhys paused to consider it, then nodded. “Yes. Be it in a decade or century. Upon a witch’s pyre or within a serene tomb. A heroine or villain, ordinary or without peer. Whenever death takes you, I shall come. Then you can tell me of all your triumphs and regrets. Good luck, Beatrice, and I mean that. May your tale be riveting.”

END