All the world a spear, and the taste of blood. This one was tall. For a human, of course; to Esserai, tall could only mean the great trees and their spreading branches high overhead, but for a human, this one was tall. Six-four, or perhaps six-five, and what might’ve been a lanky frame in adolescence fully filled out in adulthood.
Her head snapped sideways as the cudgel connected with her jaw, and she spat blood involuntarily. Esserai was not fond of cudgels, the crude, ugly weapons that they were, and so, as she reeled back from the blow, she kicked the man with a little more force than was strictly necessary. Her foot caught his black-bandaged head on the temple, and he went flying into the grass a dozen yards away.
Plunging her spear into the dirt behind her, she thrust herself upright and took a wide, crouched stance. One had circled behind her, while the other was directly in front of her. Esserai closed her eyes. The world of colors and shapes vanished, and she sensed more strongly the flowing channels of rei. In the earth, in the grass, in the air. In her body.
She sensed a knife darting through the gap between her and the shrouded assassin behind her and turned her body parallel to it. The person in front of her, for she couldn't immediately distinguish whether they were male or female behind their all-covering clothing, was forced to deflect it with his sword.
To their credit, her assailants said not a word in frustration. Instead, they rushed at her together. Esserai thrust at the black-clad sword wielder in front of her, extending the pike to its full fifteen feet of length. They parried, or tried to, but she’d already released the spear, turned her body one hundred and eighty degrees, and thrust the butt of the spear behind her back into the gut of the knife thrower that had been to her rear moments before.
A feminine grunt escaped her lips, then Esserai lifted the butt of the spear, smashing it into her chin. With a quick jab of the blunt wooden end of her spear, Esserai introduced the woman’s esophagus to her spinal column, ending her life.
She opened her eyes.
With a thought and a pulse of rei, the spear shrank to the size of a baton. Esserai twisted, then sent it careening out again in a rapidly expanding rod towards the lone swordsman, its tip the triplicate fangs of a trident. The man, whose snarl was one that only a frightened, enraged man could make, charged towards her.
Lifting his sword over his shoulder, the point facing the earth as he ran, the man deflected the trident in a scrape of wood against metal. He closed the distance quickly, and Esserai felt a shifting of the air as he brought his sword streaking down, a long katana, with the wind visibly sharpening in an extension of the blade.
Arrogant child, she thought, and vanished her spear. A single step brought her a hand’s breath from the man’s shrouded face, and she lifted an open palm to strike his chest. Her eyes flared violet as she channeled rei through her navel, her heart, her veins, down through her shoulder and arm and into her forearm, then finally out of her hand.
The glaive glistened a thirsty crimson as its long, curved blade rose towards the sky, the swordsman hanging motionless, impaled gruesomely on its wet shaft. His sword, which was raised above his head with the promise of a definitive strike, fell from his limp hands, its final task unfulfilled, and planted itself vertically into the dirt.
The swordsman began to slide down the shaft of the spear, blood staining the black fabric of his wrappings in an ever-growing circle like a macabre rendition of the rising moon. Esserai shifted her glaive to the side and cast him off, the blade sliding easily from his flesh.
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I spend my life killing strangers in a strange land. I know not their people nor their creed; their lives are a mystery to me, except for how they end.
Flipping her hands over and over, Esserai twisted the glaive faster and faster till it spun like a falling leaf, purging it of blood and the stain of her sins. If I cannot cleanse myself, then I shall tend to your purity, Siah, that you might only dirty yourself with the blood of tainted foes.
Remembrances of her naming day came to her in images and time-worn words as she strode to the place where her first attacker lay.
“You did well, daughter! You will protect our clan with your spear, just as the spear protected you for seven days and seven nights in Obemsfad.”
Memories of the Dead Place, the Obemsfad, the clearing within the clearing still haunted her to this day, and Esserai gripped the haft of her spear more tightly.
But it was not ghouls that slew us in the end—not the shattered souls of the forsaken nor the kissing hands of the unmakers. It was the humans. And their gods.
Esserai let the tip of her spear, its head in the form of an elegant, needle-like spike, fall to rest on the soft flesh above the man’s kneecap. Then, she drove it in. He screamed, but she stabbed it through until she felt the resistance of bone against the point.
“If you wish to walk again, then speak. Who sent you?”
Though Esserai could not see the man’s eyes, she felt them pleading. His cudgel had fallen several feet away from him, and he was lying there, helpless, the leg without her spear in it mangled and bent crookedly beside his hip.
Your prayers aren’t sent to a god of fortune, then.
“They’ll kill me, worse than kill me, they’ll—”
The cracking of bone was a shiver through the wood in her hand, punctuated by a gasp, then a scream.
“Who.”
Esserai crouched and lowered her hand, making the spear's angle shallower, more parallel to the ground and his outstretched leg. Gently pressing forwards, she guided the spear point deeper into the mans thigh, feeling it scrape against his femur until it was almost touching his pelvis.
“They’re. Coming. For you,” he said.
Each word was bitten off, made almost unintelligible by his rasping, throaty voice. The man coughed, and blood came with it, filling his mouth and distorting his breathing into a choking sort of gurgle.
“What do you think happens…” Esserai rotated the shaft back and forth in her hand, the needlepoint tip of her spear grinding against some bone in his hip, “If I change the shape of my spear while it's inside of you?”
Esserai tilted her head to the side, then drew her lips back into a tired smile.
“Turned it into, say, an axhead? Or a hammer? And slowly, yes, very slowly.” And her skin began to shine white with rei.
The man shook his bandage-wrapped head, and a sharp, sour odor intruded on her nostrils.
“Fine," he expulsed a racking cough, "okay... okay—It's the Mori, they hear tales of a giantess in the west, AHH—”
She twisted the spear again. However heavy her heart weighed with the atrocities she was forced to commit, Esserai would not tolerate disrespect toward her people.
The words came faster, more urgent. “A-and they wanted to take you, to meet you, recruit you and—”
With a light prodding thrust, the left side of his pelvis fractured.
“Enough. These Mori, who are they?”
But his head had slumped forwards, and he was dead.
Humans... I forget how fragile their bodies are. I shall take more care with them in the future.
After cleaning Siah again, Esserai made her way back to the road. The bubble of rei that had concealed their fight would fade soon, and she didn’t want to be in its vicinity when it did. By nightfall, she would be at the city’s gates. By nightfall, she would take the first real step on her journey.