"Tissue." I groaned, pressure bearing down on me. Moments later, a young man ran up, wiping the blood rolling down from my eyes away.
"Thanks." I groaned once more.
Even sparing the two words ached like I'd been speaking for days straight. Everything hurt, my mind ready to explode, my body humming with power barely restrained.
Come on, Rook, don't give in yet.
I felt like I'd lost my connection to time. All that existed was pressure crushing me, grinding me into the very core of the planet. I was a speck under the weight of an entire mountain.
I will not break.
A stream of power and insight was constantly rushing into me from a crack in the heavens far above, a rift in space-time that I'd torn open using my unique connection to the concepts of time and the sword.
The sword. Hah, and to think I ever thought I knew anything about swords.
While I'd been gradually crushed under the weight looming far overhead, my mind had been forcibly expanded as I desperately attempted to grasp meaning from something that transcended my current existence. It was like trying to desperately catch snowflakes out of the air, only to melt in your hands as soon as you did.
Days. That much I knew. I'd been grasping those snowflakes for days as power continuously tore me apart from the inside out. It wasn't even mana; the concept carried too much weight for my vessel.
Or nearly, because as much as I felt like I was tearing apart at the seams, I held all the same. So those very snowflakes, which had been melting in my hands, slowly began to last for only the blink of an eye, then a tenth of a second, then a full second, slowly building up as I began to grasp something more.
Whatever that something was, I wasn't even sure of myself. I felt like I could see a picture in the distance, an image forming that I recognized without fully understanding what I was recognizing.
Almost there.
If I was in bad shape, my helpers were in even worse shape, even with only a moment of attention to spare toward any of them at any given moment; I saw the way their bodies quaked, days straight of effort on the verge of failing.
Which was where my current desperation was beginning to grow. Sure, I felt like I was under the pressure of a mountain, but to them, their bodies not made for this sort of effort must have felt like they were under the pressure of the heavens themselves.
Find it, find the spark you're missing.
I was so close; I could feel it.
"Pull back!" I heard a shout from far away, reminded that despite all my days of effort, battles had been waged—a slowly losing battle. Letting my attention waver briefly, I recognized what was happening.
We were losing, being pushed back. We had perhaps half our original numbers, and from the look of things, we were being swiftly driven back, our mages exhausted, and numbers dwindling without the magic to disrupt enemy lines.
Shit.
I returned my attention to the task at hand. We didn't have long; that much was obvious, but the thing about understanding was that it couldn't be rushed.
But if I didn't rush, we would run out of time, our line would break, and we would break. Furthermore, my helpers may not even last that long.
Desperation began to settle in, and so I made a rash decision. I didn't have time to break down and decipher the meaning of the concept drawn from some fragment of the future. I'd have to force it.
Here goes nothing.
If it wasn't for the fact that I felt as close to an epiphany as I was, testing my luck as I was about to would have been suicide, but I only needed a little more. Forcing that little bit more was unlikely to cause much of an issue.
Surely.
My decision was made; I closed my eyes, drew a deep breath, and focused my mana sense on the rift far above. It was like pressing my hands against a ceiling and expecting to push through an inviolable barrier.
But all barriers could be broken.
Grasping what meaning I had already gained from the rift, a tangled mess of half-formed ideas and vague concepts, nonsensical words and visions, I imagined folding them together, shaping them, and folding them again and again and again.
Until, within my mind, I imagined a blade of imaginary, unborn, and fictitious existences, a sword forged of thoughts born of a paradox made reality.
And then I thrust it into the rift, shattering the boundary with the very concepts I'd gained from it.
In my mind, it was as if I was sitting at the center of an exploding star, something I'd experienced before. Seconds passed as my world was an existence made of endless white until that too vanished, and of all places, I found myself back home, back in Juniper.
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I was sitting in the kitchen, across the counter from-
Me?
"I knew you were rash sometimes, but this takes the cake." The other me, an older-looking version of me, perhaps in my late forties, chided.
"Who are you?" I questioned.
"Oh, you should understand that well enough; I'm you. Sort of. I'm a fragment born from a concept stolen from a 'what-if' splintered from a larger existential time stream."
"Come again?" I questioned.
The most brilliant blade I'd ever seen appeared in the older me's hands. Or, logically, my brain could tell me such an apparent reality. The issue was that while I understood logically that there was a sword in his hands that I was looking at, I could not make any sense of the sight like a space of nonsense in the shape of a sword was all that existed.
"You reached out through time, siphoned meaning from a branching future, and drew it back to you of the present. Simply siphoning it wasn't enough, though, and you decided to go and stick your hand in the cookie jar. Metaphorically speaking."
"I reached out into time?" I raised an eyebrow at the older variant of me.
"Basically." He, I, nodded. "Breaking the space-time barrier isn't something that is done lightly. Floating down the timestream is one thing, as the Sage Above All once did. What you just decided to do was swim against that stream, and you went and got yourself stranded in a small rock within that stream."
"In less metaphorical and flowery terms?" I questioned myself.
"Your mind currently exists outside of time, and the only reason you didn't break apart like a clump of sand in the ocean is a tighter temporal binding due to prior exposure. That, and you've got me shielding you."
"And you are a fragment born from the concepts I was siphoning."
"Bingo. You can think of me along the lines as you would a Vestige, except I never existed; I'm only a concept born of forces you were channeling. You could say, in a way, that I'm the spirit of your Blade."
"You're… Rainsplitter?" I stared in disbelief at the old version of me.
"Two for two."
"Then-"
"Ahh, don't get ahead of yourself." The spirit of Rainsplitter winked. "There is a lot that you simply aren't capable of understanding right now, which is the entire point of what you did, isn't it?"
"I guess," I mumbled.
"Good, if you understand that, then heed these words. If it's the strength to strike down any and all foes, look no further than here. It will cost you, though. You aren't ready for this; it will break you, and you will have to reforge the pieces and reshape the meaning."
"Will I be able to prevail if I don't?" I questioned, suddenly quiet.
"Hah, not a chance." The spirit of Rainsplitter snorted. "That is why I already know your answer, but I'll ask anyway: Will you do it?"
I was silent for several seconds before I shook my head, a spark of defiance in my eyes.
"Yes."
"You wouldn't be you if you said anything else." Rainsplitter snorted.
The blade that Rainsplitter had been holding vanished. Within my own hand, I felt a sudden familiar weight as a blade began to form, growing brighter by the second.
"Go, do what needs to be done then." Rainsplitter shooed me away, but I frowned at the sword's spirit for a second.
"Before I leave, I've just got one last question."
"Best be quick; you don't have much time left."
"Why do you look like that-" I gestured toward the Rainsplitter. "Like me?"
"Oh, that's simple enough." Rainsplitter shrugged. "Because the Blade is you."
------------------------
My eyes snapped open as the world's loudest crack of shattering glass rang out, shaking the sky. I had no attention to spare toward the noise, though, and instead focused on the last few words spoken to me.
The Blade is you.
There was a power in those words that I couldn't yet grasp, and it was for the best that I didn't even bother. With myself at the epicenter, an explosion of force flung everything nearby away from me, the weight of the world no longer bearing down on us but instead radiating out from the sword I held within my right hand.
It was Rainsplitter, but unlike I'd ever seen Rainsplitter before.
No, that's not quite right.
Rainsplitter was part of the sword I now held, but it was only a single fragment; whatever I held existed beyond Rainsplitter.
The Blade is you.
It was longer and thinner than I recalled Rainsplitter, with a slight curve to the single-edged Blade. The cross guard was fashioned of wood, worn, aged, and polished black, and the pommel was wrapped in timeworn cloth like the wraps a veteran pugilist would wrap around their fists.
It was, without a doubt, the single most incredible sword I'd ever seen. It had no ounce of flair, a weapon of pure practicality, the only hint of appeal in the polished black wood of the cross guard.
I admired the Blade for only a moment later, noticing several aids running toward us, but I couldn't spare the time to talk with them. Whatever, however, the Blade worked, I could tell it wouldn't last.
Change of plans.
Initially, the idea had been to draw the concepts and power from the future into Rainsplitter and strike down the great wall of Theronhold with a descending blade of light; I didn't need to be close to the wall to do that. From this new sword, that wouldn't be possible.
Or rather, I couldn't physically handle it; I wouldn't be able to draw that much potential from it.
Going to have to get in close and personal.
Feeling the mana forming the Blade rapidly dwindling, I had maybe a minute to reach the city wall. All the while, an entire battle unfolded between the city wall and me.
No problem.
Instantly, I could feel that it wasn't just the Blade radiating with power; I felt more powerful. It was like Flow but with an entirely qualitative improvement stacked on top of it. At this moment, I felt like I was on top of the world, number one.
"Let's see what we can do, eh?" I spoke softly to the sword, and like a flash of black lightning, I shot forward, adrenaline coursing through me. I didn't even feel my feet move; it was as if I was flickering forward, appearing and disappearing with unmatched speed as a whoop of excitement escaped me.
Now, this is something else!
Reaching the battlefield in an instant, I lashed out once, and the sheer speed of the strike projected the Blade's sharpness forward, a wind blade that cleaved through hundreds in a single stroke, as easy as crushing ants.
Holy shit!
Two more strikes and I'd opened a path, two swipes and untold amounts of deceased soldiers. I raced forward as if I were a phantom appearing and disappearing at will. In moments, I stood before the towering wall—walls that had once loomed over me as a child, walls that seemed so unconquerable.
Perhaps I was drunk on more power than I'd ever had access to, but those same towering walls looked like nothing more than a sandcastle ready to be kicked over.
I raised the unknown Blade overhead, preparing for my strike. No mana was gathered, no special powers used, nothing—just a single downward strike.
And that was all it took.
A line of darkness seemed to descend, cleaving through the invincible wall. The battle that had been waging suddenly went silent, as onlookers from outside the walls and inside the city could only stare in shocked awe at the massive crevice cleaving through them like a god had descended and opened a canyon through a mountain pass.
The unbreakable walls of Theronhold, the Titan of the North, the unconquerable city, had been breached.
No magic, no special powers, no extended siege.
Just a single downward swing from the world's most incredible Blade.