The Hero released his grip on the sword embedded in the Demon Lord’s chest. His fingers were wet.
The gnarled trees whistled through their bare branches and whispered secrets for the ravens and vultures and crows picking at meat in their gleeful way and the faded consonants of their words ran in a trickle between his feet and through his fingers and across the rough expanse of his skin and though he knew his blood coursed strong so too did he feel that he was not truly alive; the pecks like totems and the trees’ words like a chant and the starless sky like a veil to wrap the lands’ boundaries and allow no living creature to pass through its mists.
Between the tangled roots and sparse grass and steel and blacksteel weaponry and endless smears of blood were the pallid flesh of corpses and none were felled by disease or age or injury and these bodies stretched across every inch of the island whether they were armed or unarmed or possessing white armbands or possessing dark armour they did not breathe unless they were him.
Somewhere amidst the severed heads of men and unblinking stares of women and the burned villages and the fallen comrades and the unrelenting fatigue and the screams and glares of the soldiers they struck down their goal had transformed from liberation to vengeance. Despite all the speeches on morality and necessity he had quietly known that vengeance had always been his goal and that despite all the ways he had grown and the companions he had found and the armies he had gathered and alliances he had made he was still the same sharp-eyed peasant lying in the dirt with a mouth full of broken teeth and the world taken from him, except now there was no world left to take back.
The battalions had been slowly stripped away on both sides to reveal the beating organ beneath the war; him and the Demon Lord with their pride and reason and purpose drained away like an apple with only skin remaining and left with only the form of the thing and that form was dark and intangible.
He wondered whether he should complete the merciless symmetry of their war and open his throat and leave this evil place as a record of a mad and meaningless hubris for the other islands to point to and deliver little didactic stories about and say look at these savages and look at their ways and look how we cleverly commandeered their future through politics and alliances and duplicitousness and all those weapons and look how we tried to help them but it was not to be and so this event this enormous and all-encompassing island of mocking trees and laughing birds and the people that were no longer people would be herded into the confines of a page or play and crammed into the word tragedy as if words were anything but noise.
Even as the rest of his being hung limply above his own body the thought lingered for long enough that it settled in his gut like boiling blood and before coherency could return to his mind that woeful heat in his stomach spread to his legs and he was stumbling forwards and away and the stillness of his mind broke and settled and broke and settled and he suddenly knew that his destination must be somewhere far away and he also knew that he could walk past the stars themselves and it wouldn’t be far enough.
As he walked the minutiae of his surroundings changed and the patterns of the carrion birds changed and the villages changed and the grass changed and the dead changed yet nothing truly changed as if he weren’t moving at all and the ground was simply rolling beneath his feet. His armour was heavy so he pawed at its straps but there were no squires to aid him and no friends to help him and though he managed to doff his helm and leave it as his feet and drop his pauldrons against a trunk and unbuckle his scabbard the rest of his plate remained stubbornly attached to his aching existence and he wondered whether he was a spirit wandering the land of the dead with its memory bisected from it alongside its life and if his struggles had ever been real. True night fell without chill and he supped on a dead man’s rations and slept leaned against a mound of his fallen soldiers while dreaming of ghostly violence with the hundred bruises and cuts playing throughout it all like the spirit of agony and he didn’t wake until the next day was over.
His stride carried him past splintered homes and crumbled masonry and fallen walls and razed fields and burning forests and bloodied pathways and broken bridges and the unceasing dead wearing both the enemy’s colours and his own and ash rained from the sky draping him in a blanket of his destroyed homeland and though he breathed no one else did and the sea grew from the horizon like some god’s final judgement and the wind ferried its pure scent over to him and it was rich and salty like rabbit stew yet cold and unceasing and he slid through the scrub rooted in sand and stumbled across the beach and felt the shock of water around his ankles and he pushed forward through the seaweed and gazed past the fish and the water and the distant lumps of the surrounding islands and past the silhouettes snaking through the depths and the sea birds and hawks hovering above the wind and past the mists and past his own vision to the jagged mountain rising above it all to pierce the heavens.
He walked along the shoreline and over rocks and through the port city where the remnants of his fleet bobbed and waited for their masters and down the pier and past the sorrowful ships and though his eyes fixed on a one-man fishing boat his mind gazed at that prideful mountain lifetimes distant.
It was the Spine of the World, a pilgrimage for the great and foolish to strive towards. At the intersect between the earth and the celestial anything was possible. Yet of all the philosophers and warriors and monarchs only bone was their legacy. The Spine consumed those that reached for it.
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He grasped the oars using them to push off the pier and against the ocean and he propelled the boat away from his broken homeland and his body was perspiring mightily and his spirit was full of the uncharted waters ahead.
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He returned in a different boat with salt coating skin scorched brown by the sun’s unceasing stare with it all draped over a languishing body and at his feet lay a broad mutt with drooping jowls and joyful eyes. He pulled the pier using the oars and managed to manoeuvre the shoddy vessel over to it. He looked around the boat for anything to bring with him however there was nothing he desired but the pants on his legs and boots on his feet. He whistled sharply but the distance was too large for the dog so he wrapped his hands around her belly and lifted her onto the wood, careful to avoid placing her soft paws on the barnacles menacing the length of the pier. Afterwards he leapt onto it and nearly toppled as the ground rocked wildly.
The two of them sat there a while with the dog licking his face as he rubbed her mottled coat thinking. When his legs returned he rose and walked the pier with its angry barnacles scrabbling against his boots and the sea breeze fading at his back and the music of waves dying against land. He reached the centre of the port city of Fellawong and saw the remnants of its people as they walked from their huts and talked as they worked and walked with their baskets and the smell of Ulla’s forge burning and his hammer swinging and the fishmongers hawking and the stench of all the people and fish and food and feuds and laughter. He saw the Demon Lord’s warriors clad in their blacksteel rush through it all with their demands of children and food as tribute and all the people quiet fearing the world was at its end. He saw the ruins and he saw the dead and he saw the silence and he saw what it was. His eyes ached but he bit his lip and refused the tears. The dog whined and he crooned gentle words to her.
They drunk from rainwater filtered from a barrel layered with charcoal and he took a small rod and went to impale a cricket on its hook but changed his mind and cast it into the sea with a berry. They watched the bobber ride the roll of the waves. He caught seaweed. He wondered whether it would be better to use a fishing spear but decided not to leave his island. He caught a pearlsten, its silver scales shimmering as its thin body writhed, mindless of its own mortality yet understanding it in the way all things do. He cooked it and they shared it and when night fell they slept in a tangle of bushes, just off the beach. Above them the hemisphere turned, driving the stars from the sky.
He walked a wide and beaten path inland with the dog snuffling at the rotting bodies sparse on the roadside. His scouts had been forced to clear them away so as to not impede the main army’s march. Aral, who had followed him since hearing his speeches in the squares of another island and who had laughed and wept often, had been among them and had died in one of the first ambushes of the war. He searched for his friend’s features in the flesh of the fallen but if he saw them he could not recognise them.
He walked through rows of broken stakes overgrown with vines bent under the weight of berries and tomatoes and grapes and the dog ate one then spat it out and pawed at the ground frantically. He walked through a village that he hadn’t known the name of until his army had fought through the wreckage and it was there he had learned it was Benahew, known for its wine. After the battle there they had drunk the wine in measured sips from the few remaining bottles, quietly gazing at the dead that they could not bury. It was there that he had first begun to suspect what his war would take.
He left the village with a shovel and walked onwards through the forest. It was in this stretch that their forces had advanced and retreated, clashing and withdrawing like two lovestruck birds soaring through an endless ritual, their wake leaving a trail of bodies as if they were flakes from a giant’s skin. He told the dog that somewhere nearby must be his fallen companions: his tactician Ada, his lieutenant Orth, his seven stern guards with little Ballajee among their number and everyone he had loved and befriended for the purpose of his cause and the dog listened and in her wisdom gave no reply. Blacksteel swords and pikes and halberds and armour and he remembered giving a speech to his forces about how blacksteel was an unholy material and a sign their foes’ apostasy but even as he castigated them for their ways he knew he would have sold his soul for five hundred such weapons had a devil offered.
The dog’s loping slowed and she grew tired so he found a small glade off the side of the destruction with a trickle of water fumbling through a path of stones and despite his misgivings he held her to his chest and she licked him and he struggled his way to a restless slumber. Within the expanse of his sleep he spoke to the dead and they looked at him and spoke but he could not hear them and when he awoke the mutt was licking his face and he sobbed without substance because he could not allow tears to come.
He arrived at the place with the whispering trees and hungering birds and saw the Demon Lord dead, a sword impaled in his chest. The madness of that war was that at its end there were only two remaining combatants and each had been merely of above-average martial talent, their ephemeral bodies holding neither black magic nor holy blessing. The danger of their naked blades had forced each to freeze and measure the other’s breathing and stance and they had slowly drawn closer in search of a lethal blow. And he remembered that in the Demon Lord’s face he had seen bleeding through the fury an overwhelming despair to match his own, and he knew that for all the evil that had arose from the Demon Lord’s fingers he remained but a wrinkled, bearded man witnessing the end of the world.
He stood at the Demon Lord’s body with the shovel grasped loosely in his left hand. Everything descended upon him.
His fingers were dry. He reached downward and grasped the worn hilt of his blade and drew it out. The Hero stood, frozen, staring at the weapon. Eventually, he let it fall to the side. His body turned to survey the desolation, and almost unconsciously his head raised to stare at the blue expanse peeking through the canopy.
He grasped the shovel’s handle between calloused hands. With a sharp exhale, he buried its head into the dirt.