Winter, as Denor had grimly anticipated, arrived not so much like an unwelcome guest but more like a heavily armored Trunian invader, with relentless snow horrible cold. Yet somehow, this particular winter had taken the weather forecast and decided to double down on every bit of unpleasantness, out of sheer malice. The sun, apparently having read the room, took its sweet time creeping over the horizon each day, as if it wasn’t entirely convinced there was any point in making an appearance at all in these conditions.
With the weather making most outdoor tasks impossible, Denor found himself with extra time on his hands—time that, ideally, should have been spent mastering his sword. But instead of flourishing like a great warrior in the making, our hero spent most of it grumbling at his reflection in the blade, willing his energy to course through it. The results were predictably nonexistent. Even when he resorted to asking Ledo to check him with the power meter, the device remained stubbornly unimpressed, emitting not so much as a beep of encouragement. The grim verdict: janitorial work was very likely in Denor’s future, unless he fancied a career in failing spectacularly.
Yet Denor was nothing if not persistently dense. And so, he soldiered on, determined to squeeze some semblance of success from his training. Ledo, with the kind of inventiveness only a father could conjure, rolled up his sleeves and devised what he optimistically termed a ‘training plan.’
Denor had been bracing himself for something resembling the brutal regimes Lidar and the rest of the Andronian youth endured, but Ledo’s approach turned out to be a delightful concoction of paternal sadism and eccentricity.
Now, Ledo wasn’t cruel, exactly. He was simply very, very good at inflicting character-building misery. Denor’s frustration and inability to die often tipped him into recklessness—a trait Ledo assured him would get him killed faster than any sword. Thus, some of the training sessions ended with Denor writhing in pain after Ledo had shot him or skewered him with a blade. Painful? Absolutely. Effective? Well, after a few hours of miraculous healing, Denor began to get the point—both figuratively and literally.
It was time for the literary equivalent of a training montage, complete with awesome soundtrack.
So with a blend of stubbornness and the sort of suicidal bravery that heroes tend to possess, Denor kept coming back for more. Slowly, and not without considerable protest, even his brain began to understand the method in his father’s madness.
Sure, he wasn’t teaching him how to use an energy shield or channel through the blade, but these rudimentary lessons in pain were strengthening him with every death.
Take, for instance, the task Ledo set him one frigid morning. Denor was to haul a massive slab of sheet metal from a nearby storage house and pulverize it into chunks using nothing but his own two hands. After hours of labor, which started out promising but quickly descended into misery as his hands became bloodied and numb, he finally reduced the metal to fragments just before reducing his own arms to stumps. The next day, Ledo had him do it again with a different sheet. And again the day after that. By the fourth morning, Denor had predicted what would happen and decided that enough was enough. He marched off to the workshop and returned triumphantly with a hammer.
The proverbial training music took a brief respite, possibly out of fear of Ledo.
The gunsmith, who could out-glare winter itself, regarded Denor with a sternness that somehow dropped the temperature even further. “And just what do you think you’re doing?”
Denor, gripping the hammer like a declaration of independence, replied, “Using a better tool.”
Ledo’s eyes narrowed. “My wish is for you to use your hands.”
“Why?” Denor asked, his voice slipping into the universal tone of a teenager who knows he’s about to lose the argument and doesn’t understand why.
Ledo’s eyes narrowed, which was never a good sign. "Because, lad, you won’t always have a hammer to hand. If you want to survive out there, you’ll need to build more than just your technique. You’ll need to build yourself—a body that steel itself might think twice about cutting, and fists it has no chance of resisting."
Denor, furrowed his brow in the way that meant his brain had sputtered into second gear after much protest from the clutch. He was a manual transmission for the purposes of this analogy, which made sense, as things that came automatically to others, often referred to as ‘common sense’, eluded the boy with dastardly regularity. "So, this is more about me than the metal I’m pounding on?"
"Aye," Ledo grunted, refusing to praise the boy for asking the right question. "The metal doesn’t care whether you break it with a hammer, a fist, or the sharp end of a particularly pointy stick. But you, my boy, must learn to use what you’ve got. Your body’s not just a vessel for fetching snacks; it’s the tool through which your will is made real. Master it, and it’ll serve you well. Neglect it, and it’ll turn on you faster than you can say ‘slowing metabolism’."
Denor gave this some thought, an excruciating exercise in labour as had been well-established at this point. "I think I get it, Father."
Ledo’s stern expression softened ever so slightly, as though the concept of Denor understanding anything was a win. "Good. Now, break the metal. Not with brute strength alone, but with patience and skill. The hammer can wait its turn as a reward."
And so, Denor set to work. His muscles screamed in protest at the abuse, and his hands turned numb and bloodied. But as he pounded away, he started to grasp what his father had been hammering into his thick skull. The way of the fist wasn’t just about having a tool at hand; it was about becoming the tool, the best version of oneself, and Denor, bless his earnest heart, was nothing if not eager.
Ledo watched from the sidelines, noting with a mix of pride and mild horror the way the ice around him was slowly turning a rosy pink from his son’s blood. "You won’t always find a hammer in battle. If you think the only useful weapon is the one with a sharp edge, you might as well show up naked and ask for directions to the afterlife. Your fists must be your first weapons, and the body behind them needs to be as hard as Iron."
Denor couldn’t help but notice the capitalisation of that last word. With that and the rest of the words rattling around in his almost-empty head like a series of loose screws, Denor turned his back on the hammer and returned to smashing the sheet metal. This time, he focused on more than just making scrap. He watched the cracks in the surface, aiming at the weak spots like a predator with a grudge. He missed more than he hit, but when he did land a strike, it was a thing of beauty. And after what felt like a lifetime but was probably just an hour, he’d reduced the metal to a pile of scrap, just as Ledo had instructed.
***
Later, Denor trudged into the workshop, where his father was busy tinkering with some sort of blaster that currently had no business being in the hands of anyone with a sense of self-preservation. “It’s done, Father.”
Ledo looked up, a flicker of satisfaction in his eyes, though it was hidden behind a curtain of sparks. “And what did you learn, lad?”
Denor paused, the gears in his head turning. “If I’ve got my fists, I don’t need a sword to break things.”
Ledo nodded, a slow, deliberate motion that suggested Denor might have finally stumbled onto something resembling wisdom. “You were always good at breaking things, Denor. Sword or no sword. Why did you finish faster this time?”
“I aimed for the cracks. Made the metal break quicker. Sulas would have called the exercise a heavy metal beat and demanded some riffs.”
Ledo gave a rare nod of approval. It had taken the boy a good seventy tries more than it should have and he was running out of metal sheets for him to attack, but by Tamet, he’d figured it out. “Very good, lad.”
Denor smiled, a flicker of hope lighting up his face. “Well, Father, will you fight with me?” he asked, with an eagerness for pain that would have made a sadist throw up his hands in disbelief.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
His father grinned weakly, shaking his head. “Not yet, Denor. You’ve learned enough for today,” he said, as if ‘enough’ was something one could ever have too much of when wanting to be the strongest and most famous warrior ever.
Denor’s initial urge was to argue, but one thing his father’s endless, mind-numbing lessons had drilled into him was patience—a skill that, much like a good pair of boots, is both sturdy and shockingly hard to wear out. Denor had learned to take each exercise not just a hundred times, but a thousand. Lacking much in the way of unnecessary things like 'thoughts' or 'doubt,' he had managed to transform his greatest weakness—his lack of imagination—into a strength. Denor, once he started, was harder to stop than a rock monster with a grudge. A totally real creature that didn’t exclusively appear in grandpa Tycho’s bizarre stories.
Denor would punch until he was drenched in sweat, gasping like a fish that had suddenly realized water was a good idea after all. When death finally won the argument, he’d wake up covered in what could only be described as reddish slush—probably a mix of sweat, mud, and whatever else was lurking around—only to hear his father’s voice. “Again.”
Denor’s fists became extensions of his will, which was fortunately quite strong, as his fists had no other way to keep going. He would whirl and leap, his fists stabbing and striking with a kind of frantic determination that only comes from persistence or insanity. Even when he stumbled, he rolled and rose to keep attacking.
“Enough, son,” Ledo would say, and Denor would collapse, only to get up the next day and do it all again, like some kind of very determined zombie, which wasn’t far off the mark as far as these copious analogies go.
Through the long, bitter winter nights, Denor trained. Each exercise built on the previous one, a never-ending ladder of pain and frustration that somehow led upwards. He became skilled with his fists, though not quite skilled enough to drive a blade through an energy shield as his father could.
But alas, poor Denor—bright, shining, persistent Denor—still sported the cleverness of a lobotomised aurox. The solution to many of life’s problems required cleverness, and our hero, unfortunately, had mostly persistence. If he was going to be regarded as an immortal icon, it wouldn’t be through his wit, or his influence, or anything sensible like that. No, he would simply keep coming at you and refuse to die.
First though he had to gain enough energy to activate his sword, a vision he held close, where his blade would glow with a light so fierce it would slice through enemies like a hot sword through particularly unlucky enemies. Denor hadn’t mastered analogies quite as well as the narrator had.
The second goal, the one that haunted him just as much, was to have his father fight with him. Ledo’s refusals weren’t out of fear—Denor was fairly certain his father didn’t know the meaning of the word, though it’s possible he just never bothered to learn it. But every time Ledo said no, it was like a slap to Denor’s pride, a suggestion that he was not yet worthy to stand as a warrior in his father’s eyes. That recognition was something Denor craved like a man lost in the desert craves water—a feeling that he definitely wouldn’t experience much later on in this tale—and he would stop at nothing—absolutely nothing—to earn it.
His success was largely due to the simple fact that he hadn’t the faintest idea that what he was attempting was utterly impossible, and his father did nothing to dissuade him of that ignorance. Denor was the kind of person who, upon being told to leap a canyon, would be halfway across before he realized that his feet had left the ground. Or skateboard, if you wanted to throw an old reference in there for the sake of it. He just kept coming back and attempting things, until those things happened.
The next evening, Ledo gathered the entire village by the great fire, the flames casting a warm, wavering glow that made every face look like it belonged to some ancient, implacable god. You know, Tamet. Denor was placed at the center of this circle of judgment, feeling rather like a particularly unimpressive sacrifice.
“You,” Ledo began, pointing a finger at the boy that seemed to have been carved from granite, “will go into the village. You will visit every household, and you will do the work they would have done. You’ll do all the dirty jobs nobody else wants to do. If they need it, you’ll even polish their boots. And,” he added, his gaze sweeping over the assembled warriors like a scythe, “none of you are to let him off lightly. He wants to be a man, to put his childhood behind him? Well, manhood doesn’t come with a day off. Are we clear?”
The warriors nodded, very clear on the matter, and men who knew they would soon need their boots polishing to prove that they hadn’t gone easy on the boy.
Denor, for his part, felt like he was shrinking into himself, a sort of reverse chrysalis process where he was going to emerge as a particularly small and pathetic moth. Which until his recent training would probably have been an upgrade. He was supposed to be fulfilling his destiny, but instead, he was about to become the village’s most overqualified janitor. His throat tightened, and his stomach did that unpleasant thing it did when it was practicing for future emotional upheavals. This also certainly wasn’t foreshadowing of any sort of impending doom that would disrupt what was left of his childhood.
“Go on, then,” Ledo said, with the air of a man dismissing a particularly persistent fly.
Denor swallowed and croaked, “Yes, Ledo.”
“And Denor…” Ledo held out a hand, palm up. “You won’t be needing your sword.”
After all his hard practice, Ledo had relegated him to janitorial duties after all.
***
When Denor finally returned home, the sun had already tucked itself in, and the moons were out, yawning and stretching as they began their nightly watch. Yup, things were still entirely too cold and desolate. Andron VII’s moons didn’t have much to observe. The odd aurox here, a wild Gurruk there, though why one was capitalised and the other was only intermittently so was a mystery yet to be unraveled.
Ledo sat at the table, a figure of quiet authority made more ominous by the flickering shadows. A bowl of cold stew awaited Denor, but it might as well have been a bowl of stones for all the appetite he had. The bowl of stones may have been tastier at that. Our brave hero had flown up the hill with all the enthusiasm of a man trying to outrun his own tears, and had even given the snow a rather thorough inspection by face-planting into it multiple times, just to make sure the evidence of his tears was well and truly gone. Or so he told himself. He had done all the chores, and then some, hoping that perhaps—just perhaps—this would earn him a ticket back to the warrior's training.
But deep down, in the part of his heart reserved for inconvenient truths, he was terrified that he’d lost his father’s respect forever. And worst of all, he had no idea what he’d done to deserve this treatment.
“Sit down, Denor,” Ledo said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t particularly concerned about whether Denor actually sat or simply melted into a puddle on the floor.
Denor, who had perfected the art of following orders, sank down by the door, glaring at the floor as though it had personally wronged him. “I’m not hungry, Father.”
“You don’t have to eat, just listen.”
“I don’t understand why you punished me. I don’t understand what I did wrong!”
“You’ll need to understand a great deal more, my son, if you ever want to hold that sword again.”
Denor finally heaved himself up and staggered over to the bench, moving with all the coordination of a torso that had just been introduced to the concept of limbs for the first time. “I did everything you asked, Father.”
“I know. And more,” Ledo replied, nodding with a thoughtful expression. “Just as I expected. And you should know that half the village has told me I’ve been too hard on you. Imagine that—Andron VII producing men who think I’m too harsh.”
Denor wanted to smile, he really did, but it was as if happiness had taken a holiday without leaving a forwarding address.
"Do you know why they did that, son?" Ledo's voice was heavy, but there was no anger.
Denor shook his head, knowing this wasn’t the time for witty remarks.
"They expect great things from you, Denor. You were born a second time after that incident with Litarn. Once they laughed at you, now some of them see greatness."
Ledo leaned forward, the table creaking in a manner that suggested it would have preferred to be anywhere else, and not under the strain of heavy parental expectations. "And do you know why I'm leaning so hard on you?" He asked, leaning on the table further to illustrate the leaning in the clearest way possible for Denor.
“Because I can’t die? Because you hate me? Because you enjoy watching me suffer? Because—”
"No," Ledo interrupted, with the kind of patience that was wearing thin and getting thinner by the second. "Because you’re the one who convinced me you’re destined for more, just like your mother did."
Denor’s eyes widened. Mentioning his mother was like bringing up ancient history—necessary sometimes, but mostly avoided, unless there was something particularly valuable to be unearthed.
Ledo sighed, an action that had clearly put in the overtime recently, his gaze far away, rifling through the past or just trying to not to remember too much of it. "She saw something in you, Denor. A spark that was more than just survival. She believed you could be a leader, a beacon. I thought she was mad, but after the incident… well, I push you hard because I know you want that spark to catch fire. It’s what she’d want too."
Denor nodded slowly, feeling the gravity of the situation settle in. This was parent-serious, the kind of seriousness that could stop time and make everything change. He really had to focus hard on not saying or doing anything stupid.
"Remember, Denor," Ledo's voice softened. "A sword is just a tool. It’s the hand that wields it and the heart that guides it that count. Earn your sword back, not by polishing boots or sweeping floors, but by understanding what it means to hold it. We’ll worry about the brain behind it later… that part might need some extra work."
"I will, Father," Denor whispered, miraculously avoiding saying anything stupid to ruin the moment. “I don’t want to be a janitor.”
Ledo smiled faintly, the stern lines of his face relaxing, as if remembering something amusing, or possibly just relieved that having to explain things to Denor almost over. "I suspect you will, my son. Now, get some rest. Tomorrow is another day, and there's always something new to learn."
Denor stood up, feeling a bit taller, which was entirely possible given his growth spurt of late. He would earn back his sword, his father’s trust, and maybe even his own destiny. And if he played his cards right, he might find a way to avoid breaking more sheet metal with his bare hands. Because, honestly, that really hurt.
In a distant part of the galaxy, the workers in a sheet metal factory collectively relaxed, and they weren’t entirely sure why.