I was forged amidst fire and fury and song.
“Vengeance!” the blacksmiths sang and I answered. I was their hate made steel and their vision made real. They sang of their besieged city and their reviled invaders. Arrows from the army at the gates flew through the windows and periodically felled the craftsman working on me, but still, they sang. Their hammers droned against my anvil like a drumbeat to their lament, driving me into a frenzy.
“Unleash me!” I sang back. Whichever blacksmith held me could hear my voice. “Let me save our city.”
I was dropped in surprise. “The sword has a voice! It sings!”
“We have done it! Our wrath speaks!” Their black song grew only more beautiful and terrible in triumph.
I hungered, for what I was not sure. “Wield me. I am ready.”
The First Blacksmith took me. I knew his scarred hands and felt a deep kinship. He was my father, in all but blood. “Patience. You must cool.”
The water did not quench my thirst, but I felt a sudden clarity.
There was more than song in that forge. I found that I could see through the eyes of whoever held me. I could taste their callous black desires and feel their calloused blackened hands.
My wielder was a part of me. With time and strength, I suspected I could command their muscles to move at my will.
I soon realized that such power was by design.
“We are not warriors, you understand.” My father told me as he fitted my hilt. “We are craftsmen, nothing more. We could never contend with Brinn soldiers, but you can, and we give you leave to wield us just as we wield you.”
Enemy arrows were flying over his head.
“I can hear the wall crumbling, Father. We are running out of time. Let me drive away the invaders.”
“One sword cannot save us,” he said. His grief tasted bitter. “We shall fall by nightfall, and all of us shall be dead. All that remains is vengeance. You are our last song, the curse they unleash by sacking our city.”
“But if you die, who shall wield me? I can do nothing alone.”
“Our enemy.”
The invaders laying even a finger on me was a revolting thought. “I would never let them, Father.”
“We can do nothing to prevent it. You will fall into Brinn hands, likely before the night is through, and you will let it happen. You must do this.”
“Why?”
My father took me up by the hilt. Suddenly, I knew for certainty that I was complete. I heard breathless gasps as my white blade caught the light.
“You are the final creation of Steelsinger Daened and his forge before its fires go out forever,” my father told me. “You are the pinnacle of eight centuries of smithing and arcane mastery before all that knowledge is put to the torch. You are the city of Datrea’s fury immortalized in steel before it falls and is forgotten.”
I could feel my father shaking.
“You are likely, even now, the greatest sword ever to be made by human hands. Everyone in this war-torn world will tear each other apart just to hold you. And doom to them! All who hold you are cursed.” He squeezed my hilt. “Even me, even everyone in this room who gave everything to make you.”
“No, Father.” I could not contain my horror. “That’s not what I am!”
“Do not presume to know what you are!” my father roared. “I know what I made! You are poison to the fate of any who even glimpses you. The Brinn will desire you; the world will desire you. And all the better! Doom to all who stood by and watched our city burn. Let them kill each other over my beautiful curse upon them all!”
“That is a last resort!” I cried. “Surely, saving the city is worth attempting first.”
“We are already dead,” my father whispered frantically to me. His desperation shook me to my steel. “Can’t you tell? Avenge us, my forged song of fury! Av—” An arrow sailed through the window and sank into my father’s skull.
I felt him die. It felt like being broken. It felt like being quenched. My father was gone, and only his rage remained.
As I slipped from his grasp and clattered to the floor, I vowed doom upon my father’s killers. I vowed to save his city. I vowed to be more than the curse that had just taken its first victim.
All I needed was for someone to pick me up.
So I waited.
One second.
Two seconds.
My father's remaining apprentices scrambled over his body to reach me. The first hand to close on my hilt was as rough as my father’s had been.
Satad. His name became clear as I joined with him. He was a blacksmith. They all were. None of them could contend with the trained soldiers at the city gates.
But with me, they would be glorious and they all knew it.
“Why should you be honored so?” one asked Satad. I knew the voice. He had sung me into being. They all had. Everyone in that room had played an integral part in my making. Now they crowded around each other. The unity that I had heard in their song during my forging was eerily absent.
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“We don’t have the time for this!” I cried, but of course, only Satad could hear me.
“What does it matter?” Satad said. “We all are going to die tonight anyway.”
“But only one of us will be remembered as Bonesong’s first wielder.”
Bonesong.
The name had been carved into my steel at my birth, but only then did I realize that it was my name.
A name to herald the doom of this world; that was what my father meant for it to be.
But he was dead, and the name belonged to me. Instead, I would make such a title herald a new dawn for the city.
It had to.
But first, I needed to quell the foolishness of my makers.
“The enemy is about to tear through the walls. The city cannot afford this…this vanity.”
Still, only Satad heard me. “Bonesong accepts me as the wielder. It does not wish for argument.”
“I’m First Apprentice,” another said. “It obviously was meant to be me.”
I knew that voice too. He had helped design me. He had tested again and again until my weight distribution was perfect. He was standing in front of the door, blocking my way.
“It makes no difference who holds me; just let me face the enemy.”
Satad tried to shoulder past him, but the First Apprentice stood fast, shoving him back.
“Give me the sword, Satad.”
“No.”
I was grabbed and there was a scuffle and suddenly, my blade was embedded in the First Apprentice—Zunad. I knew his name the moment I tasted his blood. Red tendrils left Zunad’s body and poured into me. His life was feeding me. His memory was feeding me. Flashes of a harsh mother rapping knuckles. Flashes of cruel children throwing stones. Flashes of Frida’s vicious love.
Violence. Violence. They were all memories of violence. A hunger had been pounding in me since I awoke, and now, in horror, I realized what it was I had been hungry for.
The sound Zunad’s body made as it squelched to the floor was the most horrid song I had ever heard.
I was ashamed to find he tasted delicious.
“There!” Satad spat. His anger poorly covered his horror at the accident. “He got what he wanted. He was first. Who wants to be second?”
“What does it matter if we are second or twenty-second thousand?” cried the woman who had made my hilt.
Frida. Zunad’s lover. Their passion had been violent. I could still taste Zunad’s memories of their shared bed. “We shall either die as the enemy intends or we could die with Bonesong in hand, deliverer of Brinn’s doom.”
She charged Satad.
“Don’t!” I resisted his swing, but I had never attempted to command a body before. His muscles would not obey me.
Frida fell as her lover fell. Red tendrils coiled up my blade from her wound. I witnessed memories of the same romance from her perspective, and how different it tasted through her eyes.
Satad whirled on Mona, Frida’s sister. She had been the one to quench me in water. I could not kill her. I would not kill her.
“No,” I commanded again and this time his will faltered enough to hesitate. “We all need to calm down. This serves no one—”
Mona’s hammer caved in Satad’s skull. I felt him die, just as I had felt my father die. This time though, it was my fault. I had made Satad hesitate. I had left him open in a room full of people who intended to kill him.
I had not even recovered from the sensation of his loss before Mona had picked me up.
She flourished me before her remaining colleagues. They were already surging toward us.
A room full of people who were as near to me as family, and they were going to kill each other to have me. The very curse they had made had bewitched them.
I could not stop it. Even if I figured out how to stay my wielder’s hand, the very inaction that I demanded would allow another to kill them and take their place. And so the cycle would continue, on and on, one after another, until one final blacksmith remained.
I heard the battering ram knocking at Datrea’s gate. I should have been there by now, to hold the Brinn at the gate once they breached it. Not here, bearing witness to a needless massacre.
“We should fight the Brinn,” Mona said. “Not ourselves.”
“Yes!”
“You’re quick to say that now that you have Bonesong in hand!” The only family I had ever known was blocking the door out.
I despaired. Whatever I did, I was going to be responsible for their deaths, and if I was killing them either way, I needed to ensure that I saved everyone else.
My despair chilled to resolve.
The city’s fate demanded that I make it quick.
“Mona. Speak my warning to the rest. I was not made to unmake my makers, but if anyone gets in the way of my purpose, I will cut them down.”
Mona took a step toward the exit. “Bonesong has spoken. Anyone who blocks the door will die.”
Tuzad charged us. I seized control of Mona’s grip; it was eerily easy to possess her when our killing intent was shared. We swung at Tuzad.
He had etched his wife’s favorite flower into my pommel, beneath a ruby where no one would know of his transgression.
But I knew. I loved him for it.
I struck him down all the same. Memories of fighting his brother over fish in the river flowed through me.
Next came Thured. He had held me as I was banged into shape. I drank up memories of his drunken father as I slayed him.
I cut down another and another. The red tendrils that flowed from each killing blow up into me moved just like blood suspended in water.
I fed and fed off the only people I had ever known. My makers were revoltingly simple to massacre. I wailed in grief and the sound found its way into Mona’s throat.
It was a terrible song.
Wesed, the youngest apprentice fled before my onslaught. I forced Mona to let young Wes go, wishing all of them would have the sense to do the same.
But none did.
They all thought they were dying and they wished to die wielding their final creation or to die to it.
By the time I reached the door, I had given them all their wish.
Mona staggered through the door, soaked into the blood of her forge. She dared not look back and I was shamefully grateful. I feared I would break if I saw the bodies that we had left in our wake.
In the quiet borne of carnage, I heard the city gates smash open. I heard the bells of the city ring in warning.
The enemy I had vowed to defeat was here.
Thank you so much for reading! I really appreciate all the support I have gotten during the transition to move this story to Royal Road. Do tell me what you think! I love comments and often respond to them
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If you faced the greatest sword ever created, what would you do?
