Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 172 - Neighbors

The Ebon Blade would have expected the boredom of its situation to bother it more than it did, but now that it didn’t seem to be at risk of draining down to nothing, it was unperturbed by it. It still hadn’t quite figured out why that was the case, though it’s two leading theories were that it either had to sleep for a long enough period of time to discharge the vast energies it had stored, the God soul it had captured was feeding it in some way, or it had simply reached its final form, and crystalized its true nature.

That was of possible. It was unlikely that it had fully reassembled its soul in previous lives; perhaps that was the hole through which its power had drained previously. The blade did not know, so it kept its lonely vigil over the slopes and the valley below, devouring any animal or monster foolish enough to come within hundreds of feet of the monolithic ring it was embedded in.

Years passed, and saplings had started growing in the burn scar before it saw any real change. That first one came in the form of a small cabin in the valley that was finished just in time for winter. In the spring, it was still there, and someone still lived inside of it. In the spring, they took a small herd of goats up the slopes, though not close enough for the blade to touch them. In the fall, they retreated back down the mountain.

The young man who’d built his home there had no way of knowing he’d built it on the banks of an etheric river of hellish energy trickling down the mountain. Or perhaps he did, the blade considered, noting that the cabin had been built just on the edge of that stream and the goat’s paddock was put on the far side, away from it.

The following year, the structure was expanded to include stables and then a field. The blade watched the small family that lived there reap and sow in sporadic view of time that it had, and things moved with artificial quickness. It put its situation in a more philosophical perspective, at least for a time. The world was growing in its absence, flourishing so that the scythe of war could cut down communities again. The trouble was that it no longer wanted to slice through whole communities wholesale. It merely wanted to face and defeat their best.

The following year, two more buildings were added, and more herds were sent out onto the mountain. These came tantalizingly close to the weapon, though it wasn’t until the year after that that anyone approached its resting place.

The blade had been there for six years before human eyes noticed it. They belonged to a young shepherd boy. The Ebon Blade would have guessed that he was just tall enough to reach the blade’s hilt if he were to grab it, but he didn’t.

The weapon did not strike him down for that, though it briefly had the urge to. It didn’t even kill any of the boy’s goats while he studied the sword and explored the standing stones or the wide altar in the middle of them. Something so negative would have made him less likely to come back. Instead, the blade siphoned away a few points of Life Force from all of the animals and waited.

A few weeks later, presumably after the boy had gone home and shared what he saw, he returned with an older man who seemed to be his father.

“I told you,” the boy called out, running ahead. “An ancient shrine, and a sword!”

The man grunted, stopping a few feet from the blade. And taking in the scene. “Something terrible must have happened here for such a weapon to get stuck in the stone itself. I’d hate to find out what happened to the man who wielded it.”

For a moment, he looked like he was about to tug on the weapon and try to pull it free. With human strength that was probably impossible, but with the sword's strength flowing through him, it would have been easy. If the Ebon Blade had lungs, it would have held its breath. Still, at the last second, he pulled his hand away and moved past it to look at the altar.

While the two of them discussed the writing that had been engraved there, which they could not read any more than the weapon could, it wondered why the man hadn’t touched it. Did I do something to give myself away? Of course, it hadn’t. Its runes were dark, and it hadn’t even drained him. It had done everything to make itself as innocuous and inviting as possible.

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For as long as they were there, it held out hope, but when the boy asked if his father was going to take the sword, the older man replied, “There’s something foul about that blade, Geral, and this place in general. Promise me you won’t bring the animals here anymore.”

The boy promised, which angered the blade. It immediately tried to drain the father in retribution, but the two left soon after, and the weapon only managed to weaken him a little, which was a shame.

While the blade had taken its time in purgatory with equanimity, it was still eager to be free, and it was more than frustrated by the missed opportunity. That resentment only intensified as the months passed, and it saw the boy many times. Often, he was just a few hundred yards out of reach. He listened to his father’s order, but only barely.

He will come again, the blade told itself one day when it watched the shepherd move his herd downslope as the seasons turned. When he’s older and stronger, the temptation will be too great, and he’ll try to pull me free himself.

That day was a long time coming. Years passed, and each time the boy came back, he was a little older. As the community grew, he wasn’t even alone. Sometimes he would be with another boy, or eventually, a girl, and they would talk. “My father said it's a place built to worship dark gods,” one of the boys told the other on one of the visits. “That’s where the miasma that fills the lowlands comes from.”

It doesn’t come from here; it comes from the hell rift, the blade corrected silently, even if no one could hear it.

That raised an interesting point. Though the evil from hell flowed through the valley, passed the growing community, it continued on, downslope. Where would such evil go? Where would it pool, and what would that look like? The blade was intensely curious about that, though that was probably more due to boredom than anything else.

Save for going back to hell or waking the demon queen that slumbered in its soul, it would do almost anything to be freed from its current boredom, and some distant valley filled with hellspawn corrupted monsters sounded like a good time. It would at least provide a challenge, which was all it really wanted.

The blade watched the boy that it would have sworn would have become its wielder a year or two ago grow, slowly but surely. Then, as the tiny farmstead became a village, he stopped coming by, denying the blade even that hope. It sometimes saw other shepherds on the same slope, but they never came as close as Geral had.

It took the weapon several days to note that had been caused by something had attacked the distant homestead. The battle must have happened while it slumbered, denying it even that scrap of entertainment, but the way the people down there had pivoted from stacking firewood and expanding fields to building a wooden palisade told it all that it needed to know.

Perhaps if there’s enough fighting, someone will come for me, the weapon thought hopefully, but that didn’t materialize. At this point, it would have willingly endured the grip of some aetharchy mage or even that traitorous elf. At least those people he could fight for control of, and try to escape into the hands of a better wielder. After nearly a decade of waiting, this was becoming intolerable.

Unfortunately, it still had years to wait, and the only productive thing that happened in all of that time was that the poison that had stained it so deeply slowly bled away. The threads that made of the etheric weave of its blade were still darker than they’d been before it went to hell, but years spent languishing in creation had let much of that toxicity leach away, and the oil sheen that had tainted it for so long had slowly faded.

When had it happened? The weapon couldn’t say.

The seasons wheeled around it, and its time awake became a smaller and smaller portion of its existence as the weapon pillaged the mountainside for every scrap of Life Force that was available to it, turning the slope it was on into a graveyard. Only the insects and plants escaped its hunger, and if it had the power to drain them too, it would have.

Almost a decade after the first cabin was built, the village finally expanded into the flow of evil they had long avoided. That puzzled the blade. Up until now, they’d built to the left of that foul, invisible stream, but whoever had made such decisions must have died or left, because the construction that took place after that practically followed the current toward the valley’s exit to the wider world.

While someone else might have found that interesting, it merely hoped that someone, anyone, would break the taboo that kept those same people from visiting it. A few years later, that was finally what happened when Geral came marching up the slope with another man and a fine white sheep in tow.