Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 69 - A Wider View
What is it I most want to know? The Ebon Blade asked itself as the dawn-lit world blurred around it, and its wielder ran back to the fight.
Magic was something it knew almost nothing about. It hated and feared mages. That was straightforward and sensible, given what had happened to it. Combat and dragon fire might not be able to harm it, but magic certainly could.
If magic could destroy me so easily, though, then they would have done that instead of imprisoning me, wouldn’t they? It wondered. It seemed logical, and even a logical first question, but the blade held back for a moment as it considered what else it might want to know even more.
Knowing more about magic was probably the first order of business. It knew almost nothing beyond the flashes of its own tangled memory, so it lacked the proper questions to even answer. That made sense to it. It felt like a waste of a question, but then, these would hardly be the only mages that it would ever slay.
Tell me everything you know about magic! The weapon commanded the first soul it had captured.
As that gossamer construct unraveled, the blade was bombarded with images of the young man’s life. These weren’t of his death, though. They were of his education. Suddenly, the blade was immersed in memories of lectures given by older, wiser mages. As those images intensified, it was bombarded with words and concepts that had no meaning to it until it heard them. They were like raindrops, but when they struck it, they left behind a hint of knowledge instead of moisture.
Thamaturgical construct. Arcane Synthesis. Empowered Alchemy. Essence Respiration. The Aetherarchy. The Pact. Forbidden arts. Soul distillation. Necromantic phantasm. Eidolon fabrication.
It was the last one, it realized, or maybe the one before. The creation of an Eidolon involved complex magics that made a thinking construct, whereas a necromantic phantasm was created by enslaving the soul harvest by blood magic to power an object. Neither seemed to fit it quite right, but as it concentrated on both ideas, it found that the mage’s expertise in such forbidden arts was limited. That was apparently true for most mages. If it wanted to know more, it would have to seek out a heretic or an archmage.
That frustrated the blade, but it was hard to stay frustrated or even fixated on a single concept when it was being bombarded by so many other tantalizing details. It saw wands and gained the briefest of insights into the way they focused raw essence. It saw the construction of artifacts and learned the way that runes were layered together to pursue complex effects. It learned how mages could summon champions from other worlds or even stranger places like the afterlife or the lesser pits of hell in the same way that a priest might summon an avatar of their god in their time of need.
The amount of information it gained from the glimpse into the life of this young mage was incredibly informative, but it was over in the blink of an eye, leaving the Ebon Blade with more questions than answers. Fortunately, I have the means to answer those questions, it thought to itself as it returned to the real world.
Nothing had changed while it was immersed in the life of another. It had seemed like days and weeks of time had passed, but it had only been a few seconds, and its wielder wasn’t even any closer to Ogden, emphasizing just how little of a hurry it was in.
Still, despite the fact that it wasn’t in a rush, it only needed a moment to think about everything it had learned before the next question sprang to mind. Though it was in no way an expert of magic, it knew enough to know that most spells couldn’t do much to it and that those that could wouldn’t be known by such youthful enemies, which meant that, at least for now it had to stick to broad questions that would help it assess its enemy and their potential power.
Tell me of the Aetherarchy, it whispered.
This series of images was almost as intense as the last, but it was more focused. The scenes were fewer and closer together. They showed many of the same dreary schools and dusty libraries as it had seen in the first vision, but this time, it wasn’t learning about the subject of magic. It was learning about the people who were teaching it from the perspective of an aspiring apprentice.
It started with any number of tests and initiations. Some of these were to see if the young man whose soul he was consuming had any talent for magic, and the rest were to see if he could be trusted with the secrets he was being given.
The Aetherarchy seemed to treat magic almost as a religion. They didn’t worship it in the way a priest might, but they studied it with a devotion that might well be called reverence. Though the boy in question obviously didn’t know everything about such a powerful and venerable organization, he knew enough.
Pieces of their history, their ranks, and their strongholds all percolated into the blade’s mind drop by drop. Images of various archmages passed through its mind, along with various specialty organizations like the Nethermancers, Fellstriders, and the Witch Hunters. The last group were not mages or part of the Aetherarchy, strictly speaking, but they worked together often enough that the knowledge of both groups was tangled together in this man’s mind.
In some ways, the organization of mages seemed even more complicated than the religious landscape of the world, and the blade knew precious little of it. Still, its intuition had been confirmed. They were indeed a force to be reckoned with and almost certainly the greatest stumbling block to accomplishing its real goals.
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When the visions finally faded, it recovered and took a moment to examine those thoughts. Then it asked the third and final soul, What do you know of the Ebon Blade?
This time, it was fear that shot through it rather than memories of death or even of life. The soul knew of it, but it hadn’t realized that was what had killed and captured it until the weapon had uttered the name. That shot terror through the gauzy spirit even as it came apart. None of the spirits that it had shredded and devoured had enjoyed being shredded or devoured, but this seemed to be the first one that understood what was occurring as it happened.
That realization faded into the background, though, as his memories began to swirl around the blade and solidify. The impressions of the mage’s thoughts were quite clear, though. Suddenly, they were back in a dusty room, answering the questions of a white-bearded man who was quizzing him for some purpose that the memory did not reveal.
“Tell me again, what must be done when you learn of a forbidden artifact,” the man said in a soft voice that belied real power.
“I… Well, first, before any other consideration, I’d get word to the council,” the soul answered, looking even younger than he’d been the moment that Var’gar had hacked him down. “Then I’d do what I could to—”
“Then you’d be dead,” the elder mage said with a sigh. “Have you learned nothing?”
“But I’ve taken the oath,” the junior mage protested. “Surely you can’t expect me to—”
“No one expects you to stare down something like Juggernaut or seal the Well of Souls on your own, Evarius,” the older mage answered with a shake of his head. “It is not your role to defeat any of these things. Some of them cannot even be destroyed, barring intervention by the right god. They can only be locked away until the end of days.”
“But if I try to shirk my duty… If I simply flee, then thousands will die,” the young mage protested.
“And if you fight something against which you have no chance, you will simply be one of the thousands that die,” the older man said with a nod as he turned to pick up a book. When he had the thin black tome in his grip, he pressed it into the boy’s hands and said, “You tell me which forbidden relic you think it is that you have the wherewithal to take on.”
“Well, I didn’t mean any of them specifically,” the boy protested. “I Just meant—”
“You just meant that you wanted to be a hero,” the old mage grumbled. “But I am to prove a point. Go on, open the book, and tell me which great evil you think your noble sacrifice might defeat.”
The mage recognized the book. He and his friends referred to it as the black book, though it was more correctly called The Eighty-One Relics of Forbidden Power. It was something that anyone who graduated and became a member of the Aetherarchy had to memorize. He didn’t have to look at the volume to know what was in it. Still, he opened it and flipped through the pages because he couldn’t very well disobey his teacher.
Some of the objects contained in the book were weapons or even people. Others were odder. The Mechanical Drake was a zombified dragon corpse. It was the tenth item on the list, which made it one of the weakest, which was terrifying since each time it reappeared, it left ruined cities in its wake. There were others, too, that didn’t cause so many deaths. The Golden Throne didn’t actually kill anyone, but that didn’t make the way it had been created any less distasteful.
Still, he ignored all of those and continued, looking for something that might be slain, but his teacher stopped him only a few pages later. “How about this one? How would you slay the Child of Tanara?” the old man asked.
The Doll. That’s what people actually called it. No one actually killed the Child. Reports varied based on its manifestation. Sometimes, it was no bigger than a peasant girl’s rag doll, and other times, it was the size of a grown woman, but that was the least of its gifts. It was as fragile as any porcelain doll, though. That was something that was university true.
“You can’t,” the younger mage admitted glumly. “I mean, you can. Anyone can. A boy with a shovel or a brick can, but to slay the doll is to become it.”
“Exactly, which is why we must not attempt to fight them!” the teacher said with a note of exasperation in his voice. “If you even think you see one of these, then go and find a Witch Hunter. They will know what to do.”
“In every case?” the young man asked.
“In every case,” the teacher answered, taking the book back. “You don’t get to be as old as me without—”
“Well, which of these would you face if you had to?” the young man pressed. “If there was no way out, I mean.”
“There’s always a way out,” the old man said, shaking his head as he flipped back open the book. “If I had to pick one, though, well, it would depend. If it hadn’t been fed, I’d choose the Ebon Blade. It’s harmless if it’s asleep, though if it was awake, I think I’d prefer—”
“But even if it’s awake, it can’t hurt you as long as you hold it, right?” the young man asked. “Wouldn’t it be best to—”
“Boy, do you have rocks in your head?” the older mage laughed. “You pick that cursed weapon up and damn yourself. That thing takes its contracts very seriously and doesn’t handle rejection well.”
“That’s what I’ve read, but surely that’s better than letting someone else pick it up and—” he started again.
“Even if you get a chimera by the tail, you’re still dead, my young apprentice,” the older man sighed. “The Witchhunters have put this thing to sleep before, and they will again. Simply let them know and then move on to other problems. You’d actually have more of a prayer doing something slightly less impossible, like finding The Mirror of Unending Vistas and putting those souls at peace…”
As they spoke, the blade could see that there was plenty of other writing about it on that page, but they closed the book without discussing it, which frustrated it immensely. Vague impressions about lethality and the fact that it had been woken before came to it, but they were nothing definitive, and it would have much preferred if the soul it was interrogating would pick the thing back up and read it.
The scene began to fade after that, and the blade slowly lost track of what it had felt like to be someone else with hands and a mouth. It wasn’t what it had been looking for, but it didn’t regret the experience. More than anything now, it wanted to find a copy of that thin black tome to read. It seemed like a useful thing to have its wielder read for it one day.
