Chương 156: The Many Lives of the Ebon Blade

The Ebon Blade did not do anything rash in the aftermath of that encounter. It wanted to. It wanted to strike down the Penitent a second time and then leave the city to its own devices as it imploded, but something stayed its hand. There was a mystery there that it did not understand, and the blade did not like things that it did not understand.

Instead of striking the demon prince down, though, or causing havoc to vent its anger, it simply found a tall building off of one of the larger market squares where it would not be disturbed, and had its wielder, the Warbringer, sit there on the roof while it rested on the mechanical man's lap and reflected. Do I want to get involved here? It wondered. I could just go, so why don't I?

The blade was tempted to say that it was some insidious power of the Penitent that was holding it here, but really, it was the demon's words. As tempting as it was to blame the strange powers like crushing sadness that held it to the bottom of the ocean for months or years, and the distorted space that had held it captive in Prince Cerirval's wandering palace. If you stand before her with even a single flaw, you will shatter in an instant.

The memory was fresh, and every time it replayed, the blade remembered how easily the beggar king had slid into its very heart. Could it have killed me then? It wondered. Could it have shattered me the same way it said that the Prime Evil would? The blade didn't know, but it knew that the demon prince wasn't wrong. It could see the flaw in the ruby that was its hilt, even without the system interface telling it that it had to finish repairing its soul, but part of it resisted those feelings.

I know everything about myself, it repeated, as if it mattered. I am happy with who I have become, and more information would only complicate things further. The blade recalled well how crushing it had been to learn the true fate of its first wielder, and even if the revelations after it had not proved as soul-shattering, there was no way of knowing what other terrible secrets hid in the shadows of its past.

The blade examined that occluded fissure for a long time before it reached a decision, both because the decision was a hard one and because it was in no hurry. All around it, the city moved as if it were a real place, and in the distance, the volcano that was its real target rumbled relentlessly and only occasionally vomited flames into the sky.

It had come to a place in hell that was utterly indifferent to its existence, and despite the number of demons and damned souls that wandered around in the streets and buildings below, no one made any effort to ambush it. At first, the Ebon Blade thought it was being lulled into a false sense of security, but after days, it became clear that as long as it was out of sight, it was out of mind. That was when it paid the cost and activated Repair Soul 5.

-5, 000 Life Force Compared to the sheer amount of power that churned in its reserves now, five thousand Life Force wasn't much. Near the beginning of its journey, it would have taken everything the blade had to pay that bill, but now it felt only a brief buzzing of electric heat flow through it as almost all of its runic circuits activated at once, and then the world was fading around it.

At first, the main effect of that power surge was to reveal the portions of its edge that were still dull, and the threads that were still frayed after its battle with the Bug Queen. I need to fix those, it noted idly, but even as it made a note, it was drifting further into the dark. The volcano, the city, and eventually even the building the Warbringer sat on faded into the gloom.

The Warbringer vanished next, though it did so, a layer at a time; first the metal man's armor faded, revealing the complex metal skeleton that powered it. Then, one layer of gears and mechanisms faded out of existence until the sword was alone in the void. The darkness didn't stop there, though. It was corrosive; it devoured the blade a layer at a time, unraveling it like a cheap cloak. Its rune channels were stripped away, one power at a time, starting with the newest ones.

First, it lost Hellfire and all of its temporary powers. Old ones like Aura of Hunger vanished last, leaving it only a blank blade, but even then, it did not panic. It watched the proceedings with a strange calm. That only started to change a little when its gem separated from its hilt, along with the gilt elements.

The blade's soul gem continued to shrink, moment by moment, after that, and though it worried it would disappear with it, the weapon felt no change as it shrank first to the size of a robin's egg, and then a speck of sand before vanishing entirely and leaving the world even darker. After that, its wire hilt was unwound, leaving it exposed and naked. No, more than that, it was empty. It was just a hunk of metal that had been quenched in molten dragon's blood.

Then, suddenly, that black coating of dragon's blood vanished, and the blade was shiny and silvery. That was when the weapon knew that every last layer of itself had been peeled away. This is what had been at the very beginning, before the very first pieces that made it who it was today were set into motion. As it pondered what that might mean and how it could remember a time before it existed, the same many-armed smith demon it had fought just before it came to hell picked it up.

For a moment, the blade worried that the creature had managed to escape from the red soul gem, but that ruby was empty now, and this was only a shadow of that fiend. It's not a soul, the blade realized belatedly. It's a memory.

"A fine start. Certainly better than the last blade you offered up to me," the demon whispered. They were back in the hellforge now. It had coalesced out of the darkness around them, and the demon idly held the blank blade in the green-yellow hellfire that leaked from the open portal.

"But a start is all that it is without a soul great enough to power it. Where will you find a gods granted champion like that?"

"He has already been summoned from another world, in accordance with the prophecy," another person said, stepping forward. This was a man in red robes. The blade couldn't see his face, but it immediately marked him as a rodent from the Aetherarchy. A second wretch in red robes appeared and concurred.

"The prophecy that the Prime Evil would be purged by someone not of our world has existed for longer than the thrones of most of the inner kingdoms. No king will work against us when we tell them the time has come and that this is the way we achieve victory."

"Prophecy or no, Nuella cannot be defeated," the demon grinned.

"She dwells in a place of pure fire where even most demons cannot reach her, and carved her name into hell itself. No man or woman, no matter how strong, will ever claim her life."

"I agree," the first weasel answered.

"But then she's also no threat to creation. She will not open the door and burn the sky until she stands on death's door. It is written. The safest course is to let her slumber there for all eternity, but the prophecy can still be used to accomplish this project, if King Paralon can be persuaded, we might—""To what end?" the demonic smith asked.

"To forge a blade such as you've had me design.... I've done that, but who will wield it, and to what end?" The scene faded then, before the blade heard the response. It found the idea that it had just watched the moments before its creation strange, but not so strange as what it saw next. One moment, it was standing in the Hellforge, which was a loathsome but familiar place, and the next, it was standing in a place unlike any it had ever imagined. It was in a city of glass and steel.

For a moment, the weapon thought that it was glimpsing heaven. Then other words started to percolate through the dimmest parts of its brain, revealing that this place was anything but. Carpet. High-rise. Track Lighting. Automobiles. As the world came into focus, the Ebon Blade knew the truth. This was where Baraga had started before he had become the swordsman that would rise to power, only to be snuffed out by traitors. At this point, he didn't look like much. He wasn't a warrior.

Instead of chainmail, he wore rafts that were referred to as business casual, and the only blade in his life was the one that trimmed away the beard he typically wore to nothing. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. It was disorienting, and despite the blade's fondness for the man, it still felt a twinge of disgust at his slender limbs and complete lack of bloodlust.

As it watched the scene unfold, it wanted to warn him, but the weapon knew that would do no good; all of this had happened before. That was the lesson here. This was its history, and it was doomed to understand it as the man accidentally walked into traffic while answering something called a phone call from a magic box in his pocket.

Had Baraga, or Bartholomew, as the people of this world called him, not been summoned at that moment, he would have been smeared across the ground by a smoke-belching beast that might have been a distant ancestor of the furnace beast. As it was, he vanished in a flash of light and reappeared, along with the blade, in a throne room that was very familiar by now.

Once there, the blade's desire to intercede only increased as King Paralon gave a long and impassioned speech to the man that would become the core of his soul.

"You are the hero foretold!" the king insisted, going on about the nature of a prophecy that would see hell sundered and the gates to heaven thrown open. Bartholomew took the man's words at face value in a daze, even though the blade knew they were lies. That anger redoubled when he was present with the fated sword that would later become his prison. Get too worked up and you'll have to do all of this again, it reminded itself as it was tempted to try to murder the king all over again.

Only the appearance of Princess Rosalina mollified it; she didn't deserve her fate either, and if anything, it was crueler than it had been. After that, things started to speed up, though not so fast as to blur out all of the details as it had in the past. It watched, with ever-increasing speed, as Baraga earned his nickname thanks to a dwarf who couldn't pronounce his real one, and met many of the companions that would someday become part of the blade's soul.

Knowing that should have made it sad, but somehow the vision was more nostalgic than anything. Not everyone who fought by Baraga's side did so long enough to share his fate, but many did. The man left few men behind, and as he leveled up inexorably, the blade grew to enjoy his progress and the memories of the dozen other people. It knew that eventually all those lives would be snuffed out senselessly in the rite that created it, but it enjoyed their growth just the same.

All too soon came the fight with the dragon that earned it its matte black temper, and Baraga's burn scars. After that came the wedding feast, and the betrayal. That was harder for the Ebon Blade to bear, and seeing it replayed for the fourth time didn't make it easier. Still, it endured and was rewarded by a glimpse into its own private hell. The blade had seen itself forged before.

It had heard the screams of Barga's friends as their souls were ripped from their bodies one at a time and layered together in runes to power its magic, but it had never seen the process before in such detail. This time, it saw the leering smile of the demonsmith and heard the pride in the voice of the aetherarchs as they succeeded in their complex working. By the time that was done, though, each set of runic circuits felt like a scar that had been burned into it.

Worse, it knew the name of each soul that had been used to do it. There was no longer any ambiguity there. It was no different than the Juggernaut in that regard. That monster of a man had been pieced together with the flesh of warriors. As gruesome as it was, somehow the sight of preserved corpse flesh that had been stitched together felt more dignified than what the mages had done with the assembled souls, though.

When it was done, though, and the lines of magic throbbed painfully against the matte black metal, the darkness claimed it once more, even as the mages discussed their triumph. The Ebon Blade expected its vision to end. Instead, it was subjected to glimpses of the rest of its history in rapid-fire succession. There was the princeling who used it to slay a second dragon; he hung it on the wall as much as he hung the blade's scabbard from his belt.

Intellectually, the weapon wanted to be as angry about that as it was about being forged in the first place, but that rage was dulled by the inert nature of its past self. The weapon throbbed with power, but there was no mind present in it, not for years. That was a puzzle, certainly, and not one the blade was well equipped to answer. It took years of small adventures for any of its evolving magics to show. The first ones to appear strengthened the wielder and had nothing to do with draining anything.

Those came later. Still, it wasn't enough, and the Aetherarchy eventually decided that their best efforts had failed. Eventually, the mages collected their failed experiment, and the weapon hung not on a prince's wall, but in a magical vault. It might have hung there forever were it not stolen by an enterprising ring of thieves. It was that theft that eventually led it to a roguish bandit who brought it to life.

The Ebon Blade knew nothing about how these magics worked; it would have assumed that it simply drank enough souls to achieve some criticality of sentience, but that wasn't it at all. The truth was that it would never have awoken in the hands of a fop. It needed someone who reminded it of Baraga to wake it up. Is that why I consider Baraga my first wielder, then? It wondered. Because this man looked so much like him? It was certainly a valid theory.

Trenton the Dark, as he became known to the locals during his short-lived reign of terror, was as brave and bold as Baraga had ever been, though in Trenton's case, his wounds healed far faster than anyone's should have. Originally, he only wielded the weapon because he liked the color.

"It matches my armor," he told the woman he was sleeping with at the time. It did much more than that when it awoke. This part of the blade's story wasn't something it remembered before, so it paid careful attention when it awoke for the first time, but it needn't have; its very first incarnation acted like a hungry goblin more than anything, and it gibbered to its wielder as it forced the man to lash out violently.

The Ebon Blade was embarrassed by the scene, but there was little it could do about it centuries later. Was I really so different when that shepherd woke me in this life? It reflected as it remembered the way it had cajoled and chaffed against Ren's grip. It might have had a bit more mind in this incarnation, but only a little. Trenton instantly went from an ambitious thief to a small-time warlord, conquering a series of rich cities on the coast.

The blade could feel that the man was more than happy with that outcome; if he'd limited himself to that, then he might have had a long, mostly untroubled reign, but the blade never would have allowed him peace, and eventually the other rulers in the region fought him in earnest. Even then, he might have won out, or at least the blade would have, had his final defeat not occurred at sea.

When Trenton's ship was sunk, the blade sank too, which was an ignominious end to its years-long reign of terror, but the blade did not pity itself as it sank beneath the waves. Instead, it reflected on the poor choices it had made in that life and this one as it lingered at the bottom of the sea.

It couldn't say how long it stayed there after it lost consciousness; all it could say was that it had grown barnacles and a coral reef had grown up around before the claw of a crab man seized it from where it lay in the dark water, hundreds of feet beneath the surface. It did not enjoy the alien touch of that monster, but the blade had little choice in the matter. It couldn't even seize the thing's mind immediately; it was too alien.

It was months before the weapon forced its strange owner to the surface to hunt humans, and even longer to fall into the hands of man after a mage cooked its aquatic wielder from the inside out with a fire spell. There were more wars after that, and more bloodshed. It wasn't so different from the way the blade operated now. The main difference between its second life and its first life seemed to be that it took the death of its carcinus wielder to understand that the hands that held it were interchangeable.

While Trenton's run had lasted for a year, the deaths that followed the blade this second run lasted for only days, and sometimes even hours. Its shame for how little loyalty it showed for the men and women that held it would haunt it for some time after that, but it improved toward the end. It was only after half a country was on fire, and two armies were massacred, that it started to care about those who carried it. That didn't come in time to save it, though.

By the end of its second life, the blade had attracted the ire of the gods themselves, and when it retreated to an iron mine in an attempt to evade them, Gordon-Val crushed the mountain it was dug into and buried it beneath a mountain of rubble for another age. The blade might have stayed there forever if a dwarven prospector hadn't found it a century later. From there, it was a quick journey back to the surface that involved three dwarves, a gnome, a goblin, and the death of six dwarvish clans.

The blade did not enjoy watching this part, both because the battles were hardly honorable and because they were foolhardy. A god had just buried it alive, and there was every reason to think they'd do exactly that all over again when they got the chance a second time, yet strangely it wasn't in any hurry to get back to the light, not when there was blood to be had.

It took a year for it to reach the surface during that third life, but by then, it had finally become conscious enough to remember at least part of who it was, and more importantly, who was responsible for what had happened to it. That was when it moved on King Paralon for the first time. Of the entire surreal sequence, this was the part of the experience that the blade enjoyed the most.

While it did not like the way it treated each wielder as being entirely disposable, the rage that its past self felt toward the king who had done this warmed it, and it lost itself in whole campaigns that were nothing but orgies of violence. Eventually, that reign of terror came to an end when its wielder was chained down with ingenious dwarven weapons and left to rot in a field for weeks. The cowards thought that they'd bled it dry when the priest came to collect it.

It wasn't inert, though; it just wasn't strong enough to claim the mind of someone so totally devoted to the God of Secrets, though it spent the weeks he walked toward its final resting place trying to change that. Eventually, though, when the blade was placed in the now goblin-free temple, and it struck down the priest that had borne it here, darkness claimed it again.

As depressing as that vision was, as the world returned around it, it was pleased to note that there were no sharp edges or pain at the reunification of those memories. Its entire history had finally come together in a single, winding tale that was nearly as complicated as the weave of its essence.