by E. G. Condé
All was still in the vale of the Legendwalkers. Beneath a rumbling sky, he could see nothing stalking about the ebon crags and the tiered slopes of the great rotunda, which gave way to a chasm of unfathomable depth. Legends walked with him, whispering from the heritage metals grafted onto his burnished cheek. They recounted the chasm’s fiery birth, a great rending in distant ages when the world was young and the song of creation could not yet find its voice in the thunder, the roaring that was the engine of the cosmos. The weepers above swarmed and roiled, casting lambent shadows over the obsidian jags and cliffside paths that led to the Jutting City. His keen ears pitched to the tremoring sky, divining from the cadence of the drumming that the weepers would soon burst and shed their tears to feed the black river and nourish the blue calabashes that took root in the terraces carved by his people.
As the first droplets fell, his nostrils flared, excited by the petrichor musk of the brume. From his perch at the edge of a black escarpment, he surveyed the vale, scanning for signs of his quarry. Nothing stirred in that striated canvas of black, gray, and indigo stone. A wet gust from the deep of the chasm set the long, silvery braids of his hair aflutter. Cascades of moisture ran in glassy rivulets over his charcoal-brown skin, yet he did not wince or move. He was still, as petrified as the mottled spines of rock on which he crouched, waiting for _their_ arrival; Pale indigo lances, crystalline, bright, and many-tongued, coruscated in the dusk, their flickers followed by an explosive shuddering that echoed in the hollowed rift below. He shut his eyes, listening carefully to the overtones still ringing above the wound in the earth. Over the rataplan of rain battering rock, he could hear hidden melodies gyring. Songs that whispered of creation, of order and harmony on a scale beyond human reckoning or comprehension. Another blue serpent streaked the sky, bejeweling the rain, pricking up the hairs on his neck. His cerulean eyes opened, and he readied himself, having divined the whereabouts of his prey from the music of the storm.
He pounced down from the promontory, sprinting along the eastern cliffs, counting the seconds between tremors and flashes as his feet carried him along the slick rim. Urgency seized him as the distance between the thunderclaps shortened. The trespasser had fled the jutting city, and would be searching now for a way to cross the vale, to escape to the lands in the Out, a place of clear skies and quiet nights. In his haste he stepped knee-deep into a glassy pool, crystal waters eddying into a whirling mirror as it flowed over black stone. Warping with the ripples, he could see his chiseled face, swarthy and smooth save for a whorl of iridescent metal etched into his left cheek, tapering along his sharply-bladed jaw.
The reticulating spiral of skin-fused metal had grown significantly since his birth, when it was first smelted in his rite of becoming. Over the course of his long life, many of his elder kin had fallen ill, their bodies withering as they transformed into the Fulminous, ascending past the weepers to the ever-torch, where they would begin their drumming, spawning again as the blue serpents that now brilliantly illuminated the ebon vale. The Fulminous had no use for their discarded bodies, so it was that they were burnt and turned molten. While still as slippery and liquid as rain, their remains had been poured and smelted onto his face, their metals fusing with his skin in a silvery alloy to guide him on his path to joining them in the crackling firmament. Such was the order of things, the way of the Legendwalkers, but his prey, a youth tempted by the ephemeral riches and pleasures of the beyond, had become a threat to his way of life. For the youth had stolen the sacred metals, with a mind to peddle them in the outlands.
“Legendwalker,” A feminine voice grumbled clumsily in his language.
Startled, he whirled around to face the stranger, brandishing the obsidian maul that dangled from his belt, “You trespass on our lands, Redcape! It was agreed that none of your ilk would come here again, so it was agreed.”
The woman crossed her arms, her body coated in crimson mail, fashioned from alien alloys that might have enchanted a lesser man. But he was a legendwalker, steeled to the cold, harsh reality of life in the Vale and could not be easily tempted by treasures from the Out. Her wrinkled face, a chilling hue of bone, was faintly visible beneath a gilded helmet that took the shape of a skywolf, beak poised as if to strike.
She spoke slowly, her accent coating every word thickly, “The Imperium does not intend to break our treaty – our agreement, as you say. This land remains a preserve, and no interlopers without due cause from the outlands will be permitted to enter. We seek not to disrupt your way of life, as preserving it is the will of the Score, the music you hear in your thunder, a music heard and known differently elsewhere, but worshipped just the same.”
“Yet you have come,” The man growled, maul still clenched tightly in his left hand. The rain streamed over him without soaking his skin, beads repelled by his densely-pleated leathers,
“We have learned that one of your own seeks to flee to the outlands,” She began to pace, her red cape buckling with the wind as she spoke, “I know of their plan to sell your ornamental silvers.”
“Heritage metals,” the man groaned, “that is how they are called. Would you refer to the remains of your kin as mere decorations?”
“My apologies, my command of your language is imperfect,” The woman sighed, “I have to come to assist you, as this matter now extends beyond the Vale.”
“I am Legendwalker, I require no assistance from a She-Sword of the Out.”
The woman was swifter than he anticipated, unsheathing a burgundy blade with deadly precision. He raised his maul to meet her with a breath to spare, deflecting the assault with a swooping riposte. “Per your custom, I prove I am worthy of my name, the daughter-mother Eidrim, Arbiter-Knight of the Imperium, enforcer and protector of the holy will of the Score.”
The man bowed his head, returning his weapon to its hook on his belt, “Arbiter-Knight Eidrim, you move like lightning and you are paler than bone, but you wrap yourself in metals that sing of blood, so in the Vale you will be called, Crimson the She-Sword.”
The old woman lowered her head in deference, “I am honored by this name, Legendwalker.” Crimson peered up at him. With her visor pulled up, he could see her hooded, celadon eyes and soft features gnarled with deep wrinkles. She paused, as if trying to recall the rest of the custom before asking, “and who are you that walks before me?”
The man nodded, shutting his eyes as he invoked the many names of his molten lineage, “I am legendwalker, I walk with many names.” He spoke of Agga, the windstalker, and Drem, the ebon spear, and Tlaor, the thunder weaver. He spoke of many others, recounting for her the long tangle of lives encoded in his metals reaching as far back as the Seer who first settled the Vale, a thousand generations prior. At last, he said, “In the Vale I am named Silver, the He-Maul, for on the night I was born the delvers of the Jutting City found a great vein of white metals, and when the first locks of my hair sprouted, they too were as pale as silver.”
“I am honored to hear of your legend, Silver the He-Maul,” Crimson turned her head to the sky, where the Fulminous were descending from the heavens, in a forked, luminous procession. “May we bring this trespasser to justice.”
Alerted by a subtle shift in the overtones of the thunder that followed the bright bolts, Silver dashed toward a promontory of rock that jutted out over the black depths of the vale, Crimson in close pursuit. At the jagged sill of the escarpment, which had always reminded him of the talons of skywolves, he peered down into the black maw over the brink. Palpitant bursts of blue scattered over the Vale, revealing a field of floating stones suspended in the air.
The Arbiter-Knight leaned forward, her mouth agape, “Silver, tell me, how is it that those stones have not fallen? By what sorcery of the Score is this possible?”
Silver glanced at her, his jutting brow furling in astonishment, “you say strange things She-Sword.” He pointed at the stones that bobbed and eddied in the air, tethered by some unseen force, “but you are from the Out, we are told no such place exists like the Vale.”
He lunged his arm precariously over the sill, catching a small pebble hovering near the edge, “Buried in the bedrock here, are the ores of our ancestors, their slumbering power allow the stones to take flight.”
He used his maul to retrieve another, “Some of them when pressed together are pulled apart with a strength of a thousand Legendwalkers.” Silver demonstrated, and Crimson watched as a pair of stones repelled one another in an endless waltz, refusing to collide. “And others, when they are close enough, are drawn together with similar might,” Silver hurled a pebble over the edge to the abyss below, it drifted slowly toward the field of quivering stones. Then, in an instant, it darted at an incredible speed, another coming to meet it, their collision percussive and total, for they had become clenched as one.
Crimson scratched her chin with her gauntleted hand, “this force you speak of, in the Imperium, our scholars call it the geowind. It is the only force we know of strong enough to override the All-Mother’s pull, the divine grasp that keeps us tethered to this world, the pull that keeps us from drifting up to the stars beyond the sky.”
Silver nodded, returning his gaze to the abyss and the strangely suspended sea of pebbles hovering about, “It is with this, geowind, as you say, that we Legendwalkers built the jutting city. It is through our heritage metals that we are granted the ability to catch the scent of the metals so that we can bend them to our will.”
“You possess the power to affect geowind?” Crimson said, her face incredulous.
“Not by our will alone,” Silver explained, his arms gesturing out, “but with the aid of the Fulminous.”
Then, as if answering him, lightning plumed overhead, soaring by them, its charge heating the air as it plummeted down into the abyss, striking something steadily rising from the shadowy depths.
“The ancestors found a way to summon the Fulminous,” Silver said, pointing to a flotilla of carved obsidian, outfitted with pikes on either end that resembled the horns of some petrified beast. “The discus allows us to ride the geowind across the Vale.”
Before Crimson could inquire further, Silver threw himself over the sill of the cliff, landing with a thud on the discus as it vaulted upward. He could see her expression of fear as she looked down at him. “You must jump, the one we hunt is already out here in the maw.”
Silver watched Crimson’s cape riffle in the wind as she tumbled onto the platform.
“You have done well, She-Sword,” Silver folded his arms, “it takes a youth many moons to master the mounting of the discus.”
“Lightning rods,” she said, appraising the apparatuses jutting out of either side of the flotilla that suspended them. “Like a sail harvesting winds to cross a sea. You bait energy with these rods. The lightning strikes, and with this apparatus, you gain the capability to shift the directionality of the geowind’s pull-”
The Arbiter-Knight cursed in her language, as another flare of lightning struck the anterior pike, sending them forward at an incredible velocity. With one hand adorned in a glove beaded with shimmering metals, Silver socketed his fingers into an onyx pedestal, and with his eyes closed, the craft careened Northward, the impossibly dark reaches below somehow deepening as they went. “The vale, too, has pull, the lost metals of our distant ancestors hold us up toward the sky as we cross. When the Fulminous are summoned, we can guide their spirits to steer the discus.”
Crimson walked unsteadily toward him, “And our enemy knows how to steer one of these…discuses?”
Silver nodded, “Yes, it was I who trained them in these arts.”
The Arbiter-Knight scanned the dark for their target, “They are your kin?”
“They are not,” Silver sighed, “It is our way that youth must apprentice to doyens outside of their kin group, so that the love of kin will not blind them to true learning.”
“And what inspired your apprentice to commit such a heinous act?”
Silver’s cerulean eyes lifted to the sky, “A tale that one day my metals will tell as legend.”
“I would be honored to hear it, if only in the interest of understanding our foe.”
“Very well,” Silver cleared his throat, “it is our way, that in order to complete their training, an apprentice must prove themselves worthy of a legend-name, not the name given at birth, an earned name. Until then, they are neither man nor woman, nor person of any sort. If they succeed they can take on a legend name of their choosing, they can choose to walk as man or woman, or remain as neither.”
Crimson raised an eyebrow, “so you were not born a man?”
“You speak of strange notions, outlander. Personhood is not given, it is forged.” Silver grunted, “we are nothing until we are proven, and only after the proving can we be made, can we choose to be whatever we wish to be, because we have earned the privilege to write our own legends for posterity in the molten eternity beyond death.”
“Fascinating, I was not briefed on this custom,” Crimson said, straining to be heard over the downpour, “tell me, what drove your apprentice to ruin?”
Silver turned to face her, his eyes as blue as the serpents threading across the sky, “it is not uncommon for an elder doyen and their apprentice to make a union of bodies, to strike as lightning does to rock and vanish swiftly thereafter.”
“You were lovers?”
“In the Vale, love is many shaded, like the strata of rock in these cliffs,” Silver clenched his gloved hand as another bolt struck the posterior pike, “there are many loves, the love of smelting that makes the discus, the love of men and women that brings children, the love of kin, the love that hunters share with their prey, and the love that is quick and of the body.”
Crimson stood beside him, “There are no such words to describe this love in my language, I am having difficulty understanding.”
“They mistook the love that is quick for the love that is molten,” Silver began, “a love that is forbidden for an apprentice without a name.”
“And so, they came to love you in this way?” The Arbiter-Knight muttered, “but you did not reciprocate, could not…because it was forbidden?”
“Yes,” Silver frowned. “Such is the way of things.”
“There!” Crimson shouted, pointing to a black fleck on the horizon, barely visible above the maw of the chasm.
“Trespassers!” Silver bellowed, across the vale, his teeth gleaming like ivory daggers.
Azure serpents tunneled down from the sky in a sinuous waltz, drawn to the gleaming pikes on the opposing discuses. The world brightened, then darkened, as their craft hurtled toward their enemy’s, the pull of the geowinds now reversed, no longer in opposition, but gravitic attraction. Silver readied his maul, and Crimson’s sword glowed in the flicker of the Fulminous as they brachiated over the Vale. Ahead on the swiftly approaching discus, the dark silhouettes of five souls grew increasingly clearer.
The voice was crisp, at once masculine and feminine, “So it has come to this, consorting with agents from the Out to bring me to heel.”
Unlike Silver, no locks or curls or braids fell from their charcoal face, and no hair yet grew above their full, violet-tinged lips. Their lithe, sculpted physique was on full display as they were not yet permitted to wear the full leathers. The whorl of their heritage metals was nestled below the sharp precipice of their cheekbone, set faintly aglow by the Fulminous. Eyes blacker than the obsidian of the Vale narrowed in contempt upon appraisal of the Arbiter-Knight who accompanied Silver.
“You who are unnamed, you who have trespassed against the Way of the Jutting City,” Silver said, pointing the black tip of his maul at his former pupil, “you must answer for your crimes. But first, tell me, who are the ones that ride with you?”
Behind the youth, stood a quartet of strangers, clad in scaled copper mail, their monolidded, golden-brown eyes bursting from smooth canvases of bronze skin, their brass hairs coiled into lattices that jutted up behind their skulls. Violet scarves concealed their thin mouths, but even from this distance, their visages spoke of death as they raised their golden maces.
Crimson stepped forward, addressing first the apprentice Legendwalker, whose dark eyes remained fixed on her, “The matter of your trespass is beyond my purview and jurisdiction, for the Imperium has promised not to interfere directly in the affairs of the Vale, but those who ride with you are not immune to my reach.”
They spoke in the language of the Glass City, the heart of the Imperium, though their accents tinged each word with a lyrical quality, “Study as you will the music of all places, but no answer will you find to the calamity, the rot that withers your Empire.”
Crimson lowered her sword, “surrender now, and I will spare your lives, on the condition that you do not again enter this Vale or contaminate the music of its Way.”
The four hunters stiffened, “We of the Viridian Sands do not answer to you, Arbiter-Knight, we will take these metals and offer them to the Ever-Torch. They will serve as tokens for our passage to the living flame, where we will spend eternity as spirit-fire long after our bodies are dissolved by the sandtide.”
“By decree of the Score, all Ways must be preserved,” Crimson began, shifting her footing, red blade lifted to the sky, “but no Way shall be permitted to flourish at the expense of another. The Whole of the music must be preserved at all costs.”
“May your ashes fuel the eternal flame,” The hunters said, and in unison, they vaulted into the air, landing behind her. Decades of service had prepared her for such ambushes, her movements were governed by a precise economy. The songs of her strokes guided by the lyrics of combat she divined from the music of the score; the crashing of turquoise breakers on the bronze beaches of the Glass City, the howl of winds combing through leafless trees in the snow-swept hills where she had roamed as a girl-child, and here, in the blue bloom of lightning boring through sky and earth. Two fell dead, the crimson tip of her blade carving through skin and sinew as it cleaved. The remaining foes struck in tandem, their golden bludgeons whizzing by her ears as they sought to crush bone.
Silver bared his teeth at his pupil, quelling the desire that swept over him, the lust for flesh against flesh that had inexplicably flourished into a love that could not be. “I must bring you to the Jutted City.”
His pupil wielded a silver staff that terminated in two gleaming prongs, “So that they can put me in a pyre. So that they can make me molten, fuse me with the alloys of my ancestors? You would have them destroy me?”
“That is our way,” Silver readied his maul, gripping it with both hands.
“Night the Diving-Glaive,” They whispered, “That is what I would have chosen as a name.”
“But now you have chosen to be nothing,” Silver said, but before he could finish his verbal parry, Night was in the air, barreling toward him. Their weapons met in a flash of indigo sparks, shards of the Fulminous dripping down into the shadowy maw. Behind them, Crimson and the Outlanders dueled, their grunting and clatter a distraction that Silver evacuated from his perception.
“Why must I perish?” Night cried, thrusting the teeth of their staff toward Silver’s leg, striking instead the black stone of the platform. “Why must I end, merely for loving you?”
Silver swung his maul toward Night’s bared chest, but the youth was agile, somersaulting over the wide arc of his attack, “You will not perish, as the Outlanders say, you will live on forever, as the metal that whispers, as the alloy of legends that guides future generations.”
Night landed at the edge of the discus, one hand clinging to the pike at its edge, and the other to their staff, which they spun to answer Silver’s lunge. Sparks flurried over their eyes, the crystalline blue of the doyen, the tenebrous black of the apprentice as maul and staff collided again and again.
“I do not fear death,” Night said at last.
“Then why do you resist it so?” Silver stammered, between breaths.
“I turned to the Outlanders, because they do not know our way,” Night began, “they mean to take the metals without destroying me, to appease their fiery god. And I will live on, in the Out, where I may lead a life devoted to forgetting you.”
The maw roared, a tremor sizzling up from its depths to cleave the sky with its resonant echo. “What I fear most, you see, is losing you,” Night said, and then the Fulminous came, blue light radiating from the sky to touch the pike that he gripped. Then, buoyant with their power, Night dropped into the maw.
Crimson steadied her sanguine brand as her enemies approached. “You fight well, Arbiter-Knight, but you are old, and the weight of the ages bears down on you,” the last of the hunters taunted, the violet scarf already cloven by her blade, revealing a set of thin lips that bristled with rage.
“My deeds here are written in the Score,” Crimson muttered, driving her sword between the hunter’s ribs. “And your demise was foretold in its great melodies, as is mine, but not today, not now.”
With the last of her foes felled, Crimson turned to see Silver leaping off the edge of the discus, a tongue of lightning forking from the metal of his cheek to the pike that reached for the sky. Suspended above the deep, doyen and apprentice dueled, azure sparks marking the dance of their weapons in the shadow of the wheeling storm.
“Part of you yearns for me still,” Night shouted, propelled by the geowind toward their foe, the forked staff biting down at the hilt of Silver’s maul. “And yet you deny it, clinging to tradition.”
Silver tugged at his maul, which remained in the grip of Night’s weapon, hurtling them into a dizzying spin, “Discipline quiets my weakness, my yearning to take you in my coils, like the blue serpents.”
“You say not what you feel, Legendwalker,” Night sneered, disarming their doyen, the maul pirouetting as it plunged into the jaws of the dark below. They pointed their staff at their doyen, and the pair gazed at each other, floating, suspended by the geowinds that tugged at the metals in their cheeks. “You desire more than a flicker, that is why you and not another hunts me, even if you deny it now!”
“This is our way,” Silver hurled himself at Night with such force that the weapon slipped from his hand, and the two tumbled onto the discus, their dark limbs entangled.
Crimson rushed to meet them, helping Silver to his feet. Night rose slowly, their neck craned forward in evident submission. The Arbiter-Knight pressed her bloodied blade against their neck, discouraging resistance.
“What if our Way is wrong?” Night said.
“You speak blasphemy,” Silver growled, his round nose dripping with rain, “but this is the Way of youth. To challenge, to defy.”
Night peered at their upturned palms, watching droplets pool against the pale part of their skin, “I carry legends, whispers from my metals, that sing of love not unlike ours.”
Silver’s round, thin-lidded eyes narrowed with intrigue. Then, before he could open his lips to answer this charge, one of the corpses of the outlanders moved, and their hand-tossed a golden dagger into the air. With a splash of blood, the dagger met bare flesh, for Night had thrust themself in its path, and now they slumped to their knees, maimed, one hand clutching their ribs. Silver did not hear Crimson the She-Sword cleaving the assailant with her red blade, but he did hear the rain and the stilted whimper of his beloved Night. Silver clasped them, intoxicated by their petrichor scent, a scent now tainted with the iron of rushing blood. Their eyes met again, and Night reached out with a trembling hand, the dark blade of their fingertip tracing the spooled metals on Silver’s cheek.
“So you are named, Night, the Diving-Glaive,” Silver whispered, but Night’s eyes had already stilled, they were already beginning their chrysalis.
“They are,” Crimson crouched beside him, “no more.”
As the spark dimmed in Night, Silver continued to clutch them, as if drawn by the pull of geowinds. Above, the sky bled, molten brass streaming through perforations in the weepers. The din of the storm was abating, and soon the Ever-Torch would drown the sky in its fiery cast.
“Quickly, we must make a fire,” Silver said, his voice coarse and quivering.
“We have no fuel,” Crimson said, helping him set down the youth’s body into the center of the discus.
Silver plucked a tiny phial from his belt, “these salts are harvested from the lower depths of the Vale, they grow bright flames but we must first find a seed.”
Crimson fetched the scarves from the corpses of the Outlanders, wrapping Night’s body with the damp strips of violet cloth, seeding the flames to come, while Silver gingerly sprinkled the vermillion powder onto his beloved.
“Now, for the spark,” Crimson said. With her red blade, she sliced the stone, a radial arc that spawned bright flecks in its wake.
A single spark set the youth ablaze. The flames were hot and azure, reducing the corpse to white ashes with startling speed. From the smolder, cerulean serpents bloomed and jolted up to electrify the heavens, and just as swiftly, the youth was gone, only a pool of silvery metals remained where they had lain. Light fissured through the diminishing weepers in columns of gold and pink, revealing the staggering vastness of the rift valley. Crimson gawked at the colors embedded in the densely layered walls of sedimentary rock that ringed the vast chasm, a river faintly visible coursing through its labyrinthine expanse. Hands shaking, heart flooding, Silver siphoned the molten metals into glass needles he kept in his belt, before bursting as the weepers had done. He wept and wailed for the love that should not have been.
After a long while, Silver approached Crimson. “Sit here, and make yourself as unmoving as bedrock,” he instructed, and the old woman obeyed, setting her avian helm at her feet, cropped white hair still drenched with sweat and rain.
Then, he reached for the glass needle, and pierced her cheek. Before she could protest, he began pouring the strangely cool liquid through tiny boreholes carved into her cheek with the needle. Upon contact with her skin, the molten fluid did not burn, but it did harden, and she could feel the alien metals tugging at her skin as it became more rigid.
“Night will live on in both of us now,” Silver said, before applying the remainder of the fluid onto his own skin, “This must be the Way of things.”
With the whorl of silver now cooled and fused to her skin, the Arbiter-Knight Eidrim rubbed her cheek in understanding, “Is it not forbidden to share the metals with a woman from the Out?”
“My affections for Night were also forbidden,” Silver grumbled, “but I do not regret them, and their legend must travel beyond the Vale, in the lands where you are called Eidrim the Arbiter-Knight and not Crimson the She-Sword.”
She nodded in understanding, and he could see in her celadon eyes a newfound awareness, the legends seeping down from the metals to make wiser her conscious mind. “Where will you go?”
“To the Jutted City,” Silver said, “to face judgment or to appeal to our elders, perhaps our Way can yet change.”
“May the Fulminous guide your path,” Crimson said, as their discus docked against a cliff dotted with fulgurites that resembled the white roses that bloomed in her Glass City.
Silver followed her, his body turning South to the steely minarets of his city, while Crimson headed West, to the lands of the Out, the beyond that no legendwalker had dared to explore, until Night, until now.
“Be safe, Legendwalker,” Silver said to her, and for the first time, a smile tinged his lips.
© October 2022, E. G. Condé
E. G. Condé’s training as a cultural anthropologist deeply informs his world building. His work has appeared in Anthropology & Humanism, Reckoning, and If There’s Anyone Left. Stories are forthcoming in Solarpunk Magazine and from Stelliform Press. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.