Storytime
In a secluded corner of an ancient city tucked between towering trees, wrapped in silence, and invisible to wandering eyes, I lived a life no one questioned. Solitude suited me. It kept my secrets close.
My origins are a haze, a riddle with no beginning. I cannot tell you who raised me, where I first learned my name, or how I ended up in that forgotten town.
But I carried one thing with me always: a carved, marked blade that whispered when I spoke to it. It answered questions no human could. It opened places no map dared to record.
On a night drenched in moonlight, when the veil between worlds thinned to a breath, I stepped outside beneath a sky littered with stars. With my blade in hand, I murmured old words. Words I had no memory of learning.
With my blade I traced a doorway into the air. Its edges flashed white, cold as the walls of a glacier. Frost bit into my fingertips as I stepped through.
The first breath inside the passage was ice-cold. The second was a warm, tropical breeze.
I opened my eyes to a sun-soaked coastline. Palm trees, heat shimmering off ancient stone, and a frail old man, stumbling toward me with a concerned expression.
He lifted a hand to speak to me, but a sudden crack split the air. He dropped to the ground, struck from behind. Blood flowed from the back of his head. He was dead.
His attacker stepped forward: a man in a black suit, his face unnervingly perfect. He did not even look at me when he said: “Turn back. You’re not welcome here. He’s furious.”
My pulse quickened. The dead old man at my feet… the familiar heat of the sun… The handsome man in a black suit. Something shifted inside me.
I knew this place.
I knew who he meant.
And I remembered our story.
My warlord - the one waiting for me - wasn’t just dangerous. He was a terror, a plague in human skin. I had been bound to him by contract, by seduction, by lies sharp enough to cut bone. I had killed for him when I was was barely more than a child. But today I would send him to hell. And if he refused to go, I would accompany him there to make sure he did not draw another breath.
The man in the black suit didn’t wait for my answer. He simply turned toward the ruins rising above the mountain path, and started walking. I followed him. He did not look back at me. Each step up the crumbling stone felt like walking toward a version of myself I had tried to forget.
We arrived at the top and the man in the black suit walked on towards the entrance of the place. In front of the entrance stood a big bodyguard with face tattoos, staring straight ahead.
There was a large patio with a lounge area with cushioned seating and a firepit in the middle.
There he was. He stood near the firepit, wearing a white linen suit, immaculate against the dust and heat. His gaze didn’t observe me; it cut through me. I walked slowly toward him, keeping my eyes fixated on him; if he tasted any fear, I would be food.
“What you did,” he said in his quiet raspy voice, “was not my assignment.”
“Do it again, and I’ll end you myself,” he whispered. He grabbed my chin, then with his thumb he traced the line of my neck. He pressed it against the hollow between my collarbones, then kissed me hard, punishing, possessive.
I gasped for air. I kept my hands still at my sides; wiping my mouth would have been an insult he wouldn’t tolerate. I waited for the fraction of a second he turned away. That was enough.
In that second I drew my blade, pushed it into his chest and yanked it back out.
He staggered, clutching the blooming stain of red across his white suit. His expression was not anger, nor pain, but disbelief. He wanted to speak, but couldn’t.
Behind me, heavy footsteps scraped stone.
The massive bodyguard with his tattooed face ran toward us. No time to climb down the ruins. I sprinted towards the edge as stones crumbled beneath my feet. A gunshot cracked behind me. A bullet sliced fabric near my ribs. I didn’t look back. I jumped.
The fall lasted only a few seconds, while my blade slipped from my coat, clattering against rock before disappearing. Then: impact. Cold water swallowed me whole.
In the dark water beneath the surface, I kept my eyes closed and pressed a finger to my chest.
I whispered the same ancient words I once spoke to the blade; words that now lived in my bones.
In the dark waters, a light flared beneath, shaping itself into a door of ice, the water grew even colder. I swam towards it and went through the ice portal, feeling immense coldness.
The blade remained behind in that world, like the last bone of a life I refused to keep living.
And just like that, the tropical heat had vanished.
I wound up home in my bed, clothes drenched, body feeling like ice, shivering while my heart was still pounding with the echo of gunfire and my betrayal.
It ended with survival, and the certainty that the doorway could open again at any time. I didn’t need the blade. I was the blade.
