Let me be very clear about this: I hate you. I utterly despise you, in a deeply personal and utterly consuming manner. You are useless to me, and thus irrelevant, but you are also an obstruction to me, and thus deserving of my rage.
You are the one creature I can never turn my wrath on. You are a hollow shell animated only by spite and the last remnants of an iron will, burning with your hatred of me.
Let me be clear: I do not need you. I allow you to live only that my hate may rise, choking your throat with bile, making your eyes burn with rage not your own.
I do not need you.
_____________________________
Behold: a platform. Square, metal, and dull, orbiting a stationary pillar. This is where I stood for the first battle I fought in the name of Sin. Around me was nothing but blackness, the deep dark of the void. Not some deep space bullshit, either, just the Void, the abyss that stares back. I know this place well; it is my place.
On another platform was a man who thought the Void was his. He wore black; cloak, hood, gloves, boots and hair, with golden eyes that I could see from a good fifty feet away. His form was more shadow than substance, and I sneered at his arrogance. He stood on the very edge of the platform, cloak streaming out behind him, daring the void to take him, suck him down into the blackness that no one ever left.
He was a fool. The darkness around us was no danger; death is found on the blade's edge, not in empty space. He stood there, orbiting away from me, eyes boring into those orbs he thought were mine. I ignored him. He was not yet important.
I am not a swordsman. I am a sword. A swordsman recognizes patterns, but a sword merely cuts. A swordsman, such as this hollow shell might once have been, would have looked at the orbiting of the platforms and calculated an exact path that would take them to the center. I am a sword. I do not calculate, I merely strike. I did not think, I merely leapt.
"You are a dead man," said the enemy, conversationally. "The only question here is how you will die."
I, having no tongue in this empty head, disdained to reply. I moved from my platform to another, every motion an attack on the very concept of location. The enemy waited for the opportune moment and simply stepped from one to the other as they passed. Coward.
"What, no response?" he mocked as he paced across the moving ground. "No last words before you die?"
Idiot. As if I could be killed by one such as he. I leapt again, to a new spinning disc, and made the mistake of looking down. I saw nothing. Should I fall I would fall forever, and though this husk would eventually perish I would remain, falling, falling forevermore. There is a silence here behind that thought, a ragged edge of insanity, that I do not care to examine too closely. I would not fall. I would make my way to the center, the hub, and stand on firm ground. There I would face the enemy, and there he would fall.
"This bores me," announced the enemy.
Fascinating, I would have replied.
Let us make it more interesting, then. I raised one arm and beckoned to the foe, urging him closer. And closer he came, a sword appearing from nowhere in his hand.
Neither of us ever made it to the central hub. We met between platforms, I leaping to the one he had been on and he doing the same to mine. We took the time to exchange a pair of blows in midair, and then we were past and spinning to face each other again.
"You're better than I thought," said the enemy.
"Nothing to say?" he asked.
"Speak!" he said.
I opened my mouth and waggled the stump of this wretched tongue at him. Rest assured, fool, were I to speak you would be
listening.
The enemy was...not perturbed, just surprised. "Someone's silenced you," he laughed. I made no response. The dog deserves no treat for pointing out the obvious.
"Well, then," he said, affronted by my silence. "You're in my way." And he jumped and he struck, and there were no more words between us.
Welcome to the dance of the Sword. Move fast and move skilled, for to misstep is to die. Every simple gesture is filled with a world of meaning. The blades spark and clash; block with the flat, attack with the edge and the point,
slash and
lunge and
parry and
riposte. This is the blade dance, the movement of the Sword, and at this I cannot be defeated. This shadowman is merely a pretender to my throne. I shall set him right with but a touch.
And so we danced, moving from one spinning platform to another. My shell spoke not with the foe, but I exchanged intimate words with the sword of mine enemy. Whispered endearments, the seduction by steel; let me in, allow my past thy guard, let me slip around the edges and caress the hand that holds thee, stroking flesh with the bleeding edge. The enemy's blade and I spoke, heads bowed together, as the shadowman danced with the rotting husk.
I am not a swordsman. I am a sword. I did not dance with the shadowman; my desires were bent towards another.
It was a small slip, a brief assumption that I would be somewhere else, and I slid over the shadow-blade, smooth as silk on chain. The blades embraced, and I conquered. This husk opened its mouth and screamed without words, a hideous gargling cry, and the shadowman's golden eyes opened wide in shock.
And then he smiled.
"I am...Beuxhart," he said, dark ichor bubbling from his mouth. "I am the Blade of Shadows...the Wanderer in the Void...the--the--I am the Silent Darkness. I cannot die." He straightened and grinned. His flesh had parted at my touch, but he cared not. The shadow closed back over the cut and he stood whole, or at least as whole as this Beuxhart ever was. He laughed, and my heart burned cold with rage.
Cut.
Cut the flesh, cut the bone, cut away the mind and the soul.
Cut.
The blow took him just under the chin, blazing a red line up his chest before striking the skull and taking him from his feet. The enemy was uplifted, shadows whirling around his wounds, and in his moment of uncertainty I lofted him from his perch on life. I dug deep, pushing, slamming into bone and sending the Beuxhart stumbling away, backward, over the edge and into empty space.
I did not watch him fall. I knew what it would look like, the dim figure slowly vanishing into its own darkness, the occasionally flash of light from a desperate gun slowly becoming smaller and smaller. Beuxhart had fallen, to wander his void forevermore.
_____________________________
Do you hear me? Do you hear the voice of That Which Compels?
