thirteen

Hunner prepared to depart and slung the Daemon Blade over his back tied with a piece of cord that he had produced from one of his many pockets. Fyndraxis had mixed feelings about being worn in such a fashion. Humans observe their reality from the front side of their head, and putting the controllable end of an unfamiliar weapon exactly where you can’t observe it is an exceptionally lethal brand of machismo.
The French invented a sword that did this a long time ago. They called it the Guillotine. He decided not to bring it up though, not only to keep the peace, but to maintain his character as Light Bringer, the divine sword of Gaia.
They began their journey and Fyndraxis took that opportunity to try to get the lay of the surrounding land while he still had the privilege of a bit of light. He had spent his winter in a high mountain glade at the northern end of a textbook glacial valley. At some point a couple of hundred million years ago these peaks had been truly immense towering monuments to plate tectonics. They had no doubt rivaled any of the tallest peaks in the world in their height and general grandeur.
Over eons, wind and ice had done their damage and worn these once mighty peaks down to the granite and marble that had been kept in the basement. When a peak is eroded in such a way, the material that had once been the peak has to go somewhere. In this case it simply slid down the side of the mountain and formed a high plain. The mountains had been peeled like bananas.
This produced a pattern of peaks and high plains and valley floors that persisted from valley to valley in a quite predictable manner. These once hostile mountains had gone into retirement and were content to have things like trees and humans populate their gentle slopes. Trees had taken quite a hold around here. From his vantage on Hunner’s back, most of what Fyndraxis could see through gaps in the canopy were other far off equally successful trees.
They made their way across the high plain of the valley in a westerly direction, fording brooks and making their way through the occasional meadow. Fyndraxis let his mind wander, and started thinking about time. He could slow down his personal time, it was a pretty neat trick. He wondered idly whether he could speed up time as well. It turns out that he could. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t thought of this before. This made reality an incomprehensible blur for him. He had only touched the power for a second, but he rocketed forward through time with no concept of where he was going or what he was doing.
Night had fallen, and he was in the central square of a small village. The village itself looked pretty solidly medieval. It was populated with squat huts with roofs made of thatched reeds or some sort of local bamboo equivalent. He was still slung over Hunner’s back, so he had a pretty good view of what was going on. Hunner, it seemed, had gotten himself into a swordfight.
“That you Hunner?” A male voice announced, clearly knowing the answer to his question. Hunner said nothing but stopped dead in his tracks.
“Told you not to come back. Nobody here took your brother,” the man said, stepping forward and drawing a blade that looked to have been made from the leaf spring of a large truck.
“I reckon the Twitchels’re dead.” the man surmised. Holding this leaf spring blade was a man in his middle age, who looked to have found his way to that state of being though sheer grit and determination.
“I know they killed him, Presson,” Hunner presumably knew this man Presson and had a bit of a reputation around town.
“What’s that on your back?” Presson asked, readying himself to do something violent. He seemed to be rather comfortable with that sort of thing. Generally, people who carry around large swords tend to use them. When you have a hammer, all that you see are nails.
“Found it up in the woods. Wasn’t the Wendigo up in the eastern hills,” Hunner took this opportunity to draw the Daemon Blade.
The unfortunate thing about carrying a lethally, irresponsibly sharp blade on your back is that it can be difficult to draw safely. Pulling a blade out of its sheath blind, and without practice can lead to some unforeseen outcomes. What happened in this case was Hunner cleanly lopped off the crown of his skull. While not immediately lethal, it does tend to be a bit of a distraction.
While Hunner was busy yelling “Fuck,” just about as loud as he could, Presson closed the distance between them and swung his blade in a brutal overhand chop that had probably produced thousands of cords of firewood. Hunner was not fully distracted by his injury. He was an extremely tough, competent product of his environment. He managed to get the Daemon Blade up to block Presson’s deathblow. Presson’s weapon was cleaved cleanly in half and Hunner broke the bridge of his attacker’s nose with the pommel of the sword.
Hunner used this moment to back off and truly square up to the man. While he was doing this people began to poke their heads out of their huts.
“Hunner, whatever you are doing I need you to stop,” Fyndraxis said calmly.
“Fuckin’ took off the top of my head you fucking prick,” Hunner said, as blood began to pour down his head and neck soaking his burlap and leathers.
Presson came in for another attempt at Hunner, this time being wary of the Daemon Blade that was glowing sky blue into the night. Presson couldn’t see all that well with his freshly broken nose though. Tears had blurred his vision and he had a dramatically shorter weapon than he did a couple of seconds ago. Hunner took advantage of this. Presson was split diagonally from his collarbone out through the opposite side of his ribcage, taking his sword hand in the same stroke. Hunner laughed as his foe tumbled in pieces to the ground.
Hunner was beginning to get a bit lightheaded from blood loss, and having a bit less skull than he was used to. He chose this moment to begin vomiting, so he failed to notice that there was a man sneaking up behind him. Fyndraxis also failed to inform him of this, because he had deemed his wielder problematic in a couple of very fundamental ways. When the man got close enough, he slit Hunner’s throat down to the spine. A mixture of blood and vomit sprayed from his new wound as his scream found an easier path to freedom.
Once Hunner had bled all the way out, the man spat in his face, cut off his ears and threw them in the river. After these rites had been observed, he calmly looted his body while the village looked on.