[Galley] Birth of the End

With a hiss of virgin voidsteel, Nergui pulled the blade free of the pulsating knot of darkness that grew, like a cancer, upon the throne of Ordo. It would be years before his sorcerers would build the sheath to ensnare this cursed thing.

With an angry grunt, Kubrat pulled the sword from its binding sheath, ready to betray his own father. Son and father both were lost.

With a curious glint in her eye, Sakura dared to pull on the gilded hilt to see what prize she had stolen. She was gone like a breath, killed looking for a reflection the blade could not yield.

Jean could not disobey her master as she drew the unholy thing. She knew she would die for Romulus' curiosity long before she could find the will to wield this terrible thing against him. And with a simple tug, she did.

Furious at his creation, ****-hoon drew the forbidden blade and prepared to sacrifice himself to put down this wretched experiment, lest the entire clan fell. But the speed of that wretch...

Yarrick drew the blade that killed his master, and screamed in agony as he felled his makers. He pulled it again, the first to draw it twice, to annihilate the Auction assassin. He drew it thrice to sentence a Kingdom to annihilation, a fourth time to escape a Fateweaver prison, and finally, on the fifth pull of this terrible thing, he met his fated end.

s7yFDSf8u#IF pulled the sword out, and eg5$%gerg%3e5t53t screamed at its terrible reflection as ruination and power bled out against a sealed door.

Galley drew the wind-

“Welcome home, Daisy,” greeted the stranger.

Daisy Dandelion Nippel, whose bullies made her loathe the name, had arrived at her seventh placement in her tenth year of life. The latest foster home had been located in rural Georgia, a stretch of peach farms and adverse possessions whose names had been lost on the child. Daisy knew the smile on the face of the stranger--a warm, comfortable-looking woman of advanced years--and, despite the infamy of the system, knew that this woman too would try and give Daisy a normal life.

But it wasn't going to work... it never did. I am soulless... and I am a killer.

A memory that was not hers, but held her in its heart: Daisy, newborn and in a packed New York City hospital, cried and screamed amid the plastic cribs. Her mother’s health had driven her into a coma as she gave birth, one she would recover from once she was freed of her baby’s presence. None could stand the babe’s cries, and she was quickly rushed to the nursery where she went on to wail for food, for touch, for anything. It was noticed a day later: the cribs of the nursery, all save that of little D.D. Nippel, now filled with tiny, unmoving bodies. SIDS, they called it… but it befell every child, no matter its minutes or hours of life, wherever they heard Daisy’s wail.

A priest was called in because the nurses couldn’t bear to approach me. I wanted love, attention, relief from the pain of a world I did not understand… one even more alien to me than any other newborn washed by light for the first time. It is still not a world I understand. It is not a world that can stand when I scream with my heart.

“It’s going to be alright. My name’s Kelly Fyre, and I’ll be taking good care of you from now on, OK?”

Daisy was back in the doorway of her seventh placement… and she was starting to understand.

I suppose the Order being the first to understand—first I ever met—was why I signed up without hesitation. I am soulless... in a world made of nothing but spiritual energy. One of the Order's seers once described me as a sucking wound in the world, one that moved and shifted wherever my body went and drinking everything it touched just to send it nowhere. That made sense to me. It was sort of how interactions I could remember went: every time I tried to reach out to my father, to my foster parents, or anyone else with my cries and my joy, it sucked out just a bit more of them... and their love for me. I guess that's why my biological parents stuck around the longest: they had the most love to lose.

The child in the doorway, dressed in a cute blue sundress and topped with an adult straw hat she had taken a liking to, was held by the hand by her social services agent. The woman clutching her was severe in demeanor; she was secretly an Order agent as well, charged with placing the soulless until something was to be done with her... and she was exhausted spiritually by the repeated encounters with the adorable anomaly in her grip. "Say hello to Mrs. Fyre, Daisy," the agent tersely ordered, surprising the foster mother.

But she'd understand too, in time... and I was starting to notice how it happened. I just wanted to experience and know the world, as any child does. I needed to feel love and fun and the rapture of life everyone else seemed to have with each other. I just needed those feelings returned to me by that place that never stopped feeling foreign to me... that Earth, that reality. So I'd reach out... and like those babies, my parents, and the agent... reaching out meant I took whenever I meant to share. What I wanted to feel with another I instead stole from them. Normal people and things could take that love and reflect it back; I know this. I smell the sweet, addictive scent of attachments and adoration on people as clearly as I do on random, inanimate objects. They exchange it in every trade of emotion through their words, gestures, and actions... but I cannot trade. If I try to give, I just… take.

The child did not smile in return... she was too afraid to upset yet another foster mother, and nothing seemed to wear them down faster than joy, eagerness, or even just interacting with Daisy. Instead, Daisy nodded solemnly. "Thank you," she curtly replied; she was taught manners, at least. But even that—gratitude, however mechanical—made the edges of the foster mother's smile shrink imperceptibly.

I'm just a sucking wound, taking that love or attention and sending it nowhere. So everything I say, everything I do, everything I feel has to be identified… and then buried. Only when it’s gone, when I’ve made sure I’ve put it away securely… only then can I mimic how I ought to act as a result. I still have my slip-ups, my moments of embarrassment or surprise… especially lately… and I can see it on most of the faces I’m with now. They’re getting tired of me. I’m draining them. Soon I’ll smell their resentment… until it’s all I can smell.

The other sullen faces of her childhood were a roulette, from the most optimistic to the most monstrous that got their hands on the young, unwanted girl. Daisy had barely evaded the worst of it… and yet experienced, every time, something more terrible: a loneliness, a terrible solitude in her condition and what relationship she had with the human condition. When at last the reason for her loneliness, her isolation, and her dearth of empathy became known, it was the Order that was there to tell her. They promised she could be made into a weapon, a hero capable of destroying evil, a contract “mage” set to fight the secret villains of the world.

Mage… what a title for the one person who can never become one. I took the title, though; I was eager. I took the surgery too, and let them carve into my bones and flesh with the works they stole from some dead archmage. The pain took years to get used to… but I was Soulless. I understood pain like I did emotions: I just had to identify them, bury them, and mimic how I ought to act. I mastered it in those years… enough for the Order to tolerate me, enough to survive without foster care. All I had to do to keep fitting in was kill their enemies… but I never did fit in, did I?

Galley's fingers gripped the sword handle tighter as she drifted in the void. But you’re just like me, huh? A sword, sure… but soulless. A weapon. You get drawn by your wielders, and you do your best to reflect their intent with your edge… but you can’t reflect or share. You can only take. You drink it up until they can’t stand you anymore… until their bodies can’t stand you anymore. Just like me.

The sword was not real, according to her nose... but here, in the void of their first union, she finally saw its edge shimmer earnestly. The edge was her... but she had no soul to feed it, no spiritual essence to absorb, and nothing except the paradoxical existence of her ego: an entity that did not reciprocate the energies of the soul, but drank them infinitely.

We’re like two mirrors facing each other in darkness…no. No, you’re the mirror… and I’m the reflection. You’re the first thing to not shatter upon holding me… and I’m the first to be glad to see you. I can’t go back to walking around with my eyes closed, and you can’t go back under the throw-sheet, right?

The hilt, guard, and sheathe shimmered and broke apart as if they were images cast in rippling waters.

I am not Daisy… and you’re not the Wind. What is your name…? The grip began to solidify in her grasp… and took an unfamiliar, comfortable shape. The blade did not have a will… but it existed in a way only Galley could call familiar, and in that familiarity she nodded with a smile. Of course… what else would it be? It’s what birthed you… it’s what you do… it’s what I do. It’s what we’ll face together, one day.

The alien world waiting outside was beginning to fade back in: dim flickers became the hallway lights, and the glimmer of faraway stars became chainsaw teeth. I wonder what John saw when he drew you...? Was it him? What did he see to scare him as bad as he was? I don't know... but I know now that I should have drawn you the moment I had you. We’ve finally found one another… and if you’re alright with it, I’ll never let you go again.

Galley's body slowly turned. Still the world that had fallen away was returning; its edges, like that of her katana, shimmered. I’ll tell the world your name because now it’s also mine. I feel our name… and I’m not going to bury this feeling ever again. You gave me equilibrium… the least I can do is tell it to everyone:

“The End.”

The cyborg had no notion or origin for the changes that swept over her target, but she was only barely alive thereafter: the blade the target unsheathed was suddenly a blur that pinched the space on either side of it as it cut a plane of unreal through the air. Its edge cut magical steel, carbon nanotubes, air, and the flesh of three barriers as well as the underlying Kingdom of Vantage. A chainsaw was brought up to parry, and so the chainsaw was shortened. Her mind failed to process this information as its signals, organic and cybernetic, were all literally cut. Her body compounded upon the edge of the blade’s path, sucking into it as if the blade’s history were a singularity that drank all matter, and some of the ceiling and floor tiles went with her. The effect ended as soon as it began, but not before leaving the cyborg a two-part heap on the ground with the center two inches of her width now consumed by Galley’s swing. Above and below her, where the blade had arced, the same two-centimeter gap had been carved through magically-reinforced steel.

The blade was sheathed anew, but for the first time not because its wielder was dead or terrified. It rested for now because it was done for now. Galley held the sheath out in front of her: gone were its gaudy effects and gildings, leaving instead a plain, black sheath of matte-painted wood. Its hilt was black-wrapped in simple cloth, the butt of it a dull steel color. Its guard was of the same steel, made into a simple sunburst design. It was a nondescript, plain weapon, unfitting for anyone but perhaps a peasant fighting a lord’s battles… even though what waited inside its hilt was pricelessly rare.

So too was Galley: gone were the effects of her Vantage disguise, replaced with familiar garb from her favorite days of youth: a gray sports bra that extended halfway down to her abs, a black leather jacket with its sleeves ripped off, business-gray jeans and a pair of boots she was never able to replace after she lost them. She could feel her hair was back up in her signature style, but this time, like the clothes, they were not made from dye: these were all part of her now, healed onto her body just as her horrid wounds had been cleaned and closed.

Renewed, she looked around as she contemplated the barriers… and what the sword could do for her with an edge that cut everything. She inhaled deeply… and cut to where the blood reeked the most.

So it was no small surprise when the Soulless suddenly appeared. Tita blinked through the mess of her platinum locks as she tried to understand the newly-clothed Soulless, or how it even managed to arrive at this place… but the rest were quicker to ascertain her value.

The cyborg abandoned Greenpaw as Fraser unleashed his own heated blade, and both went for an immediate pincer upon the pixie-mohawked warrior. Fraser’s blade cut true: Galley’s left arm and sheath were bisected and fell away just after the katana was unsheathed towards the cyborg. With her body being immune to the magical heat of the weapon, it still reacted to its hyper-sharpened edge: her blood exploded outward and painted Greenpaw’s pretty white chest fur as muscles and bones fell in a sloppy mess to the ground. The cyborg’s body flopped to the ground as her head was vanished by Galley’s wild swing.

Fraser spun the halberd for a finishing blow, striking down at Galley’s neck… and being barely caught on the flat side of her katana as her right hand trembled to hold it up to his ****… with her left hand pressing against the blade near the tip.

What?

Tita and the rest who could follow blinked in confusion. Galley’s severed arm was gone… or rather, it was no longer severed, nor was her sheath destroyed. Greenpaw was cleansed of the blood she had sprayed upon him. The black and silver of the tempered steel did not so much as glow with the heated friction of Fraser’s blade… and before he could pull it away, Galley ducked left and almost forcelessly cut to her right.

The core of Fraser’s weapon now had a scar on its side where her strange blade had tasted it… and with sputtering flames, the heat began the bleed from the flaw. Cursing, he sealed it back into the outer-blade. He dashed upwards and away from Galley before she could swing at him again, her movements artlessly closer to boxing than proper swordfighting. “How full of surprises! But Alois will be sorely disappointed: this kill is mine!” Fraser gripped his ruined weapon in his right hand as he fished for something out of his left… but a thin, white tentacle rudely interrupted his fumbling as it wrapped down his fingers to probe whatever device he was going for.

Fraser turned in the air, but the tentacle kept with him as he went to stare at the maimed moonbeast. She remained legless and partially torso-less… except now a spindly, reed-like tentacle grew from her underside and stretched out to him mid-flight. “You should be dead by n-!”

She offered him a smile too large for her face. “I told you.” Radiant hatred shined at the tip of the hidden tentacle and filled the back of Fraser’s hand. “I was a healer.”

Brilliant, shimmering prisms of light made blood and cybernetics glitter as they exploded out of Fraser’s pocket just before the incineration grenade detonated along with his hand. Phosphorous flames engulfed his body as they fell down to threaten the remaining monsters with chunks of flaming chemical spillage that continued to ignite with the air. Toxic gases leaked from his burning form, and soon his clothes had fallen from his body in chunks… leaving, at the end of the brilliant explosion, a man half-coated in flames and revealed for the gnarled, hideous experiment he was.

Steel and flesh were joined in messy fusions that everyone now realized were anything but human. The cyborg, at least, had red blood and the organs one would expect, even if they were all enhanced with arcanotech, but Fraser’s body was a pale mess of patchwork hues between beige and blue, and morose, azure blood seeped to a slow drip from the messily torn stump of his left forearm. The magical wards protecting him from most elements were wearing thin as the fires began to bite at his skin, but he hardly seemed aware of it; instead, the red lights of his helm brightened as he growled some incoherent challenge before flying towards Tita. Galley bent low as she tried to jump enough levels to meet him, but her ascent was too slow.

“I was…” Tita’s eyes grew unfocused as she thought to her meeting with John, her night of pleasure, of enslavement. “… a healer…” She thought to her willing bondage, her blasphemous pregnancy, her hatred for what she had become. “… before I was…” She thought now, finally without being blinded by the duty screaming in her blood… of her children. Of their gurgling, smiling faces. Of the hundreds she had secretly named and grew fond of in violation of her duties to the Moon. John ordered her to cherish them… and without a right to defy him, she had her excuse to blaspheme. She cherished them all… and in her own, secret way, even as she loathed slavery and John’s wretched humanity… she found herself cherishing him, as well. “… your en-”

The sound was not clean, but rough like the ripping of cloth. The heated core was sheathed, but the blade was still sharp enough. Tita did not finish her retort… and with one final spasm, her body fell limp.

Fraser howled his triumph… until his spine and much of his reworked organs were consumed by a single cut.