BORN OF SWORDS

UNLIKELY DESTRUCTION

The Judgekiller stood above the tower of the Judge, and the newly arrived night stood still with him. The moons above painted the night a bright violet, and they alone moved slowly in the skies. He had watched the sun drop beneath the horizon and the color drain from the landscape in all directions. What was once a great sapphire lake almost glowing in the south was now a pool of darkness, barely visible apart from the black flatlands in every direction. What was once a pit of hellish activity beneath him was now just a quiet home of tired warclansmen and their families.
A great caravan had come to the complex the night before. This night, a small throng of warriors rode off in the direction he had come from: to the east.
	‘Tonight. Everything must be tonight.’
	Time was not on his side. He had spent the past two days in and around Garand Point after beating the wind to arrive there much earlier than the army from the East, two days spent waiting on the Judge to leave his tower and provide an opening for the Swordborn to attack. No such opportunity had come, and it did not look like one would come any time soon. He did not have the time to waste waiting any longer – before long, the invaders would arrive, and all the castle would be swept in the conflict. By then, the Swordborn’s mission had to be completed.
	He vaulted from the tower, a missile of shadow dropping as quick as a stone. Despite the weight of his armor he sailed and moved gracefully. One hand held onto the windowsill of a passing tower as he fell; then, a foot kicked him off into the air again, and again. In moments he was on the earth again, near the entrance of the tower. No one had seen him in hours. Garand Point unwittingly opened its breast to him.
	Though night had fallen, the complex of the Judge had not yet stilled completely. Pairs of men walked by every so often, their thin sand-colored robes only hindered by the straps holding sheathed weapons to their bodies. Less often, women would go by in more adorned and cape-like robes than the men. Going behind them all was the wind, carrying with it tiny specks of dust, sand, and dirt.
The castle was great and full of activity, but this night was the first time he had noticed people leaving the complex. The recently arriving caravan had been a merchant’s, and men had been flocking to the castle on horseback and in droves lately. That was sensible: a war was on the horizon, and tensions were high across Trallia. It made sense to fortify defenses and organize networks of food and wealth when a threat approached. He had even noticed civilians coming and attempting to enter the castle for safety, all of them coming eastward from Dystil or from the southward from villages in the plains north of Garand Point. For a few hours, the Swordborn had even joined a flock of peasants – out of his armor, of course – in order to survey the perimeter of the great brown complex.
	But for a small party to leave – a party of armed nobles in the distinctive sand-golden robes of the Thousand Stars – that was unusual. Not only that, but for a small party to leave quietly, without fanfare and without the opening of the main gate…
	‘They left in secret. That is the only explanation. And if nobles leave in secret… Nobles follow, in droves, for justice.’
	If he was right, and the party leaving Garand before the moonrise had done so in secret, then there would most definitely be pursuers. That meant once the party’s departure was noticed, there would be a quick scramble of organization and commotion around the castle. The Judge would not be a part of the second party leaving Garand… but he would be preoccupied organizing and commanding those who would be leaving. It was a slim and risky window to take, but with the Eastern lord marching westward faster every day – and the lord in black behind him – the Swordborn had no time to waste waiting for a better opportunity to act.
	 The merchant caravan had come, just as that black-feathered lord had predicted. It had been an optional part of his task, but the Swordborn still found himself surprised at how accurate that particular prediction had been. First the Swordborn delivered the message to the leader of the caravan just as he was ordered to, and the task was simple. The great mobile castle of the Taebryn merchant was guarded, yes, but the guards were simple civilian mercenaries, likely never to have seen anything more bloody than a bar fight in their lives. It was child’s play for him to slip past them, find the chamber of the Taebryn leader, plant the letter, and escape again. The massive, dim corridors of stone and iron machinery were not enough to steer him off his task, nor was the confusing layout of the beastly vehicle sufficient to distract him. The task was so simple that, for once, the Swordborn allowed himself to dwell on something other than his mission as he acted.
	No matter how hard he pushed himself or how fast he rode, the great assassin had never been able to get Touga Kiryus and his mistress out of his mind. ‘I failed. In the middle of a battle, the Swordborn forgot to fight.’ Could it have been because of the woman’s odd magic? Perhaps that was what drew the Swordborn to his knees in such a disgraceful manner? He knew magic – hell, he wore a suit of legendary, magical armor on his body for years. He had fought countless men who attempted to sear him with magical flames, drown him with manipulation of water, or suffocate him by tampering with the air. But he had never battled someone with control over his own mind – someone who could make him feel pain but not actually experience any. Someone with a dark control of illusions.
	‘No. It was not the magic.’
	Could it have been his name, then? It had been so long since someone called his actual name. He did not even like to refer to himself by his given name anymore. Corsail. It sounded like the name of someone that was not him – as if he were looking down at himself from a bird’s eye view, almost piteous. It was his name now that he had long since relinquished the name given to him at birth.
	A memory threatened, but Corsail killed it before it could taint his focus. ‘The Swordborn does not waste time reminiscing of dead men.’
	As he left the great mobile castle of the Taebryn family and stalked toward the northern end of Garand again, the Swordborn flexed his gloved hands and felt the hardness of his armyrblades on his forearms as he did so. He cleared his mind and focused his eyes again on the task at hand: the killing of a Judge. ‘I failed because I failed. I will not fail again.’
	Breaking into the tower of the Judge was not as easy as it was to break into the mobile castle of the famous merchant. The men watching the only entrance to the place were large and diligent, with their hands over their sheathed blades and their sand-colored Thousand Stars robes pinned to their bodies strategically so as to not hinder movement. They looked to be men deserving of their position overlooking the Judge of Dorter.
	The Swordborn would stake his claim out and wait for an opportunity for him to slip in unnoticed, achieving the least amount of casualties needed and causing the least possible alarm. He would wait and watch for days if he had to, feasting and sleeping only when absolutely necessary. The Swordborn was a patient shadow with fangs, striking only when absolutely sure of a flawless victory and a perfect escape.
	But the time for the Swordborn had passed. He no longer had the choice to act in his tried and true way of legend. The time for such a method expired as soon as the Swordborn lost a battle and the King from the East mounted a horse with a curved foreign sword in his hand.
	Now, Corsail had to be a Judgekiller – the first of his kind.
	‘Killer of Judges and men. It has a ring to it.’
	A messenger ran towards the North Tower, said something frantic to the guards of the tower, and was allowed inside immediately. The two guards looked shaken up, but quickly resumed their positions. The Swordborn could imagine what it was the messenger had to say to the Judge. His only opportunity had come.
He allowed himself two minutes. Judging from the frequency of castle patrols he had seen, and the intensity of the situation that could be brewing before his very eyes, it would likely be about two minutes before someone else came back to the Judge’s tower. Two minutes before someone noticed the corpses that would be left in his wake.
In three minutes and fourteen seconds, the messenger vaulted out of the tower and ran around a bend and a small building of stone to the innards of the complex, likely carrying more orders with him. ‘That means it took a little less than a minute for a man to rush upstairs, and quicker than that to rush back down. I will have to be faster.’ The Judge had not followed, but more men would be coming soon, to discuss and to brief on wherever it was they were going. That was his deadline.
As soon as the messenger disappeared from sight, the Swordborn struck. He pounced from the shadows silently with his armyrblades already extended. He approached from the side of the tower and easily slit the throat of one guard with his blade. The other jumped and noticed him, but the Swordborn stuck his armyrblade into the man’s neck before the man of the Thousand Stars could even unsheathe his sword. They bled, like everyone else, into the earth.
He ran into the innards of the tower like a demon striving for a soul. With the first step into the torch-lit tower, he ripped off his helmet and threw it into the chest of a man standing to the sides of the foyer’s great spiraling staircase. The act was enough to stun the man and send him falling from his feet, too surprised to do anything but yelp. As the Swordborn bounded up the stairs to the Judge’s study, he unstrapped and threw off his chestplate next, throwing the emerald-green scaled hunk of metal behind him. Next came his waist plate, his thigh armor, his sheathed sword, and his spiked shoulders, leaving him only in leather garments, dark green armored boots, enchanted armplate and gloves holding his most useful swords, and an ominous horned helmet masking his face. ‘Thirty seconds.’ He was nearing the top of the tower, and now he that he had shed his armor, he was moving quicker than he expected.
However, now that he shed his armor, he had lost his greatest advantage in battle. One shot. He only had one shot at his mission, and he would not fail at it. Not again.
In his hands were seven small knives extracted from secret cavities in his discarded armor. On his forearms, the armyrblades were already at the ready as he leapt and burst through the great wooden door that led into the Judge’s chamber.
A tall, barrel-chested man with short-cut gray hair whirled from his position over a desk at the sudden noise. A single man next to him stood at a much shorter height, and was helping the older man put on a protective suit of leather armor, likely to go beneath a greater suit that could only be the Judge armor of legend.
	The grey-haired man – Judge Dieter, the Swordborn knew – reacted extremely fast, just as he expected from a Judge. He pushed the shorter man away from him and vaulted towards the wall a few paces away, where a great broadsword hung from a rack in a sheath. ‘He has already begun to summon his armor,’ the assassin knew. ‘It has been said that it takes at least twenty seconds for a Judge to summon his armor, and that an odious mist appears in the last ten. That leaves me twenty seconds.’
	In three seconds, he threw out both hands of knives, one to each man in the room. All seven met their target. The shorter man screamed as the knives pierced his chest and both eyes, and fell to his knees; the Judge did little more than grunt as they all stabbed into his back.
	‘This has to end with one attack.’ The Swordborn was on von Dieter’s back in four seconds, swinging both blades, one aiming for Tythron von Dieter’s chest and one for his neck. Behind him, the man of the Thousand Stars screamed in agony. The Swordborn’s steps and swings were fast, faster than normal. Shedding his armor had a profound effect on his speed, he could easily tell.
	The Judge turned, quicker than any man should have been able to with four blades stuck in his back, and was already ripping his broadsword from its spot on the wall. ‘He knew I was attacking his back already. He heard my blades cutting through the air,’ the Swordborn reasoned. ‘A formidable foe. As it should be.’
	The Judge had moved faster than expected, and with timing so perfect it could only have occurred from a man trained in life-or-death battle for years, just as the Swordborn was. While the assassin’s blades were cutting horizontally through the air, the Judge’s was coming down vertically, aimed right for the Swordborn’s head. The two-handed strike would ring true and smash through the Swordborn’s helmet and skull, even if both of his armyrblades embedded themselves in the Judge’s sides.
	Time slowed for the assassin’s mind and reflexes, but he knew it was not really slowing for anyone else. The warclansman had stopped screaming, and others would likely be racing up the stairs quickly. His time limit still ticked ever closer.
	‘I will not die a failure.’ He raised his blades mid-swing, changing their point of impact from the sides of the Judge to a parry that would slow the downward-swinging sword. Sans armor, he was not strong enough to block the attack perfectly. Both men recoiled from the attack, and the Swordborn was sent backwards, his arms shaking and his knees buckling.
	He saw the next strike coming. The Judge began to unsheathe his sword with both hands and threw a heavy kick to the Swordborn’s semi-crouched position. The assassin saw an opening: he leaped over the kick, swinging one blade down and one to the side. The lower one made its mark and cut through the flesh of the man’s thick legs, only a few inches from severing it. The man did not scream as the blade went through his leg and the limb buckled. The other blade that the Swordborn swung slammed on the emerging steel of the broadword, shaking the man’s hands and preventing him from smoothly bringing out his sword.
	Next was the finishing strike. The swing of both his blades in mid-air made the assassin rebound, sending him bouncing back a pace or two away from the man falling on his almost-cut leg. Von Dieter landed with the flat of his large blade onto the ground, wincing but not screaming. The Swordborn landed, transferred his weight, and darted forward again, both blades winding back for another final swing.
	As he pounced, his eyes narrowed beneath his eyes. ‘Sixteen seconds now, and no mist. Where is the smell, and the smoke?’
	He did not let that distract him. The large man lifted his blade, still halfway unsheathed, and raised it in the path of the armyrblade swinging horizontally towards his throat. ‘Fool. My steel is enchanted. It will not break, even against a larger sword.’ The Swordborn struck – one blade collided against the vertical greatsword, one came swinging from the side and aimed for the neck of the Judge of Dorter.
	He smashed through the parry easily – too easily, as if there was no block at all. The assassin’s eyes darted down to the block he had easily seen coming, only to see that both of the man’s hands had let go of the sword as soon as he raised it. Rather than hold up the greatsword to deflect the Swordborn’s armyrblade, he had simply held up one arm behind it, so that when the greatsword met the steel of the armyrblade, it was pushed backward, right into the flesh of the man’s exposed arm, cutting it almost entirely in two just from the meeting alone. This left the man open to raise his other, free arm, thus blocking the Swordborn’s second weapon and saving his own life. This blade also dug into the arm of the Judge about halfway, severing it and letting a torrent of blood flow freely.
“What is this?!” the Judgekiller exclaimed, almost out of his control. “You’ve sacrificed your arms. Why? You’ve lost! Why delay your death like this?!”
“I knew who you were and what you were here for as soon as this began, from the helmet and from your skill,” the man growled, smiling through his pain-filled grimace. His teeth were stained red with blood, and he looked up to the Swordborn’s helmet as if he could see through the veiled eye-holes. “I knew I would not win against a legend like you. That was not my intention. I needed only to stall you here until I was sure you would be caught for your crime.”
“What?! What Judge would speak so?” The Swordborn backed up, jerking his blade free from the man’s half-severed arm, leaving the laughing man free to fall onto the stumps of his forearms. As he bent over, the assassin could not help but look around the room and force himself to control his breathing. Time was running out – this had taken too long. The Swordborn did not panic, and the Swordborn did not fail. He raised his blade and prepared to finish the job.
Despite the pain he was in, strong enough to summon tears from his eyes, the man leaned his head back and laughed. “I know not – for I am not a Judge, but close to it. Hahaha! How I wish I could see your face!”
“…Not a Judge…? What…?” The Swordborn looked from the discarded greatsword to the bloodstained man in front of him. A man this powerful could only be a Judge… or perhaps, the next best thing – the next closest thing. An Abettor. “No… So you’re not…”
He had been watching the tower for days – yet the man inside it was not the Judge, but the Abettor. At some point in time, the Judge must have left the tower, and Abettor Vicante Alstraya must have entered. It could only have been when the Swordborn took his eyes off the tower – when he allowed himself to think of something other than his mission. When he delivered the message to the merchant woman that the lord in black had requested. And the messenger he saw was not one stating that the party had left the castle, as the Swordborn assumed, but must have been one communicating between the Judge and his Abettor. ‘Curse you, Touga Kiryus. Curse you and your bloodline for a thousand years!’
A great bellow like the roaring of a beast of legend echoed up from the foyer of the tower – and shortly following it, the sound of a beast bounding up the stairs, louder than any sound he had ever heard. It sounded like metal slamming on stone. It was the sound of armor – the magical armor of a Judge.
“It has been a great honor serving you and the Thousand Stars, my good friend,” the kneeling man said, tears running down his surprisingly calm face. “May the Stars shine forever.”
The would-be Judgekiller remained silent as he decapitated Abettor Alstraya with a single swipe of his armyrblade. He mouthed one of the only spells he knew and spoke it deep within his soul as he dove out of the only window of the Judge’s tower. It was an incantation that caused his armor to disappear – the only other spell he was proficient with was a lengthier one, that caused his armor to reappear in front of him. That one would have to come later, when he was safely outside of Garand Point and away from the wrath of the Judge of Dorter. He had only minutes left to escape, or he would fail again.