Wes tore up the stairs back into the forge and I was panicking.
Wes tore up the stairs back into the forge and I was panicking.
“Destroy me? I just awoke!”
“And I just saw my brothers and sisters slaughter ourselves over you!” he roared as he approached the very door that hid the massacre of my makers.
I did not want to see the carnage. I tried to command Wes’ muscles to go back, to return to battle, anything but that bloodstained forge.
I had no power over him.
It was disorienting. I had thought I had figured out the secret with Mona. I had complete control in that alleyway.
Now that I considered it, my control had grown with each death. If that were the case, my power over someone would be proportional to how many times they kill with me, as if the blood signed a pact that bound my wielder more and more to me with each life taken.
Wes had never killed with me. I could not stop him as he stepped over the bodies of his colleagues to reenter the forge. The very sight made him retch. I wished I was capable of doing the same.
“Demons below, Mona did this. Mona. Who couldn’t even bear to kill the rats.” Wes choked. “I just killed her. To destroy you yes, but still…for you. You did this. You made us do this.”
“Me? You made me like this!”
“Yes, and while we were making you, we all felt the poison of your allure.” We passed the instruments of my making: the anvil, the hammer, the tongs, the chisels, the brushes. I could almost hear the echo of the song that brought me into being.
“Each time we passed you around there was always the slightest of pauses, the slightest hesitations that we all felt, but could ignore. We were making something greater than ourselves. We could not afford to fall prey to our own creation.”
He moved on from that bloodied room into the heart of the forge itself, grand and molten and vast—the place where I and so many other great swords of Datrea had been forged. I could feel the song of my father still singing in the lava that spewed out below the viewing balcony where Wes stood.
“But once we were done and the city walls had all but crumbled, we had nothing to lose, and suddenly, the dream of dying with our masterpiece in hand became too great to bear. We knew the curse and still, it consumed us. You consumed us.”
“I was trying to stop you! I told Satad to stop; I made him stop till my interference got his head smashed in. I just want to face the Brinn.”
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“The Brinn.” Wes spat. “I’d be happy to loose you on them if that’s all you’d do. I sang with hate when I thought it was just them who would feel it.” He looked down at my white blade. “But we did our work too well. Something so poisonous will not stay contained among the Brinn. I see it now. You will ruin lives long after the drums of Brinn cease to beat. You cannot be allowed to endure.”
“Let me stop their drums tonight! Now is the hour for which I was made. You can’t destroy me now!”
“This is the only time that I can.” He held me over the lava. “While I still have my nerve…while someone who knows what you are still lives…while the forge is still hot enough to melt you back down.”
He pressed me down on the forge and I screamed.
Wes winced at hearing my shriek. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to prevent the ruin of the world.”
“Causing ruin was your plan for me, not mine! I just want to save the city.”
“The city is lost, Bonesong. But if I destroy you right now, I can prevent the ruin of countless other cities. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you see what you have done already?”
How could I see? I was burning; I was screaming. To hasten my destruction, Wes began to sing.
It was a song of unmaking, of breaking. I could feel myself breaking to the tune of his timbre. Such a song was violent and I knew it from those memories of my makers that I had taken. Desperately, I tried to drown him out. I sang in their voices, a terrible choir trapped within me.
“You dare wield them?” Wes wept hearing it, but his grief strengthened his voice, and my grief weakened mine.
I was singing in their voices because I had devoured them. My family. How could I argue when my first act was so heinous?
No. That was my father’s curse; my father’s poison. He may have carved my name, but my legacy was mine to carve. Why should they destroy me for what they made? The curse was not me.
I was the last blade of Datrea. I was the last chance this city had. I had to get Wes to carry me to that future or get out of his hands.
“You’re right! You’re right!” I changed tactics, which startled him into pausing, mid verse. “The curse upon me needs to be destroyed, and if that means destroying me then so be it. But if you must destroy me,” I pleaded, “at least destroy me in a manner that would serve my purpose.” I made my voice soft and deferential. “Please. Let not all of your forgemates’ work be for nothing, all of your work. Please, you are the last of my makers. Surely you understand.”
He did. I could feel him waver. He did not want to destroy me. I was the masterpiece of his order. The last hope his people had. I could feel even the poison of my father’s curse root ever deeper. It had never spared him. Even now, even as he was trying to unmake me, he had not been able to let go of my hilt.
“Master made you sharp enough to cut to the core of the forge,” Wes pulled me back from the lava. “It’s enforced with corpse iron, but Master once said corpse iron would give way to you.”
“You want me to destroy the forge?” I didn’t like the sound of that. I had already destroyed my family. I had no desire to also destroy the place of my birth.
“The heart is so heavily enforced because it contains enough firesongs to melt half the city.”
I liked the sound of that even less. “But I’m trying to save the city.”
“This part of the city is being overrun. We would be burning a vast host of the Brinn. Perhaps enough to give time for the rest of the city to escape through the palace tunnels. A glorious sacrifice, you and I, for them.”
That was a plan I could understand.
“What must I do?”
Did Wes make the right call in delaying Bonesong's destruction?
