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Vol.2, Ch.4, P.10

 

Under dimly lilting moonlight, Lise and I continued on with our conversation. In its course, I related to her the reason for my arrival here in Hensen.

The surprise on her face was, by this point, no surprise to me. My position as Balasthea’s acting commandant, my desire to stay the imminent slaughter of Hensen’s innocents—to Lise, it was one whelming revelation after another.

What a wayward Man I must’ve seemed to her. Only after I recounted my audience with the Jarl Alban did she at last nod convincedly.

“A liking he’s like to have taken to you, that father of mine.”

The pendulum of surprise now swung my way. Never could I have thought the jarl’s own daughter to be the damsel standing beside me.

Just as Volker had revealed, this exact district was purposed for the welfare of Hensenfolk harried by disease and destitution. Though from the look of things, the welfare had long waned to a wisp of its requisite vigour. Hence why the district was graced with the presence of Alban’s own bloodkin: at his behest was it made Lise’s charge, to lend ear to the needs of its needy, to secure succour for its fates-spurned citizens.

I gave a convinced nod myself as Lise further explained the plight of this place. By her words, the children earlier were without parents. How such came to be, Lise seemed short of spirit to say. Not that I could blame her; merely guessing conjured echoes in my ears—those of the children’s cries.

How bitter their young tears must’ve been, to find one day their parents forever parted from them.

And given the fraughtness of the folk here, I could not imagine any with means enough to take the orphans in as their own. So it was that those children lived on in a home of only children.

That the little ones yet drew breath was thanks in no small part to Lise and her colleagues. On the daily did they visit the broken home, taking turns to look after the children and to provide provisions as needed, that the little ones might live with some semblance of comfort.

Still, I could see in Lise’s eyes that their pitiful lot yet warranted much worry, as amongst the children was the boy beset by white-coath. A fortune as foul as it was fickle, for there was no knowing when another spasmodic episode might assail him.

“The physick you gave the boy,” I recalled, “one pays with whole purses for just a potion of it, no?”

“Purses and more,” Lise replied. “Though we Vílungen are ever light of purse. Such heavy remedies be hard-bought.”

But bought nonetheless.

For to willingly scribe the boy’s name on the long list of the war-lost exacted a price unpayable by any purse. This, Lise went on to say. And with her did I share the same mind. But in doing so was a new weight of the war heavy upon my shoulders. Burdened, I let my gaze fall.

It was then that something caught my eye.

In the emptied plaza below, a peculiarity—some structure, like a watchtower, whittled down to a minute scale.

…Nay. It seemed more an altar, affixed with a roof of its own. And under it… an offering of some sort? To the vættir spirits, perhaps?

“That, down there in the plaza,” I pointed. “What is it?”

“Ah, that,” said Lise, as if lifted by the new topic. “Care to have a look?”

A “look”? Was it really some reliquary on public display? I couldn’t help but oblige, ever blindly curious for folkways unfamiliar. With a nod, I followed Lise down the path before descending a set of steps. Planted at the plaza, we approached the tabernacle-like construction.

There, beneath meagre rafters, piercing straight up out of a platform, was a sword.

Dedications of the bladed sort are by no means outlandish in any land. Here, however, outlandishness was in the sword itself: from edge to edge, ridge to pommel, a weapon subsumed by its own stark-sable skin. Like a gaping void gouged into the very air, taking what silhouette but that of a sword, beckoning belookers to the bottomless blackness within.

Indeed, a curiosity counter to all convention.

“What’s this…?” I wondered aloud, doubting my eyes. “…It seems a sword, and yet…”

“That, we call svǫrtaskan…” Lise confirmed, “…the soot-steel.”

Soot?

To once again come across it in so far a place as these foe-lands—evidently, the fates found it mete to further steep my lot in the lightless ash.

“Blacker than aught and all I’ve seen before. It swallows all sight,” I observed, staring at the sword with all intensity. “What composes it?”

“Aschenblei—the wayward iron, twice heavier than silver.”

Raised were my brows. “‘Aschenblei’? I’ve read of it. ‘Wolfsteel’—or úlfstál, as they call it in the Hinternorth, if memory serves.”

My thoughts turned to the dusty texts, wherein was described the selfsame metal. A ghost of a rarity, the existence of wolfsteel finds few believers in Londosius. But those in the know are privy to the discoveries of actual ore specimens, scant though they may be.

And this they say: it is the heaviest and hardest of all known metals in this mortal plane.

On and on, I looked all along the length of bladed darkness. “Though the books give a grey lustre to the lupine metal. Not the abyssal black I see before me.”

“It was grey. Once upon a time, at least,” Lise revealed. “The sword—‘tis ashened.”

…’Ashened,’ she said?

What ash could so solidly sustain the form of a sword?

The questions only piled up in my pate.

“Our tales tell of a battle here, once held betwixt two dragons—the gamalldrekinn Gweil’ǫrr and the kyndandrekinn J̌yfæ—in the far days of the Tívafornár,” Lise explained. “‘Twas in the throes that Gweil’ǫrr’s baleful breath bore down upon the earth. And bathed in the flames: this very sword.”

Her recital sorted squarely with the old sagas.

Gweil’ǫrr, elder dragon, judged magick to be a misbegotten creation, a rogue run flowing straight astray from the erstwhile workings of life itself. And thus not few were the depictions of discord between he and J̌yfæ, a like dragon, but of an unlike mind. For it was this same J̌yfæ who kindled the seiðr, mother-spark of all magicks.

Here, too, at where would become Hensen did the two dragons break and burn the land with their battling. And by Lise’s retelling, this sword was seared to soot in the process.

“…What little legendaria I’ve come across do indeed describe Gweil’ǫrr’s flames as possessing heat enough to ‘turn steel to ash’, as it were,” I remarked. “To think—it was more fact than fiction all this time.”

Or a forgery, perhaps? Before me, a mere mimickry of the myths? Yet I could only conclude to the contrary. To behold with my naked eyes a material memory of mythical antiquity—it was all more than enough to send my heart dancing up to the clouds.

“W-well… a chronicler I’m not, you should know. I but echoed our oral traditions; whether they ring true or no is anyone’s guess,” Lise quickly tempered my expectations. “The svǫrtaskan seems ashened, sure enough. But how that came to be, of dragon-fire and bygone battles, is all just an old tale.”

“A tale I well-wish were true.”

As it must be. This, my hunch told me, however hushed it may have been. For while it was certain that the soot-sword’s blackness blocked all sight, it could not conceal its own fey nature.

“Tales aside, ashened úlfstál fascinates no less…” I went on. “Its natural endurance is matched by no other metal known. Yet, to be tempered further still? It baffles the mind.”

“Baffling, yes. But a marvel? Who can know? We, its stewards, certainly cannot. None amongst our remembered generations have ever wielded this, you see,” Lise confessed. “The hilt, the blade—one touches the blacksword on peril of piercing pain… and burns most terrible to behold.”

“With just a touch?” I said, instinctively leaning away from the sable specimen. “Truly, now?”

“Yes, for true. A truth tested to our woe. Neither glove nor gauntlet even avails. And so here it stands—unmoved, unchanged.”

A sword suffering no wielder, scorning and scorching any hand laid upon it—yet another affrighting facet to this witch of a weapon. But… why? Why was it, that in spite of its spurning grimness, I could not bear to break my gaze away from it?

I felt then as if spellbound to its boundless blackness. As though my very soul were being sucked into an abyss.

“Though like all swords, it might’ve known a master once. Our myths also remember soot asail behind each swing of the blade,” Lise added. “‘Soot-steep’d be he who holds fast this fey-sword,’ they further say.”

“…Hence ‘soot-steel’. Convincing enough.”

The black weapon waits.

Such was what I espied after hearing much of what little was known of it.

But if wait it does, then for what?

For whom?

And in this den of the destitute, of all places?

A quicksand of questions, one I was pulled out of not by an answer, but by a sense of being watched by eyes from above. There, up on the path where Lise and I were less than a while ago, stood a silhouette, rotund and familiar to my eyes: Berta, one of the attendant war-chiefs of the jarl.

 

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