Chapter II The Sword and the Ashes
«In a world of war, loyalty is an oath... until fear breaks it.»
Eight years had passed since the plaza, since the guillotine, since the blood.
Estus woke with a start, breathing hard, eyes wide open, like someone surfacing from deep water. The dream dissolved quickly, leaving only fragments: ancient voices, a metallic gleam, the word "chosen" echoing like a bell in an empty cathedral. It was not the first time he had dreamed of voices belonging to no known language, of images from a world that predated his own birth. Always the same gleam. Always the same word. And always the same abrupt awakening, with the sword in his hand and his heart hammering against his ribs before his mind had finished understanding there was no danger.
His face told the whole story: a square, hard jaw, thick eyebrows that shadowed eyes which had learned to show nothing, a short beard over skin toughened by sun, wind and the edge of too many swords. Scars. On the left cheek, across the bridge of the nose, on the right eyebrow split by a cut that had nearly cost him the eye. Each one was a story he had no interest in telling.
He lay on the floor of a small, disorderly tent. Beside him, a woman slept face down, dark hair spread across a bare shoulder. Her body was lean and firm, her skin smooth, her lips reddened by the cold and the wine of the night before.
Estus looked at her for an instant. Only an instant. Then he moved the hand she had resting on his chest with the same gesture one uses to move an annoying object.
—Get up.
There was no warmth in his voice. There was nothing. It was an order, flat and without nuance, like all those he gave.
The woman did not respond. She was sleeping deeply, exhausted from the alcohol and from what had happened between them during the night. Estus took her by the wrist and shook her roughly.
—Get out. I told you.
She woke with a start. She looked at him with confused eyes that quickly filled with understanding and then with anger. She pulled free from his grip and began dressing in silence: a leather vest, boots, thick trousers. Each garment was a piece of emotional armor she placed between herself and the humiliation of being thrown out of a cot.
—What happened last night doesn't need to leave this tent —she said with irritation—. It was just a slip. Nothing more.
They both belonged to a band of mercenaries. Soldiers without a flag, men and women who sold their swords to the highest bidder and slept with one eye open because in that trade, trust was a luxury no one could afford. They had been hired by a lesser noble seeking to seize the lands of a down-and-out count, and the mission —a series of ambushes, controlled raids and acts of intimidation— was proceeding as planned.
The woman's name was Abigail. She was the adopted daughter of the squadron's leader, a stocky, suspicious man who ran his mercenaries with an iron fist and who, if he discovered what had happened that night between his daughter and the recruit he feared most, would not hesitate to order his death.
Estus knew. He did not care.
The night before, after a particularly bloody ambush against one of the count's properties, the group had celebrated around bonfires with jugs of a turbid alcohol that burned the throat and numbed the conscience. Estus, as always, had sat apart from the rest, at the edge of the camp, with a jug in one hand and the other resting on the pommel of his sword. He never let go of the sword. Not even to sleep.
Abigail had approached, somewhat drunk, settling onto the bench with a familiarity he had not given her permission to take.
—Why are you always here, drinking like the squadron doesn't exist?
He did not look at her. He kept his eyes fixed on some point in the dark horizon, lost in thoughts he shared with no one.
—That shouldn't matter to anyone.
—My father gave you the rank. Right hand on the missions. All out of fear of what you are. And here you are, alone, as if none of that matters to you.
Estus detected the frustration beneath the casual tone. She had spent years trying to prove her worth to a father who treated her more like a soldier than a daughter, and the arrival of a stranger who in a few months had seized the position she had been chasing for years was a thorn she could not pull out.
—Seeing you sitting here alone in the middle of the night, staring at nothing, reminds me of why I'm still alive.
Estus stood, took his things and headed toward his tent with long strides.
—Save your words for someone else.
She followed. Of course she followed. She was stubborn, proud, incapable of accepting rejection as an answer.
—If you keep this up, you're going to die alone. Do you ever think about that?
When they reached a secluded spot, far from the bonfires and the noise, Estus stopped. He took her by the wrist firmly.
—Go. I don't know what you're looking for talking to me. Stay away from me.
But she was looking at him in a way he did not know how to interpret. Not with fear, not with anger, but with something more dangerous: understanding.
—You're broken, aren't you?
Something moved in his face. It was brief, barely a tremor at the corner of his lips, a flash in his eyes that went out as quickly as it appeared. But she saw it. She had found the crack in the armor.
Estus let her go. They stood in silence for a moment that stretched like an abyss between them. And then she pushed him inside the tent, and what followed was not love nor desire nor tenderness. It was an act of mutual desperation, an attempt to fill with the warmth of another body the void that neither of them knew how to name.
⁂
The following morning, already alone, Estus came out of the tent biting an apple. He sat under a tree at the edge of the camp and looked out at the snow-covered expanse stretching to the north. That year winter had arrived with force, painting white a world that was already cold enough without the need for ice.
He heard footsteps behind him.
—Estus, I need you to carry out a solo mission.
It was the leader. His voice sounded calm, measured, like a man who has rehearsed his words.
—North of the mansion there's one of the count's harvesting grounds. Tonight they'll hold a meeting there. I want you to infiltrate it and kill him.
Estus did not respond immediately. He chewed. Swallowed. And then, out of pure intuition —that animal instinct that develops when one has lived long enough among predators— he looked over his shoulder.
The leader was holding a dagger. Long. Pointed at his back.
Behind him, about twenty paces away, fifteen armed men were waiting for the signal.
—And then? —asked Estus, and he smiled.
It was a smile that froze the blood of everyone who saw it. There was no humor in it, no cruelty, not even satisfaction. It was the smile of someone who has accepted that the world is exactly as rotten as he always suspected.
What happened next was so fast that most of them did not process it until it was already over. The whistle of a blade cutting the air, and then the wet sound of steel passing through flesh and bone. The leader's head rolled across the snow, leaving a scarlet trail on the white.
Estus cleaned the sword with a quick arc that splattered the ground with red.
The fifteen men stood motionless. Not out of discipline or strategy, but out of a terror so profound it had paralyzed their legs. They had heard the rumors: more than fifty dead in a single battle, men dismembered with an efficiency that seemed more fitting to a machine than a human being. And now they had seen it with their own eyes. The ease with which he had killed. The calm that followed. As if taking a life carried the same weight as biting an apple.
From the back of the group emerged Abigail.
She walked among the motionless mercenaries with a shattered expression, glassy eyes, clenched jaw. She knew what had happened. She knew why. The informants who had alerted her father about the previous night had set in motion exactly what she had feared.
—I warned you not to come near me —said Estus—, and you ignored my warning. Your father, blinded by anger, tried to have me killed.
She kept walking toward him. She did not stop. She did not speak. She only drew her sword with a movement that was half rage, half funerary rite, and swung it at him with a cry that was more sob than war roar.
Estus stopped the blow without effort. He had seen the attack before she launched it, had read the trajectory in the tension of her shoulders, in the tilt of her hips, in the trembling of her hands.
The same sword that had taken his family from him now went through her.
The blade entered her abdomen with the cold precision of something inevitable.
Abigail stopped moving. Her breathing became ragged, each inhale a small stifled cry. Tears ran down her cheeks, and in her eyes —those eyes that the night before had looked at him with something that could have been love, or at least its shadow— there was now a mixture of pain, incomprehension, a sadness larger than the wound.
—I'm sorry... —said Estus, and his voice broke barely on the last syllable, just an instant, before composing itself—. I warned you.
Abigail raised a trembling hand and pressed it to his cheek. Her fingers were cold. All of her was cold now.
—Things could have been different... —she whispered.
And then she said nothing more.
Estus held her body as life left her like heat leaves a room when the fire goes out. He laid her on the ground with a gentleness that contrasted with the brutality of everything else. The remaining mercenaries looked at one another and, one by one, began to leave. There was no pay worth the risk of staying near that man. There was no loyalty that could survive fear.
Estus spent the rest of the afternoon digging. Two graves, side by side, beneath the tree where he had been sitting when it all began. Father and daughter. Buried together, as if in death they might recover something that life had denied them.
When he finished, he sat against the trunk and looked at the sky. Night was falling slowly, dragging with it a blanket of stars that shone with a beautiful indifference over a world that did not deserve them. Snow kept falling, soft and silent, covering the fresh graves with a white that seemed more like an apology from the sky than a meteorological phenomenon.
And then, on that face hardened by years of violence, on those eyes that had learned to show nothing, a single tear descended slowly down his cheek and was lost in the short beard.
Only one.
But it weighed more than all the snow in the world.
—Things could have been different, Abigail... —he repeated quietly, speaking to a grave that could not hear him.
And he remembered her words: «If you keep this up, you're going to die alone.»
He knew she was right.
⁂
That night, before sleep claimed him, the fragments of the morning's dream returned to him with unusual clarity. The ancient voices. The metallic gleam. And something more he had not remembered upon waking: a fleeting image of four enormous figures, with proportions that corresponded to no human being, bent over something that burned with a light that was not fire.
Before the empire, long before the black stone castles and bloodstained metal crowns existed, the world was governed by four beings that the ancient texts called the Founders. They were not kings nor gods —or perhaps they were both, depending on who told the story—. They were something earlier, something purer: entities that had been born with the earth itself, that breathed with the rhythm of the seasons and whose will shaped the continents as a potter shapes clay.
Under their rule, the world knew peace. Not the peace imposed by the sword nor the fragile peace of armistices, but a true peace, organic, as natural as the growth of trees. There was no hatred because hatred had not yet been invented. There was no hunger because the earth gave without being asked. Rivers ran clear, forests stretched endlessly, and the Founders' children lived in harmony with a world that was still young and generous.
They created four kingdoms, and from the kingdoms rose the empires: Ignis, of the eternal fire. Alsius, of the perpetual ice. Bentivegna, of the fertile fields. And Fíliadas, of the thousand rivers. Four lands separated by seas and mountains, united by a single continent that stretched from horizon to horizon like the open palm of a god.
But with the children came passions. With the passions, conflict. And from conflict was born something that had not existed before, something the Founders had never foreseen and that, when they felt it growing in the shadows of their own creation, froze their immortal blood.
Death.
The fifth Founder. The uninvited one. The one who forged itself in the darkness the other four had ignored, feeding on every pain, every loss, every tear mortals shed without knowing they were nourishing the enemy. It created its own empire: Tenebrae. An empire without walls or castles, because its territory was fear, and fear needs no borders.
The war that followed was the first and, in a certain sense, the last, because it never fully ended. The four empires united against Tenebrae, and that alliance —the first and last time men fought together for something greater than their own ambitions— managed to push back the darkness. But not destroy it. You can never destroy death; you can only postpone it.
The Founders fell. One after another, exhausted by a war that lasted longer than memory can encompass. And as they died —if beings like them can die— with the last breath of their existence, they forged something. A sword. A blade capable of cutting not only flesh, but the very essence of darkness. Yet also capable of creating it.
They buried it in the deepest part of a nameless tomb, somewhere in one of the four empires. And they left it there, with a final instruction carved into the stone of its sepulcher: that the sword would choose its bearer. That only someone who met certain requirements —requirements that the ancient texts described in contradictory and confusing ways— could wield it.
The chosen one.
Estus did not know why he dreamed of these things. He did not know where those images came from, those voices, that word that repeated itself with the insistence of something that wants to be heard. He closed his eyes over the snow, with the graves at his side and the cold working its way into his bones, and let sleep claim him again.
The snow kept falling.