heal them like fire from a gun. kneeling, my god is the sun. Who: Rictor Cassul & Divina Marcos What: An unexpected sparring session between the holy and the fell gets serious. The only way to train in fighting the Dark is, well, fighting the Dark. Where: A practice field, long distant. When: This morning, shortly after dawn. Rating: R, language and violence. Status: Complete.
His day began when he woke with the dawn (a cold and feeble light that failed to warm him), then a morning jog in the crisp and frosty air—but he’d been operating on autopilot since then, simply running through the motions until he ran into Divina at the Cathedral. Her steady hands lighting candles, Rictor’s furrowed brow as he watched her go about the silent observances to Faram. The dry conversation that followed. His proposition. Her level stare, then the curt Yes.
Now he was shifting from foot-to-foot in the damp field, stripped down out of his armour and his breath steaming in the cold air. He was chilled to the bone, but activity would warm them up soon enough.
They’d chosen one of the practice fields on the outskirts of the city, where no prying eyes from the guildhall could watch their sparring, where this clash wouldn’t have to become a spectator sport. The secluded venue suited his purposes in other regards as well, but those were somewhat less charitable.
“You done this before?” Ric asked, clearing his throat nervously.
“What, spar?”
“‘Course you have. But with the Dark, I mean.”
The offensive was the most natural position for Divina to assume, especially with Rictor’s sort; it took a begrudging moment to recall her own trepidation when she had first fought against the Dark. This was, after all, how Xiaoli Fa had chosen to instruct her. There had been no held hand, no instruction, no mercy: only the offered hilt of the sword and the immediate need to defend herself. Through the bite of Li’s blade, the Dark had brought her to her knees again and again. To wield pain, she had learned, one first had to feel it.
Broken and built.
With some effort, she bled the poison out of her voice, amended: “I have.” She crouched down, turning Deathbringer in her hand. The tactical advice left her lips in a clipped monotone. “Sacrosanct or sacrilegious, the Dark is no more than a skill. To approach it as transcendent is their foremost error.”
“It’s not just a—” Rictor began, immediately affronted, his voice rising. There was no such thing as casual dismissal of the Dark, lest one forget who their enemies were and the true significance of what they wielded.
But then her words sank in a heartbeat later, and Rictor reminded himself: that was the point of being here, no? (I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.)
And so the knight bit down the reaction and cut himself off, until he was simply standing there in silence: loose clothing, worn boots, tightly-laced tunic, chill seeping into his hands. He watched Deathbringer as it twisted in her palm. He’d been far more comfortable when Divina was a just berserker wielding claws.
“Not transcendent. Just a skill. A muscle. Got it.” Saying it was like swallowing gravel. He didn’t truly believe the sentiment—the Dark was not just a skill, but a way of life, a poisonous contamination, a stain that would spread and spread and spread and consume if one let it.
But for the purposes of learning how to fight it, the man would have to swallow this lesson. The acquiescence had Divina’s brows knitting in surprise. And so, hesitantly, she lowered her defenses another inch.
“And every muscle has its weak spot.”
Perhaps that would make it more evident that her words had been no apologia, no attempt to dissuade him from his orthodoxy (bigotry, she might have scoffed on another occasion). To afford the Dark any more significance than necessary was to ascribe to it a power that it did not possess. To Divina’s mind, the Dark was not the saving grace of the cultists nor the ultimate evil of the Pharists. She had embraced it, but no force could be so infallible.
“The Dark’s weakness is straightforward.” Deathbringer stilled. “It takes.”
She lunged forward then, black steel moving like a shadow through the morning light. “You must strike,” she continued through clenched teeth, her blade meeting his with a reverberating clang, “before it gives.”
“What,” he said, his words punctuated by the clash of their swords as Rictor’s claymore swept up to meet Divina’s Deathbringer, “the fuck,” another clash, metal ringing in the abandoned field, “does that mean?”
Rictor drifted to the defensive—an uncommon stance for him—giving way step by step, backing away as he watched the pitch-black edge of her blade. If that steel caught his skin, he knew exactly how it would feel: nausea, shivers and weakness and cold, a chill that felt like it would never quite leave your bones ever again, the anathema of everything he stood for.
Their blades locked one more time, Rictor’s boot finally finding purchase in the grass as he pushed back, this time holding his ground. “You mean ‘fucking attack before you get hit’? I knew that already, Marcos.”
“I meant this.”
A cloying mist swept over him then, a strangling sensation that made the rest of the world recede as what felt like the void opened up. Without warning, Deathbringer swept out of the darkness, almost as though it were an extension of the shadows, biting the holy knight in the side. The blade did not go in deep, Divina retracting at the last moment, bouncing back like a scorpion after a sting. This was why he had eschewed armour today: the only way to brace himself for facing the Dark in the field was to face it.
When Rictor raised his eyes, he saw that the woman’s stance was off. A jagged wound had opened from rib to hip, bleeding profusely down her leg. Divina did not seem to mind the pain, however, gesturing toward the injury with nonchalance. “This happened before the Dark,” she said flatly. “It takes before it gives.”
The pair of them went temporarily still, reading the cue to pause (and somehow their instincts still worked, still keeping time between them like a metronome). He’d never been close enough to the cultists to map their wounds mid-battle; he’d always assumed they’d all come from the current altercation.
“A mage once told me,” Rictor said slowly, “about the sickness that sets in if you don’t get enough fruit. Scurvy. It reopens old wounds.”
“And?”
“So it sounds similar.” He was no philosopher nor academic, but the pieces seemed like they fit. “You miss something fucking crucial, you have an emptiness in your body, and the wounds reopen.” Rictor couldn’t hide the marked distaste in his voice when he spoke of the Dark, watching the blood seeping through her clothing.
“But so how the fuck does this work? It gives it back?” His free hand lightly touched the nick in his own side, the thin line running through his shirt and over his skin. Eriks Cassul’s lessons had always centred on the thesis that if you hit something with a sword often enough, it would eventually stop moving. And the Dark had always been something to be fought and soldiered through, not understood—the intricacies and details didn’t matter. He’d simply tried to grit his teeth through all of it, blind and fumbling with each roiling wave of Darkga from Cerf’s hands.
Recent experiences had proven that approach to be quite inadequate.
Divina’s lips curled into a sneer. Of course, the Pharist’s first thought would be to sickness, as though he had forgotten the very sentiments his religion preached. With his sort, it was all preaching, never practice. Were not holy magicks more supplication than sacrifice? Grant me power, grant me strength, ask and you shall receive, as though God had not already granted breath, life. And at the very moment of denial, however trivial the request, the faithful bemoaned that Faram had forsaken them, they who believed in Him so ardently although they had not once contemplated what they might do for Him.
Turning away, she tried to remind herself that the other knight was now attempting to understand. That he was not the holy knight that had sent her to the dogs under the banner of piety. There was an exception to her condemnation of holy magicks, and she called upon it now.
“Chant,” she grit out. “You have studied Chant?”
“Aye, of course.” A small knife twisted in his side, and it had nothing to do with his hand resting against the small cut. The chant had long since given him pause, for its similarities. My blood for thy blood.
“Then you know how this works,” she said.
She dropped into a fighting stance then, clearly unwilling to offer further personal insight. Raising her blade, she continued, “Again.”
And again and again, the two fighters heaved themselves against one another, blades locking and twisting and slipping in the cold post-dawn air. Divina was faster than him, light on her feet and delivering fiendish, scorpion-like strikes that nicked and bit at his light, unarmoured clothing. The holy knight was stronger but slower, soaking up the damage she doled out before pressing back, sliding into the offensive and knocking her across the field. Back and forth, forward and back, dancing on the tips of their toes as if they were waltzing at a noble’s ball.
His blood rolled down his forearm and he thought of the chant, of the words he could roll on his tongue to transfer the sanguine energy into someone else. Felt the Dark chewing at his limbs, an omnipresent force lingering in the very steel of Divina’s blade.
Again.
Until, at length, the holy knight broke through yet another shroud of the Dark, his claymore bearing down hard on Deathbringer’s ribbed shoulder. The force of Rictor’s swing was strong enough to wrench the blade from even a berserker’s hands—Deathbringer soared through the air like a boomerang, embedding itself in the dirt a few yards away.
“Come the fuck on,” Rictor said, his brow furrowing into a scowl and the gunblade lowering as her weapon fell. “Gonna have to do better than that, Marcos. Thought you were here to put up a fight.”
It was like taunting a tiger, rattling the bars and trying to incite that berserker rage. And feral indeed was the woman’s reaction, her teeth flashing, spine curling in an offensive stance. Yet this was a matter for which Divina had struggled to learn control. The Dark was a weapon (no more than a skill) with which she fought. For the city, for the Guild, for her comrades—of which even the man before her was a part. The power she now wielded was at the cost of her own strength, and no more. Her soul for barter, and no other’s.
“Are you seriously implying,” she began to hiss, “that—”
Divina stopped herself. Yes. Yes, he was. Was this not the reason he had sought her out? To build the resistance he needed, to suffer the full force of the Dark? Very fucking well. With a bark-like noise, she strode to her fallen blade. Rictor watched her go with an appraising smile.
Here the fell knight eased into a familiar mindset, her thoughts turning inward, seeking and prodding. For to bring the Dark to fore was to face the darkness within herself. To face it—and arise the victor. Like a whip had cracked mercilessly through the air, blood spurted down her back, the skin left ravaged and torn. And yet there was no pause for breath. Divina unearthed Deathbringer in one smooth arc. Turning, she lunged for the korporal. Gone was her restraint, the pulling of punches. Where she moved, so too did the Dark, hanging so heavily it was palpable.
She levelled it against him and the Dark poured out of her like a seething cloud, and the holy knight felt his throat seizing up as if it had swollen to asphyxiation. Suddenly there was not enough air outdoors – he could not draw enough breath – he could not unclench his jaw – he could not get enough oxygen, it was all the Dark, it all smelled and tasted and beat of the Dark. Nausea rose, his vision blurred, and the man stumbled.
They were no longer moving in sync, and so he turned at the wrong time and Deathbringer sank into the man’s back, delivering a wound to match hers. They were no longer holding back under the guise of sparring, practice, and reined-in control.
And the injury did not feel right. It was too cold, his skin almost clammy, his spine immediately arching as if in the throes of fever. Rictor’s hand buried in the earth, his head bowed, and he tried to bite back the rising retching queasiness that accompanied the cut. It wasn’t just blood; it was cold, it was emptiness, it was darkness. It felt like what Cerf had flung against them—but worse, since it was in his veins now, ghosting beneath his skin.
It was what he needed.
Tolerance. Endurance. Experience. I wanted this.
Rictor was on his knees, and he could not rise. The gunblade fell out of his boneless hand. A hand shot out to grab it, the weapon now offered back to the him by the hilt.
(For Divina had been there, skinned knees digging into the ground, throat tightened by insuperable despair. She too had been a tower razed by the Dark, and from the ruins her soul had screamed and shattered over and over until all that remained, at last, was the desperation to take the next breath, the next step.
Broken and built.
In this moment, the man was her mirror, and like she had, he would—)
“Rise.”
I can’t was the initial thought, his chest still labouring to draw in reedy breaths through clenched teeth as pain ricocheted up and down his back, a wound that consumed. Rictor could barely see; the hilt of the sword seemed to be hovering in front of him of its own accord. Above it was only a vague glimpse of Divina’s dark hair and eyes.
But say this for the Cassuls: they never fucking gave up.
Rictor breathed in once. Twice. Three times, sucking in precious oxygen to fuel getting one foot beneath him, pushing up as his hand grasped for the claymore, blood-slick fingers tightening over hers before shifting. The gunblade was too heavy to carry one-handed, but at least he was now able to lean his weight against it, using it as a cane and laboriously working his way back to his feet.
Inch by inch, he dragged himself back up, until he could finally see Divina once more through the haze that surrounded her. Rictor’s fingers quivered before they realigned themselves, readjusting his grip on the sword. She nodded.
The sunlight (no, it had not left for a moment) glimmered off their raised blades. In unison, the intake of breath re-synchronised—and then onyx met silver, steel singing in a siren song no fighter could resist.