A Warrior's Legacy (4 page)

I stood shakily to my feet feeling as if the
weight of the world was on my shoulders, when in reality it was the
burden of my own life. My father’s arms closed around me and I felt
mine encircle him.

“I’ll do my best to make you proud
father!”

Father drew back until he was just holding
my shoulders. “You’ve already made me more proud than words could
ever express! I know the future seems scary and uncertain to you
right now, but have not one doubt that you with the Creator’s help
can accomplish everything I’ve set out before you!”

Feeling weak kneed I asked, “Where do I even
start?”

“One step at a time Zevin and a lot of
prayer will see you through to the completed goal. A couple more
things Zevin and I’ll let you go get some food and rest.”

I looked at him expectantly to see what else
he had to say.

“I want you to focus on having fun!”

I blinked.

Fun?

I looked at him incredulously.

“Your too serious Zevin you need to relax a
little more and enjoy what’s happening around you more often.
Finding the right girl will help that, but there’s no reason not to
start the ball rolling a little earlier. Okay?”

I nodded not really sure of how I was going
to do that, but I’d take a stab at it.

“What else?” I asked uncertain of what I
would hear next.

“Promise me that you will come back to visit
your mother and I as often as possible. You may need to drag Gavin
along occasionally as well as he’s not big on that kind of stuff
typically.”

“You have my word on it.” I said softly and
then after a brief hug I left and walked down the familiar halls
that already felt alien to me somehow.

I paused by an open window to breathe in
some of the refreshing night air before I reached my tower room. I
was about to turn away from the window when I heard a metallic
clanging noise the traveled clearly on the night air.

I forsook the warm food and rest my body was
coveting and left the hall and went back out into the night and
down towards the lower castle buildings. As I drew closer to the
blacksmith shop evidence of sound in the night grew more
apparent.

I slipped inside noiselessly, but Gavin
picked his head up right away and spotted me. Dropping his hammer
and whatever he had been working on he came straight for me and
enfolded me in a bear hug. It has been an evening of hugging it
seemed, but all of them had been welcome ones.

Gavin’s sweat soaked shirt and the smells of
cast metal were like a home all of their own to me. It was nice to
be with my partner in my mother’s womb again. Gavin always had a
reassuring effect on me, except for maybe tonight.

Drawing back from me I noticed that Gavin
looked like he’d been having a rough time of it lately as well.
Gavin drew back a little and rested against the table looking at me
expectantly. I took in his weary looking eyes and I couldn’t
resist.

“So I hear you’ve been dreaming about girls
a lot lately.”

Gavin’s face flushed red and he picked up a
hammer beside him and made one menacing step forward for me.

I held my hands up and shouted, “Correction
I was wrong! My statement was inexact, you’ve been dreaming about a
girl.”

I ducked and kept moving as he threw the
hammer. It clanged off the wall behind me, but not before I had a
table between me and Gavin.

“Well what’s it going to be? Are you going
or not?” Gavin fumed out loudly as his big hands gripped the
table’s edge.

“Yes.” I said and let his big relieved sigh
pass for a moment before I added with a dead serious face, “But
you’re not going to like the job relations I’m afraid.” I said
shaking my head softly.

Sudden concern creased his face into worry
lines “Why? What do you mean?”

“Well for the duration of this quest it
would be best if you thought of yourself as my slave and I your
loving and benevolent master.”

I ducked Gavin’s wide swing, but what I
hadn’t been expecting was his sudden snatch of my shirt front with
his other hand. His swing had been a setup!

He pulled me up and over the table.

As I was drug over the top of the table I
held my hands above my face and said, “Don’t hit me! It’s all
fathers’ fault!”

There was a pause, “How is it father’s
fault?”

“He told me to work at my sense of humor.” I
said peaking through my fingers up at Gavin.

“I wasn’t aware that you had a sense of
humor!”

“See! That’s why I need to work on it.”

Gavin gave a spurt of laughter and said,
“You’re going to need a lot of help!”

“I made you laugh didn’t I?”

Gavin just shook his head and helped me up.
“So when do we leave Gavin?”

“That’s for you to say, but I would like it
if we could leave soon.”

I patted him on the back realizing the heavy
toll these constant repeated visions each night were having on him,
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow after we both get some rest.”

He nodded and I turned to go with the
thought of food and a soft bed calling out my name.

“Zevin before you go I have something I want
to give you. I was going to give it to you for your birthday, but
you weren’t here so happy belated birthday brother.”

He directed me to a long thin wooden box
sitting out on a table. I walked towards it with eagerness. I knew
it was a sword. I had begged Gavin for years for a special
custom-made sword by him. My hands trembled slightly as I took the
lid off the box.

I forgot about everything else in that
moment my sole focus on the incredibility of what lay before
me.

Thickly I muttered, “Gavin..... Gavin....
How?”

Gavin came up beside me and put a big hand
on my back and said, “You said you wanted something special didn’t
you?”

Before me lay a dream come true. I had
fought with coveting my father’s sword for years knowing that it
would never be mine, but now here lay a sword like his but
different and yet the same.

It lay on the velvet liner of the box in
resplendent repose. The double-edged blade was a bluish gray and it
did not shine brightly as a newly shined blade would.

“Father helped me out a lot when I told him
several years ago what I wanted to do. I asked him if he knew of a
stronger metal than what’s commonly available. He talked with a
woman called Abby and she gave him this bluish metal. Hardest stuff
I’ve ever worked with let me tell you! The sword is a little
shorter than I had wanted it to be because there wasn’t much of the
metal to work with. Apparently it is extremely rare and father said
it has unique properties to it, but he didn’t go into saying
anymore about it.”

“Did you read the words of the Creator into
it?”

“I did, from front to back. Several times
actually.”

“Does it work like father’s does?”

“Don’t know haven’t tried it. Wanted you to
be the first.”

The blade ended in an ornate engraved handle
and cross guards that featured thin inlays of silver. The most
domineering aspect of the handle was the pommel stone. It was a
huge multi faceted ruby looking crystal.

Gavin must have seen me looking at it,
“Father supplied that too.”

A long moment passed.

Gavin burst out, “Well aren’t you going to
pick it up?”

“I’m scared to.” I replied softly.

Gavin looked thoughtful and then said,
“Zevin the sword isn’t magic, by itself it’s just metal and
crystals. It’s the bearer of it that unlocks the unique qualities
of the sword. The quality of the individual is what matters and
your all quality, except for your sense of humor that is.”

A brief smile flickered across my lips and I
remembered something my father had said, “Start your own
legacy.”

This sword certainly was a weapon to create
a legacy with. I reached out for the handle praying that the
Creator would help me be worthy of this gift and never misuse
it.

The moment my fingers touched the handle I
felt the cold metal grow warm and stranger than that was the pulse
of energy that radiated up my arm from where I gripped the sword. I
lifted the sword up into the air and watched as tiny bright blue
lines traced all along the blade until a scrollwork of unbelievable
intricacy was blazed along the entire sword length.

Gavin swallowed, “I didn’t design the blade
to have those patterns!”

The blue line designs began to pulse of a
brighter color flare and I felt tendrils close around my hand.
Looking at my hand I watched as silver tendrils of liquid metal
fused around my hand and up my arm.

The silver turned blue and I felt a shock of
power radiate throughout me and then it seemed to travel back into
the sword. The pommel stone lit up brilliantly, and showered the
room with rays of red reflected light and then the sword went
dark.

Had I broken it?

The silver tendrils were no longer about my
hand, but the way my hand felt around the handle made me never want
to let go of it. The pommel stone crystal pulsed red and then the
silver framework of the handle flashed brilliantly followed by the
entire blade which glowed a cool blue while jetting lines of cobalt
blue shot up and down the blade in constant geometric scroll like
patterns that dazzled the eyes.

I looked at Gavin and he at me and we both
grinned and said at the same time, “Cool!”

“Best gift ever brother, thank you so much!”
I said with all my heart.

“Don’t thank me I’m just glad to have been
used to create this... this.”

Gavin through his hands up at a lack for
what to say. “Masterpiece!” I finished for him as I cut the sword
through the air leaving a shimmering light trail of silver and
blue.

“Nice!” Said father from the doorway.

We both looked over at him and he got a big
smile on his face as he said to his 22-year-old sons, “It’s time to
put the toys down and go to bed. Its way past your bedtime.”

One month earlier in the land of
Assoria.

Zalisha knelt on the hard floor unmindful of
her sore knees on the prayer mat. She had been praying for hours,
days really. And all she’d gotten from her dedication was silence,
which is all she ever got.

She’d been the high priestess of the temple
for barely two years now. The spiritual leader of her people. They
looked to her to tell them how the spirits would move on behalf of
them.

Seeking hope, simply a word of encouragement
that things would get better. She had nothing. Nothing to tell
them!

Nothing!

She could have just blamed herself if it
hadn’t been for the previous high priestess’s dying words to her.
She had told her with her last breaths that she too had never heard
from the spirits of the land, of water, or even of fire. That when
it came time to make a decision that she was to lie and say that
the spirits had told her such and such in order that the proud
traditions and hope of her people could go on.

At the time she had thought the priestesses
last words were the whimsical folly of one near death, but now she
wasn’t so sure. It was a daring thing to doubt her people’s
traditions, but she did now openly within the confines of her
mind.

If the spirits had been watching out for her
people like it was claimed that they did why had they not warned
them of the disaster that had befallen her people four days
previous?

Her head lifted slightly and her eyes
drifted to her hand and the brand on it. The smooth skin of the top
of her hand had the symbol of the sorcerer sliced into it by a
knife. She had been held down by the assassin sent to kill her and
had watched as he had cut the symbol of the Sorcerer into the top
of her hand with the poisoned edge of his dagger.

He had left her crying on the floor not
knowing that he had not been successful in killing her, otherwise
he would’ve thrust her through the heart.

The edges of the cuts oozed a brownish fluid
and she had no feeling in her hand at all. Her body was fighting
off the poison, but she may yet lose her hand. At least she still
had her life unlike every other member of the royal family.

All of them were dead.

The king, his wives, children, close
relatives, distant relatives, even a newborn baby rumored to be the
bastard son of one of the king’s sons. Over four hundred people all
killed in one night by a veritable army of assassins in the employ
of the sorcerer.

She alone of all the members of the longest
running dynasty of the Eastern Kingdom was alive. The people
thought of her survival as a miraculous sign and treated her as if
she was some sort of god, but she knew better. From the time when
she was a little girl and had been selected as a future high
priestess of the temple and sent to live there she had been fed a
steady diet of poison in small doses by the other priestesses,
until she’d gained a small immunity to it, which is all that could
be hoped for.

So far it was working, but what really was
the point? They were dying as a people. Now they were without a
leader.

Forsaken by their gods.

Everything was hopeless.

She brushed tears from her eyes with her
good hand. She could do one thing!

She could stop this charade and groveling
before inanimate objects!

She stood up and pushed over the holy
serving table with its food offering. Picking up a candle staff she
smashed away at tokens and demigods alike. Panting for breath she
looked around the room at the mess that she had made of it. Taking
her good hand she made a fist of it and shook it violently towards
the ceiling.

“If you were real gods I would be dead right
now! But I’m not! I will never serve you nor prostrate myself in
front of you ever again!”

Zalisha stormed out of the small round
temple and out into the refreshing air of her garden sanctuary. The
moon shone brightly illuminating the city and the great wall that
protected it in sharp relief.