Raise Your Sword and Cut The Wind!

"Stand back! Posture! Swords up! Ready? Fiiiight!!!" the Main Warrior's trumpet blew and we all ran towards each other, yelling our war cries at top volume.

After training, Kiano trudged off to his cabin. His long black bangs swept into his eyes, and the fairies were all hidden, depriving him of their magical tricks.
He should've realized something was wrong. The fairies never hid.
But he didn't until it was too late - and there was no time to warn anybody as the first shrieks shattered the lazy summer heat. 

Enemies! The cry spread through the training camp, erasing all sleep and setting in panic. Kiano hadn't seen anyone yet, but he ran into the main building. 
Mistake. 
That was where all the fighting was going on. No wonder he hadn't seen anyone.

Kiano ducked from a stray spear, and the movement carried him into a nearby door which opened under his inertia. He fell into the room and the door slammed shut behind him. 

Inside the room was a sword.
Shit. It was THE sword. The sword the Main Warrior had told them all not to touch, under no. fucking. circumstances.

Yet there were no other weapons in the room so Kiano had no choice. 

The sword sang through the air, whipping through his enemies.
The fight was soon over.

"Kiano! Kiano, how did you find that sword?" demanded the Main Warrior, staring at the almost-rippling opal-colored sword in the boy's hand.

Kiano clutched the blade closer to his body. It was his! He found it first! He did not want to give it up.
He growled at the Warrior, and still holding the sword to his chest, took off towards the hills. The Warrior ran after him, but an arrow wound in his ankle made him fall, helpless, to the ground.

That was seven years ago.

Kiano cocked his head towards his mark. A woman who had been deceiving travelers for centuries, luring their children into her house and feasting upon their bodies and their blood.

She stood at the doorway of her cottage, bloody sharp teeth showing. Unlike his earlier victims, she didn't plead for mercy. Her gaze, upon falling onto the sword, swept to his eyes, and when they didn't find anything human there, her tirade began. "You don't know what that is - you don't know what you're doing - what it's doing to you! Turn away from your path paved with blood, put down that sword! Do you know what that sword is? Do you know who that sword is? That sword is cal-"

But the sword sang. It sang to HIM. And Kiano didn't like how the woman's ramblings weren't in harmony with the song. 

"This bores me. Stop." interrupted Kiano, in a voice he hadn't heard from himself ever before. A twinge in his mind told him that maybe if he just knew the name of the sword - but the woman's head was tumbling onto the ground, the word just seconds from falling from her lips. Kiano left the scene, not seeing the children who ran outside and cried out the name of their murdered benefactor.

After years of killing those creatures who hurt humanity (But did they? The other Kiano, or Okian, as Kiano liked to call him, sometimes whispered ideas of doubt. Oh, how Kiano wished he could murder Okian. Alas, the sword had no influence inside his mind. "Or does it?" whispers Okian, late at night, quieter every time), Kiano began to lust for something more.

What could he do, with the sword at his side? Could he annihilate the power of the crowns, who ruled above the kings for millennia? Could he destroy the ancient temples who withstood the storm of Time itself? Could he carve through liquid water, could he sever the light from the sun and keep it for himself, could he cut through the wind?

Now, with no ruthless (and wise, says Okian) dragons to convince him otherwise, no dark (yet all-knowing, says Okian) Necromancers to tell the stories of the past, Kiano could do anything, and nothing was holding him back. Nothing but Okian. 

He sought out the crowns with the magic infused into their stones, and his sword, named Un-Forger by the people, would shatter those gemstones into mere shells and sparks that Un-Forger stole into itself.
He watched Kings fall onto their knees and weep by the pieces. Kiano didn't know that memories of ancestors were kept in those stones.

He broke the diamond of the ancient Chapel of Those Who Lived and watched the first trickle of dust get torn away by the wind's hungry fingers. He smiled when priests and believers cried for the remnants of their faith. Kiano never understood what it meant to have faith, anyway. Nobody told Kiano that now Those Who Lived would come and Live again. 

One day, he plunged Un-Forger into the waves of the screaming ocean. And the waves fell apart, rushing away from the song of the sword. He didn't hear them whispering the true name of Un-Forger. But Okian heard. 

Kiano took his sword to the last rays of the sunset, gold and red and purple. He watched them settle thickly into his palm, shorn away from their source. He curled them around his forehead like a crown. He would become the King of the Sun. King of the Sword. King of Light. (That's not what the people think of you. They find in you a Harbringer of Darkness, cries Okian. (For that was but a name of the sword, given and never taken back. But he couldn't bring himself to say it)).

On the top of a mountain, whose peak glistened with ice and snow, Kiano raised the blade to the howling wind. He cut off one of those roaming fingers, and set it to play around his crown of sunlight. 

Instead of gemstones he took a bit of the morning mists. Instead of a cape, behind him flowed the rainbow. Clothed in the Night's star-embroidered cloth, armed with a sword that shone with all the lives it took, the self-proclaimed God looked out onto his kingdom. 
"So? What do you think? I did it. I took over the world." Kiano was smiling and his sword smiled along, albeit for different reasons.
Because Okian didn't answer.
He was gone.

When, many years later, Kiano realized that it was silent inside his head, it was too late.

The sword began to glow in the wavering rays of the dawn sun, and Kiano watched in horror as the glow marched up his fist, up his arm, into his heart, his body, his mind.

And then, like the swooping sensation in your stomach when you fall off a cliff, Kiano felt his perspective flood into the sword, as the Un-Forger entered him.

"My name," said Un-Forger, "Is Taker. Perhaps you've heard of me as 'Harbringer of Darkness' or 'Thief of Hearts'?"

Dammit. Yes, Kiano had heard of that sword - but the tales told of the blade being like a midnight death, stars scattered across the hilt. 

"I may have changed my looks, but my spirit stayed the same. Don't trust a sword by its color."

Wasn't it too late?

"It is." whispered Okian, the sword's smothering presence gone.

And it was. Too late.