30,000 years before the present day
The noise of the exodus comes rolling like the distant rumble of the sea, mists and exhalations rising from the blue bodies of the Roenans as they climb the mountain range in their hundreds of thousands. Anomandara looks at it all and wonders: there was a time when they put their enemies to flight but, in this age, the Roenan destiny is aflame in other faces, the faces of the Elves.
Anomandara was born too late. If she'd been born three thousand years ago, she'd have hunted the Elves down when they first arrived on this world. She would have fought and defeated each of them. She has never lost a fight but her people are losing the war.
Her eyes are dark and dilated, pieces of the white sun scattered in their pupils as she walks through the troops, faces solemn but expectant when they see her. "First Sword," a male voice calls her, heightened by lashes of urgency.
"Yes, Fifth Sword?"
Borya is the fifth best champion in the Roenan army and the best male by some distance, an example of what his gender can do if they're to be trusted in this new age. Anomandara isn't sure that she trusts them. "The Empress needs to see you, urgently," he breathes out.
How dare the Empress summon Anomandara in a time of imminent battle. Of course, modesty isn't the first thing that comes to mind when contemplating the average Empress...and this Empress is very average.
"Lead the way," Anomandara says, gripping her sword hilt for emphasis.
She enters the marching tent and the silence is breathless, a rustle of anguish rising as she makes her way along the aisle of bodyguards and advisors, her quartz-like gaze focussing on the Empress as she stops in front of the throne. She pays no attention to the others.
Damp horror is pressed on the monarch's features. "First Sword, the heir has been lost. The attack on our camp brought confusion—"
"Can no one do their job!?" Anomandara questions the timid line of bodyguards and advisors, her voice rising with the inner wind of emotion. She's not even truly angry, she's never felt emotion in that way, but a heat radiates from her that brings fear to the calcified depths of their hearts.
Mistakes like this weren't in the glorious books from which she read about the mighty Roenan Empire. One of the Empress's advisors continues, nervously.
"We need to establish if the heir is alive but a return for the whole army is impossible—"
"Enough!" Anomandara commands, with a glance at the Empress who is sitting there in alert, sad curiosity like an animal witnessing the destruction of its habitat. "I will ride alone into the enemy ranks and retrieve the girl."
The advisors gasp, a male voice uttering. "That's impossible!"
A smile breeches Anomandara's cold glare. "For you, perhaps. I'll be back shortly." She turns to the Empress and draws her sword, to which a thousand recollections, glorious and gruesome, have attached themselves, and gives a salute. "Both eye and soul," she says, leaving abruptly because she knows, while the office is worthy of her respect, the person is less so.
The cold, separating wind of genius has dictated Anomandara's life since childhood, when she defeated her tutor during the first year of sword training. Despite this, she has a bone-deep love for her country and the thought of Elves laying their hands on the Roenan heir, especially if she is still alive, grips her imagination horribly. She will kill them all. This is likely a suicide mission, even for her, but there are no hoarse voices of conflicting impulse, only knowledge of her duty.
After she storms out of the Empress's tent, the Fifth Sword Borya's father, turns to him and asks. "You really love her, don't you?"
"Yes, I do," Borya whispers. "Why?"
The old Roenan rolls his eyes with voice alone. "It just...helps to know that," he sighs.
Anomandara has never thought about any man, beyond what he can offer in a fight and, as she approaches the horses she turns, alerted. Her voice holds a warning.
"Fifth Sword..."
There's a brittle silence before Borya says. "You go into great danger."
"Speak up!" she replies, though she heard him clearly.
"You go into great danger!"
"Don't shout."
"Okay."
Anomandara smiles and a flicker of humour passes through her eyes, but then the hard coals of resolution return. "My peril is the peril of every leaf and flower when they pass with the seasons, no more. They must die and so will I."
Borya breathes deeply, sensing that this is the moment he's waited so long for to declare his feelings. "I'm coming with you."
"No, you're not."
"Okay."
The lights of his eyes are a flock of stars under a harsh and peerless sun. Anomandara smiles, because she thinks that might make him feel better, then mounts her horse and rides.
In the ruined Roenan camp, burned and broken tents crouch like animals, several arrows whizzing past Anomandara's head as she rides through. More shoot out of the trees and she deflects them, urging her horse forward into a spearman and cutting him down with a horrific crunch, then decapitating another. That's one surprising thing about these Elves: they fight as one gender, with no preference for females at all. The males seem to be just as competent, which is hard to believe.
She dismounts, the current of her fury carrying her this way and that: she cuts half a dozen archers to pieces in little more than a second. Horror at her speed, grace and power paralyses the next group. It's like she's an artist breathing life into war, moulding it into terrible new forms and putting everything she has into it: all her native honour, the quiet, sensitive child, the rage, the years of seclusion, every element of her being split into fingers, each one wielding its tools of memory and preservation as best it can.
Elves die in their dozens, then their hundreds before her inexhaustible force, springing this way and that, always out of danger but delivering death. Limbs fall like leaves, clambering like angry bees at her feet until she has to move on to the next killing ground.
Blade echoes chime into silence and she's the only one alive, amid a sea of corpses. But that was only an advance party. The Elven force is still some way off.
*
A livid, glaring white sun rifles the horizon of all its details, wind rasping dryly across the peaks. Salazar's eyes roll over the scenery. "Remarkable," he murmurs, his voice deep and cold as stones. "No two days ever look the same. Even this static horizon is, in the smallest details, somehow different from all the moments that came before: the great brush has never rested, its paint will never dry," he quotes.
Beside him, Pilar smiles at a memory. "It's unfortunate they abandoned their heir. I will offer them the child free of conditions."
"I have no wish to see a child suffer," Salazar agrees. "Though war inevitably forces suffering upon the weakest and they've brought war to us time and time again. The child will be safe with us: why should we appease them?"
"Bringing one word of peace safely to harbour from such stormy seas is not to be scorned."
"They're supremacists. They'll say we returned her out of fear," Salazar says, with considerable prescience. "A setting sun cannot share the sun with the rising; they are the old and we are the new."
The many-coloured feathers of Pilar's helmet and armour gleam wildly as she shakes her mighty head. "We've wounded them and they will never be the same. Their dominance is broken. You stood in front of Erretikatara Bridge and stopped the progress of a million of their troops for over an hour with your presence alone. We never wanted this war, brother. We have a mission, and it's time to make peace and focus on that now. Resolution can be the mother of mercy, not just barbarism."
Their gazes rise to an urgent gust, a dragon landing beside them and depositing their brother.
"Mandrigad," Salazar inclines his head.
"Brother," Mandrigad calls, his face drenched in white shock. He clings to the words with raw, bruised fingers as he speaks them. "A Roenan has attacked our camp and made off with the heir."
A smile insinuates itself across Salazar's face. "Single-handed?" he asks, impressed.
Mandrigad nods and Pilar's voice hardens in resolution. "The First Sword," she whispers, relishing the nearness of such a great opponent. "I'll ready my spear," she says and walks off to prepare for the challenge.
"Sister," Salazar calls after her. "Let her go. Are you going to kill her when she has a child in her hands, then return the child to them? I regret any Elven lives lost in her heroic attempt, but it was heroic, and we should let her go...for now."
Surprised by Salazar's repose, Pilar turns back.
Mandrigad's eternally youthful face shines mischievously and his dragon tenses its claws as he speaks. "I will ride ahead, stop her and then deliver the child to them."
"No—" Pilar calls but the boy disappears into the sky's bloody, leprous brilliance.
*
Anomandara pushes her mount to exhaustion as she cradles the baby in one strong arm, blood washing down her sleek armour and dying the horse's mane with sickly mountains of colour, black and red peaks dripping like newly formed islands. In the other hand she holds the instrument of that terror, it's blade gleaming. None of the blood is her own.
A thrown spear bursts through her horse's flank and sends it to the ground, pitching her over its head, where she rolls protectively cradling the child's head. Anomandara looks down at the child, a turbid, aching feeling in her guts, but the baby stirs, whimpering and listless. She empties a look of relief and turns her attention upward, sword poised.
Two giant Elves stalk around her, one a female with flaming red hair who disgorges her spear from the horse's guts and whirls it clean. "It is Tal Riose who has killed you," she yells, working her way around Anomandara's left flank. The other Elf is a silent man, experience and millennia of service in his eyes, who makes his way to Anomandara's right.
The baby is cradled on the side closest to Tal Riose and she attacks from that side, but is flung back by a brutal head of steel, her teeth thrown together by the strength of Anomandara's one-armed attack; in the same movement, Anomandara shifts her movement and impales her other attacker through the forehead, his eyes thrown up in shock like marbles of gristle.
Confronted with this speed, Tal Riose is clearly thinking that it's impossible but, before she can right herself, Anomandara is on her and, despite being hindered by the baby, chops through her shoulder with a sickening crunch. Riose's legs buckle beneath her, perhaps for the first time ever, and she helplessly waits for death, unafraid but daunted by the taste of defeat and the ease with which it was won.
A charcoal shadow descends, its talon clutching at where Anomandara's head was an instant before. The dragon whirls and spouts great torrents of fire but she darts aside and, wanting to get the child to safety, runs.
She feels the dragon focussed on her back like an adamantine dart and, when she feels it close enough, whirls and throws her spare sword, which sinks into its black chest as blood springs out erratically, like a red bird with its plumage ruffled.
The dragon gives a quiet, plaintive groan and sinks to the ground, with all its might focussed on the Fatherless on its back, making sure he lands safely. The Elf's face is filled with ghostly horror, his heart's coals flaring as he watches his companion beast die. "Thank you, my friend," the Elf says and there are years in those words, words meant to carry a long and sad task to its conclusion.
As soon as the words leave his mouth, their bearer turns and is on Anomandara, his boyish face flame with ghastly light, his eyes lumps of loathing trained on her movement. His speed is incredible and Anomandara is still hindered by the baby, but she must never fail in her duty. A typhoon of steel, a symphony of strikes and counter-strikes as spear meets sword, the Fatherless opening his eyes wide in appraisal.
"Incredible," he smiles, bouncing on the soles of his feet, certain of victory because that's all he's ever had. "You move like nothing I have ever seen."
"I am Anomandara, First Sword of the Roenan Empire."
"I am Mandrigad," he smiles.
Anomandara answers by trying to cut off his head, but Mandrigad ducks. The Elven king strafes back but the speed of Anomandara's attack catches him out as she flicks aside his spear and pierces him fully through the chest with her blade, his eyes trailing down in fascinated horror as the blood blooms on his armour. She pulls her blade free and he takes several great drunken steps back and, with a piercingly sad look, slumps to his knees, takes a sip of breath and, a devilish light in his eyes, springs forward with all his emptying strength.
Anomandara blocks the attack and cuts off his head, but the dying dragon lurches forward, lifeblood sloshing behind it in great canyons, its talon destined to hit home because of the time bought by the great Elven king's doomed attack: they were working as one. Anomandara braces herself and turns completely, taking the hit on her right side with the baby held in her left. She stumbles, groans and slashes the dragon's throat as blue blood drips onto her shoes. It's her blood.
She takes a few hesitant steps forward and then breaks into a run, the pain easing as she realises her task is almost done. "First Sword!" A riot of voices confronts her and she's surrounded by two dozen of her Roenan soldiers.
"No!" a voice tinctured with raw pain rings out from where the Fatherless fell. Pilar charges the Roenans like a tornado, cutting down Anomandara's soldiers like insects; she's never seen anything like it.
Holding out the child to the one remaining soldier, Anomandara speaks quietly. "Take her," she says, with one last look at the child; her heart feels bright, glowing with love and tenderness. As the soldier runs, Anomandara turns to face Pilar, whose eyes hold out their flames like an offering.
Pilar's voice is saturated with emotion. "This is for my brother; it is an act of love, not war."
Their styles are different but both are magnificent: Pilar floats out of range like a slow dream and then blooms into full attack without exposure, and Anomandara is a force of kinetic energy, exploding this way and that, throwing the great Pilar off balance for the first time in her life.
Pilar traps Anomandara's blade against the ground and pushes her spear along the hilt towards her heart but Anomandara, unable to loosen the sword from her trap, drops at an outrageous angle, back curved at ninety degrees along the ground while her knees hold the weight without effort, an armoured foot lashing out at Pilar's knee, which would break if not for the partial evasion.
The great Elf stumbles and grunts in pain, then springs forward and somehow forces Anomandara back; despite her injury, the Roenan moves freely and sends down crunching attacks on Pilar's spear, halting her offense as she blocks. A counterattack catches Anomandara off-guard and she flies to the left, her face a crucible of pain as the dragon wound in her side flares.
In that moment of distraction, Pilar strikes, her spear taking Anomandara in the chest and lifting her off the ground with brutal force. She struggles, a blazing holocaust in her eyes but soon realises it's hopeless and, taking a great gulp of air, throws her sword at Pilar's face, forcing her to remove her spear and block most of the attack as she stumbles back, a gash on her cheek.
Anomandara falls to the floor but hears yells in the distance. Borya, Fifth Sword of the Roenan Empire, is leading the charge to save her and beside him are all the swords she's ever trained over the years, mages throwing Power at Pilar, who blocks the magic but stands alone. Borya looks down at Anomandara a wrinkle of pain descends on his brow like an exclamation of purpose.
The sun is held up by the trees, those lean angels. Anomandara's gaze caresses the sky, which is pure and clean as the cry of a baby. Fame and hope, the revolt of history, all that is lost to her now but she's not lost to it. Live on words, live on deeds, last of my line, last of my blood gobbled up by the wolfish rains.
***
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