Voice of Steel

My blade, she doesn’t speak. Not like a normal person does. Not with words and stories and histories. She speaks in blood, and in movement. The only ways she can.

I can’t ask her where it all began, whether it was at the forge, or the buried earth, or the times beyond, before man, when there was only the heat and crush of unlife.

She doesn’t answer questions like those. She sings most often. And she sings with me.

The first time she spoke, it was to a small audience. Just my father and I.

It was a duet.

I listened, and I danced, and I heard, and I felt, and when it was over, she was quiet all over again, and I realized then how it would always be. She would speak, and then no one else would. She would finish every argument and end every sentence.

She wasn’t hard to understand, my blade. Sometimes I would sit with her, just looking at her shape. The blunted back end, and the straight, narrow other. She could be that way, blunted or pointed. I once used her pommel on a man’s head, and she rang out, sonorous and deep on the impact, but the next moment, it was her slicing jape at the man in front of me. She could cut deep.

Her story began with me at the age of twelve. I found her, as ever a man has found a woman, in a time of need. I needed my life to change, and I needed someone to change it.

She was alone, as was I. Not alone in a physical sense, not really, but alone in purpose. She was with many men that night, and they had many blades, and they had much to worry about with their cargo and their arguments. They didn’t notice me with their drunken warring, me in the shadows and the shrubs. They were concerned with the coin and the deal and the thought of being cheated, and in that way, I felt my blade and I connected.

We were used to unruly men. We were used to men who told us what to do and where to go and who spoke in loud voices.

But we did not.

We spoke softly and directly. I knew it from the moment I saw her, leaning in the glowing embers of the fire, against the side of their caravan.

I took her away, and we went, together, to have a conversation in the only way she knew how.

She taught me how to speak to her, and my father saw, and he heard, and he felt.

And I lay awake that night, after I cleaned her off, and she lay, resting on my shoulder, the stars wheeling above us. The whole world was opening up to me in that moment. It was unfolding, and I was understanding that the words I used before wouldn’t always work. The language of the universe wasn’t so simple. You had to speak in variants. You had to speak, sometimes, in movements and actions.

When I made an argument, it would be felt. When I voiced a concern, it would be heard. I would be sure of it, from that moment, beneath those stars, I was sure of it.

She taught me many things that first night. And I kept her close, because I knew I would never be the same, not with her at my side.

Sometimes our conversations were brief and lovely, sometimes they were almost playful. I laughed with her at the boy from Issia. We joked with him, and toyed, and he was good fun. He had a big mouth, but mine was bigger, and the weight of my words cowed him.

And sometimes our conversations were long, and long, and long. In Soran’drek, we spoke until we were coarse. There were so many voices, and so many things to say. The maces of the Oraks boomed and shouted at us, threatening to drown us out. The walls echoed with their resoundings, and they were joined by the silvery whispers of the bows and the arrows, a melody so harmonious and beautiful that I wondered why they needed the flavor of blood at all. My blade wasn’t jealous though, not of their twanging, piercing rhythm. We wanted only to join the conversation, and we did, for hours, and hours, and hours, we did.

 But my blade’s throat began to give out, as did mine. I felt her trembling in my hand. I felt each clash sending shudders through her body and into my arm, a shiver and shudder not of excitement, but of fear. She needed to rest, she needed the heat of the forge, and she needed the care of the whetstone.

I felt her growing dull and tired, and she began to whisper. And her voice was the softest I’d ever heard, and it was beautiful, so beautiful that my eyes began to sting.

“Don’t you dare,” I cracked, and I felt my throat, raw and inflamed. I felt the blood in my mouth and in my eye.

“Don’t you leave me,” I said, and the answer she gave broke my heart.

She went on, and her voice trembled from a whisper into a gale, and I roared beside her, with her, in her.

At some point, the haze of the fog and the din of the voices was too much, and I passed into a world I didn’t understand. I was moving still, and I could hear her from a long ways down, but it all felt foreign and far.

The world became a pastel of oil and water, smeared onto a canvas of chaos. And when the last person went silent, when I heard his large blade hit the ground, and cry out, and then cry no more, it was as it ever was.

It was just she, and just I.

I fell to my knees and held her, and I held her, and held her, and held her. And there was no need to speak in the silence. There was no need for anything. When I asked her to speak, she always would, and converse we always would.

She is my enigma and my partner. There are things we do not speak about, that we cannot. There are times I feel pent up, and frustrated, and looking at her beside me wishing there was something more, but these are fruitless thoughts and dreams.

I cannot bend her to my wishes, because she does not bend, and she does not break. She speaks to me for as long as I will speak to her, as long as we both are able.

And tonight, there is a man I must find. Tonight he is going to argue for a new land, and a new people, and a new way. He is going to denounce the ways of old, and he is going to proselytize and to preach, and the masses before him are going only to listen.

But we are not.

My blade and I, we are going to speak. And if he doesn’t find our words, subtle and soft as they’ll be, sufficiently convincing, then I will let my blade sing, and he will know the fury of her melody.