Today, a collection of flash- and micro-fiction paying homage to everyone’s favorite archetypal weapon of fantasy: the sword.
-KTL
Ivy watched the sun rise as she cleaned the blood and ichor off her sword. The horizon itself was a dark, brooding bruise, but the storm clouds were thinner overhead, their eastern undersides glowing bright orange and yellow. Fleeting patches of bright blue sky punctuated the cloud cover, clean and crisp as the fresh morning air. Cleaner than her sword was ever going to be again, by the looks of it. Demon gore is stubborn once it permeates steel.
“I’m gonna have to replace this again already,” Ivy said to no one in particular as she finished wiping down the blade. The bright steel was stained with mottled black patches like clouds. The weapon would last a while longer yet, but over time the demon blood would eat away at it until nothing was left.
“Told ya to clean it sooner,” said Clem, her snaggle-toothed companion. “Never leave fiend-innerds any longer than you gotta.”
Ivy returned the blade to the sheath at her hip and rose, stretching.
“Yeah, yeah, Clem. A right genius you are. Maybe next time you could use that powerful intellect of yours to plot us a route to the Summer Keep that avoids the roving demons.”
The portly man shrugged in response. “Hardly any fun that way,” he muttered under his breath.
Ivy smiled into the sunrise. Hardly any fun at all.
Revan felt the rough texture of the cord-wrapping under the leather grip of his cleaver as he eyed his opponent. It was a comfortable feeling, and one he had known and loved since he was a boy.
The presence of a sword in his hand, the eager tug of the weight to hew and hack; it was simple and joyous as life itself.
Revan smiled toothily. He had heard about the man standing across from him, one of those dandies from the Western Isles. He was said to have trained with all the masters of learned swordplay.
Well he wasn’t inside an arena, now. He was on Revan’s battlefield, with compatriots bleeding out all around them, and it was time for him to learn what good all his training would do him in the real world.
Revan whipped his cleaver high as they engaged, sending droplets of blood into the air off the stained blade, and brought it down again to split the dandy’s skull with a powerful blow. He lurched forward as the sword dug into the dirt where the dandy had stood a moment ago; where he no longer was. Revan yanked on his sword to free it, but it was so heavy, and his arms were so tired…
He looked down. Watched as his opponent’s sword slipped back out of his chest.
The grip of his cleaver felt strange in his hands as the world faded into darkness.
“What kind of warrior prince has never trained with a sword?” She frowned.
“Look, it’s more of a ceremonial title, okay? One which, as I’ve pointed out numerous times, I did not want or ask for!”
“Can’t you just give it back, then?”
“Can’t you… No! I can’t just ‘give back’ a birthright title passed down through my family by Divine Anucar himself!”
She shrugged and pointed at the sword on the table between them. “I guess you’d better start training pretty hard, then.”
A resounding crash sounds from the great hall, shuddering the towering double doors to my throne room. The ebony portal swings open with a long, drawn out creak, and a hulking figure in blackened armor with dark purple highlights collapses through the gap.
“What is the meaning of this?” I call out. I remain seated—my dark servants laid out the tattered tails of my billowing cloak ever so perfectly around the base of my throne, and I am loath to muss up the image over something so trivial as a dead guard. “…Hello?”
A young man enters the room, carefully picking his footsteps across my fallen guard’s armor with his arms held out for balance. He perches for a moment on the knight’s visor, wobbling slightly, and then hops down to the flagstones.
I frown. “You’re here early. I wasn’t expecting you for another sixty or seventy days.”
He shrugs. His tunic of rough, homespun wool was likely green at some point, but is now a blood-soaked, mottled maroon. My collection of spirit urns, displayed in alcoves along the side walls, seems to catch his eye, and he gives a low, appreciative whistle.
I rise from my throne and strike a regal pose. “No doubt by now you’ve visited the Seven Temples to claim the Ancient Implements of Power—it must have been frustrating to find—”
He shakes his head.
“—the Implements removed, your travels in vain—I’m sorry, what? You didn’t go out in search of the Ancient Temples?”
He shakes his head again and offers me a disconcertingly toothy smile.
“Excuse me, so you’re saying I had my greatest generals gather up the Arcane Implements of Power and meet me at the Scary Volcano, where I betrayed and tossed them all into the lava so that you could claim neither the Implements nor my generals’ vitality… for nothing? You didn’t even try? What the hell are you doing here?”
He reaches up with his left hand and draws from the scabbard on his back the most battered, piece-of-shit sword I have ever seen. The blade is more rust than steel at this point, and it briefly sticks mid-draw, due to a bend in the middle of the blade where someone probably stepped on it years ago. In his right hand he slings a shield, if you could call it that—it’s literally just three short boards strapped together with a couple iron bands.
I shake my head in wonder. “You’re a goddamned lunatic, is what you are. Well, suit yourself. I’m an equal-opportunity murderer.” I reach out to my side and summon my runic blackblade, while knots of crackling magenta flames flare to life and orbit above my other hand. A chorus of demonic chanting fills the air, and my clawed sabatons lift off the ground as I levitate above my throne.
The would-be hero grits his teeth and charges.
~ (One epic battle later…) ~
“NO!” I snarl and spit out a mouthful of blood, “No, this cannot be!”
My runic blackblade lies shattered among the pieces of my smashed spirit urns. My perfectly tattered cloak is shredded and ratty. My demonic chorus has been choked out and replaced by a triumphant angelic choir.
“I am the King of Evil—I will not be defeated by a… by a fucking Twink!”
The hero’s clothes are torn and singed. His “shield” is down to a single board with a bent iron angle hanging off it, and his rusty sword is missing the last four inches of its tip. He pants from the exertion of our clash—but there is not a scratch upon his body. He pulls off his ruined cap and lets it fall, and his blond hair flows as through tousled by an invisible wind.
“Gahh—Say something, damn you,” I shake my clawed fists at him, “Why won’t you speak!”
He holds up his sword in salute, and I see it: the Brand of Courage, burning from the back of his hand. I let out a primal roar and lunge for his throat—but he backflips away just out of my reach, and ripostes with inhuman speed.
“Het!”
His sword flashes out and removes the fingers from my outstretched hands.
“Het!”
His shield crashes into my nose and drives me to my knees. He holds his decrepit blade out behind him, and it flares to life with divine energy.
“HYAAH!” he cries, as he spins with his sword through the base of my neck.
Photo by Gioele Fazzeri on Unsplash
The Literary Diversions of K.T. Lazarus 
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