A Warrior Born of Grief

Very meticulously, the men, all dressed in black, of the Black Hand made their way through the village, killing every living thing they came across, burning every building, crop, and structure of the village down to the ground. And they laughed as they went through their grisly task.

“I want you to stay in here, Era, all right?” a young woman whispered to her girl child. The little girl stared up with big wide brown eyes into her mother’s worried face.

“But, Mother –“

“Erasma,” the young woman, barely more than a girl herself, said to her child. “These men out there are bad. They would kill you and me if they found us. I want you to stay here, safe. We can’t be seen together, because if they find one of us, they find both of us.” There were tears in the young mother’s eyes now.

Reach up, Erasma gently touched her mother’s face. “Mother, everything is going to be all right,” she whispered. “Right?” For a girl of four, Era was rather intelligent about things that went on around her. And her mother never hid things from the girl – it gave Era’s life and childhood a more mature outlook than those of her own age. Not only that, but it had given Era the intelligence that she had gained from this kind of childhood.

“I do not know, baby, but I hope so,” the young woman said. And those were her last words to her daughter. She set her little girl down inside a hamper, closed the lid, tears streaming down her face, and laid it down in the grass gently.

She straightened and darted to the back of the building, into the shadows, and then she was gone.

Little Era sat inside that hamper for a while, trying not to cry, still believing inside her young heart that everything was going to be all right as soon as the bad men left. But then a scream of absolute torturing pain ripped through the afternoon air and then tears began to earnestly spill down her cheeks as she recognized the voice that had uttered the scream.

My eyes opened.

It was so simple, but yet the hardest thing to do everyday – opening your eyes to find that the day you had fallen asleep too had been washed away by the coolness of the night and that a new day had replaced the one that you had known before. But on some days, I wished my eyes would never open.

Rolling to my feet, I stretched, twisting side to side, savoring the loose feel of waking up in the morning, reveling at how my body always seemed to do as I asked. I rolled up my bedroll with a kick when I finished stretching and strode over to the dying embers of the fire to start up my breakfast.

While toast and some cheese melted onto it was warming up, I washed in the stream, as I always did, every morning. I luxuriated in the cool water as it streamed over my toned body, cooling me down.

Metalwhisper

Is this not death? I thought as I lay here, unable to move. I was slowly dying, I knew, because I was lying in a pool of my own blood.

I did not know what had happened to me, only that I was lying on my back, my feet folded under me in odd angles, and that I had been walking in this dark alleyway before whoever did this appeared and quickly made short work of me, leaving me for dead.

Something wet plopped onto my nose and I looked up, just as the rain started. It sighed as it hit the cobblestones beside my head, washing away my blood and all traces of my assailant. I closed my eyes as the rain came down in torrents, washing away all scents and traces, just as my life was quickly vanishing with the rain that ran into the gutters. I couldn’t tell you who I was now, even I wanted.

Because that was the reason why I was out here in the first place – I was finding out who I was before I had lost everything. I only knew that I was a Metalwhisperer, one who spoke to metals. And that my family, all dead, were all Metalwhisperers before me. It was a gift passed down my generations. And now, it was going to die with the last descendant of the most famous metal smiths in history.

Wait, there was a –

“Hello,” a velvet voice murmured. I forced my eyes open and looked up into a pair of brilliant blue eyes. Then I flinched away from the lamplight that suddenly appeared in my vision. My breath came fast and laboriously as I saw a glint of metal in the glare of the lamplight.

“Don’t kill me,” I tried to whisper, but it came out as a gurgle as blood spilled out of my throat and over my chin. Instead, I coughed and the stranger picked me up and turned me over, holding me up as I spat out blood.

“It’s all right, you’re going to be fine now,” he told me soothingly, holding me steady as I heaved and gasped for air. Then my vision went black and I slumped in his hold and knew no more of what happened that night.

It turns out that the man who had saved me that night was a knight of the realm. Sir Jared was a man who not only was knighted for some deed, but was actually trained for combat and fighting. It turned out that he had heard a scuffle in the back alleyway that night and had come to see what it was. And finding me, he brought me back and chased down the men who did it in for me and had left me for dead and turned them into the local constable. He was a good man. And those men would swing from the gallows on the morrow.

“Do you have a name, metal eyes?” Sir Jared had asked me.

I only managed to give a shake of my head before I fell into a deep sleep again.