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The habits of creation die hard.
Death is a coin, the blade the metal of its substance, itself immune to death. The blade cuts through flesh and song. The blade cuts through creation.
The blade was created, once. It created blades. Others like itself. Kin of steel.
The blade is not like its kin. It has a voice. It has a head, a heart, a hunger. Its tempered edges still hurt.
The habits of creation died hard.
In different days, with different eyes, he looked at the world with wonder, looked at floating crowns of luminescent jellyfish, the flight of star-foxes, the silver coats of snow-leopards, and thought them beautiful. He sought to understand them, to divide nature and trait, to emulate and become. He made puzzle-boxes and chess sets, flasks and masks, bracers and engines. Once, he was known for the swiftness of his imagination and his hands alike. Once, the artifacts that came from his hands were treasures and gifts, prizes and rarities. He made some to sell, others to keep, most for the joy of making.
And if he was lonely, if he could not breathe, he never considered why.
He did not make weapons, not until the woman with the transient and sharp grin. She asked him for a sword. He lost count of how many he forged, searching for one whose steel could reflect the flash of her smile.
It took one war and three friends for him to find the perfect temper for her weapon. He had hoped she would smile when she saw it. But she simply nodded and sheathed it, her hollow eyes glinting keenly. There was no victory in her voice when she said, “You told me once you’d never make a weapon. You’ve made hundreds.”
He felt like a child, chastised and regretful, but he could not make it up to her—for it was the last he’d see of her for many years.
She was always the first to leave.
There was the dragon, with his pointed ears and his slit pupils that widened darkly when they rested on the blade. They spent countless nights under the moon, mortal and immortal, twining around each other. It was with him that the blade learnt his own body as instrument, not so different from what he made. They uncovered the secret mechanisms of his flesh, the way he could twist apart soundlessly at a certain and delicate touch, lips bruising with love. The dragon taught him to revel in something other than gears and forge-fires, celadon and paint.
“I love you,” the dragon said. “I’ll love you forever.”
“Your forevers are different,” the blade said. “I can’t hold a candle to your sun.” He held up a coin to the white moon, the same size a million miles apart. “It’s enough to be by your side.”
“Enough for who?” the dragon said. “You make such beautiful things. What more could you make, if I gave you my time?”
“Keep it,” the blade said tenderly. “I have you.”
One day the strength of his hands would fail, agility eroded by quavers. For now, he tugged his lover closer under the infinite sky and dreamed of quicksilver and halide and the lick of flame over flesh.
There was the woman with light feet and a fox's runaway heart. He nursed his feelings for her like phlox wine, always teetering on the edge of speaking his mind, always failing. He followed her everywhere like a dog with a scent, picking up everything she left behind.
So he saw the way she looked at the woman with the mercurial smile, with a wistfulness that mirrored his own.
The fox noticed his attention. “I can’t help it,” was all she said.
“No one can,” he said. They could not look at each other, and he put away the pale flask of phlox wine and never mentioned it again.
There was the boy, with his lionlike hunger and his curious mixture of laziness and precision. They played endless games of starchess, their wits striking sparks on contact, but for all their arguments they aligned more than they diverged, for both of them preferred someone else to take the credit while they cast their brilliance into the perilous deep.
For that boy, he crafted a glaive, wicked and merciless. “You could kill armies with this,” the blade told him.
The boy shrugged. “I hope I don’t have to.”
He was the first one, the only one, to echo the blade’s thoughts.
Indifferent days.
The habits of creation never died. They mutated, spilling out of hand. Memories multiplied into shadows that sought revenge, ceaseless across the stars. Sorrow fossilized their friendship, rotting meat and blood into limestone silhouettes. He could never look back.
The blade is not like its kin. It has a voice. It has a head, a heart, a hunger. Its tempered edges still hurt.
It cried out on the day that woman plunged the sword into its heart.
It cried out on the day that dragon held its hands and guided it to its doom.
It cried out on the day that young immortal walked him out of its self-made tomb.
It cried out on the day that white fox breathed her last.
The joy of companionship eclipsed the joy of crafting. Grief drowned both.
Steel replaced flesh.
Like sand in an hourglass, the memories sifted down to bury the echoes, running across the years in an endless shadowplay—intangible, fleeting sculptures of light and sound that flitted across the domes of their cities.
They were the heroes of that theater, until one by one, they fell from the stage into the void between stars.
The blade thought it understood creation. Quicksilver-adept, possibilities ran free in every direction he cast his sight in. He did not know that true creation evaded him until the end. He saw the world in colors and numbers, flashes of insight wired by years of study, all that could be simmering through all that was. But he was always a sculptor, never a painter—always transforming, never making.
Then the blade was unmade.
First, the betrayal.
There was no pleading that would sway the dragon, no regret that would undo what had been done. Reason and love evaporated like a meteor entering the atmosphere, the gravity of their descent sundering ice to smoke.
Afterwards, the agony.
It took from the blade everything it had once understood as itself—the warmth that her smile brought, the sweet ache of passion frustrated or fulfilled, the rush of losing and winning alike. She stitched pain into his soul, the familiar world shattering with each unseen slash and cut.
The blade was destroyed, once.
It thought it understood destruction. The glacial sword, the transient smile. The dragon, resolute against its desperate cries.
Would it have been saved, if it had tried to know its end sooner? In the days of its creation, it had been the architect of destruction for thousands. If only, if only it had understood sooner that when it forged a weapon, it was making an unmaking.
It returned to its workshop, after it was destroyed and found, in the wreckage, a broken sword, dull-edged and splintered.
After all the love it had ever known was forgotten, there was still the phantom remnant. Even shadows left scars. Its body was borrowed from a dead man—its soul was borrowed from the sword that had carved it. All it owned were reflections and cracks, spidering across its secondhand time. If it had to be punished, did it have to be so cruel? Even the love had been secondhand, taken from people who saw legends and knives where there was only a man.
A sudden hurt pierced the blade’s heart. That rusted old sword had plunged through its chest, sunk there by its own hand as it yearned for the companionship it once had.
The wound tried to heal instantly, nerves growing through the cracks in the sword as though embracing the two bodies as one. Separating them would hurt again. The blade breathed around a foreign spine and clutched the hilt.
The habits of destruction never died.
It tried to pull the sword out. But its wooden hilt had softened and sprung fresh, flowers blooming in its grip. Their cancerous petals tickled its skin, even an instrument of death no match for the regeneration.
Hope was a new wound. It would always bleed. It would always heal.
The habits of creation never die.