By the time they reached the plateau on top of the sinister tower, both Selena and Letho were lacerated, contused, stabbed, broken, weary and tenderised like a piece of ten years old meat jerky. They clashed four times during the ascend, exchanged blows and gasconades like cutthroat enemies, held nothing back, and came up rather even in the end. The swordsman had a gargantuan headache and a dagger wedged in his left shoulder blade, but Selena paid her dues with a deep gash in her calf a turbulent ache in her torso that would for certain amount to at least a couple of broken ribs. The ball-and-chain trammeled to their lead feet was a mutual illness, curtsey of physical fatigue that made them heave like steam engines going up a steep drag of the hillside. They were macabre apparitions, deathly wan with savagely ruffled hair stuck to their damp (in Letho’s case bloody) foreheads as they veered their trunks around the last curve, their feet unfaltering, fueled by rank resolve.
When they finally stepped over that final obstacle, that single stair that stood at the edge of their destinies, they were vexed by the shine of the blade. The ivory illumination was slightly altered, shifted to a remarkably bright nuance of cerulean that didn’t radiate, but rather came in a form of a constant eruption from the very center of the round flat dish. The site itself was far from eye-catching, completely deprived of the ornate glamour of the halls below. Dark blood-red stone stood at their feet, chapped, graceless, unreflecting, seemingly devouring every bit of light that was directed at it. Markings, undecipherable by a mortal soul, littered the dour floor in concentric circles, and the very instant a foot was set at the edge of the round arena, they too beamed with luminance, forming columns of azure livid light that extended up to the spherical dome high above.
And even as those ivory pillars struck the rocky ceiling, a rumbling could be heard, almost as if they were in the vicinity of a beast that had the hunger of the centuries in its belly together with all the war drums that were ever struck at the dawn of a battle. The cave around them shook with terrifying providential might, the stone walls that seemed as old as the foundations of the world started to crack and fissure, throwing down a torrent of pebbles that gradually grew in girth with each passing second. The den of the Blade was collapsing, their presence triggered what seemed like the safety mechanism, but the tower itself was unfazed by the tectonic shifting around it, as if its foundations went deeper, deeper then this material world; as if the tower and the blade were not a part of Althanas at all.
“DON’T YOU SEE, LETHO? YOU WILL DESTROY US ALL!! THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU ANYMORE!!! CAN YOU NOT FEEL THE POWER THAT YOU WISH TO UNLEASH?!?!” Selena bawled, not being able to see Letho through the pearly light that, though it barricaded her view, failed to blind her eyes. But she knew he was there, she felt his dauntless will withstanding her words even as she spoke them, just as she knew the Blade of the Judicator was there, somewhere in the middle of the sea of white, waiting to fulfill its destiny whether it was to save the world or bring forth its Armageddon.
And she was right. He was there, standing on the edge of this scene and literary not hearing a single word she was saying. His entire being was enthralled by the might that now rippled through him, touched every ounce of his being, and even though every iota of that force was pushing him away, he let it course over him, through him, purging him, elevating him, unable to defy him. And now it was his. He scudded from a standstill as if there was no injury encumbering his body, almost winging towards the most vivid column in the forest of them. And with every step he made he could see more of it, the lambent metal of the double-edged sword that glinted as if it was sparged with stardust. The armguard of the blade was two-fold, one side forming an angelic wing made out of what seemed like molten pearls poured into a beatific shape, while the other glimmered with the swarthiness of ebony, as pure as a moonless night in a form of a demonic wing. The two were mended in the middle at the sides of a faceless figure of a human in what seemed the most neutral gray ever blended. In the same semblance the hilt continued, spiraling downwards enough for a two-handed grip, ending with what seemed like a plain rounded piece of indifferent metal. It was a perfect blade, a dream of every swordsman, and only for Letho that aspiration would come true.
But just as he was to enfold his hands around that hilt, just as he was but a stride away from fulfillment, an osseous steely hand emerged from the light, caught him by the wrist and nimbly tripped him over her protruded leg. He rolled away towards the edge, his trunk reeling through the beams, making them flicker repeatedly as he passed, until he came to a halt some five paces from the dark abyss. The cave around them continued to degrade in stability, the clods of rock now creating a deadly downpour as the dome above continued the grind and groan. Yet not a single rock managed to land on the surface of the plateau.
“I won’t let you do this, Letho. I won’t let you destroy the world!” she spoke a bit more steadily now, standing above him with an autocratic expression. She wielded no weapon, neither of them did. Her curvy dagger was resting in Letho’s back, and Letho’s bastard sword was left stuck in an ebony wall some two conflicts ago.
“The world? The world!? The world be damned!! Tell me, where was the world when Kristiniel died? Where was the world when Myrhia burned before my eyes? To hell with the world!” he was ranting, raving in a spiteful tone, like so many madmen he met in his life and classified as demented, his voice low and defying and as acerb as they come. And before her eyes he changed, his peering ferocious eyes shifting to crimson as his muscles expanded in a blink of an eye. A vile dark red aura imbued his gigantic figure that now looked more of a beast then the werewolf transformation, because his eyes were blazing, veins thick as a fingers gushed with his boiling blood and jumped out on his neck, his forehead, littering his arms. His hair was fluttering in sync with the shimmer of the glow that stood out in the crystalline white of the Blade. She awoke the rage within him and irritated him enough to make it more powerful then ever. He rose back to his feet with agonizing slowness, like a demented phoenix that on path to resurrection took a wrong turn and wound up in hell, his hands crossed at his chest and his head bowed low. The scarlet eyes breezed with flames peered at the frail woman below the bushy eyebrows, the two gauntlets providing foot-long talons with a satisfying metallic click that got lost in the rumble of the collapsing cave. He spoke no further. Only a sadistic daredevil grin appeared on the edge of his lips, completing the visage of the phantasm that lurked in nightmares and should have never existed.
Letho charged and he was like a tidal wave; overwhelming and unstoppable. He was just as mobile as Selena now, catching up with all her limber evasions and dodges, and his every strike was a potential disaster. He came at her with double slash of both of his talons, but the woman stepped back from the first, ducked below the other and dashed past him. Her hand reached for the dagger in Letho’s back in backhand motion, trying to regain her blade and balance the odds at least in some small manner, but even as her fingers made contact with the blade, the unhinged swordsman reached behind his back with his left, catching her by the wrist. She twisted the blade, hoping that the pain would make him let go as the meaty wet sound of gushing blood and tearing muscle added a morbid detail to the pain that ripped through his back. But the more she twisted the more his grip tightened until she yawped in anguish and agony as the bones of her wrist snapped.
Her vision hazed and blurred, her consciousness begging her will to give in and just give up, but even as her right fell lifelessly from the hilt, her left picked up the blade, yanked it out and instantly went for the liver shot. She never wanted to kill him, not when she was assigned the mission to stop him, not when she had a drop on him back on the “Intrepid”, and even now, as he was on the brink of taking her life, she didn’t want to do it. Letho was a good man, one of the few truly benevolent ones. But he stepped astray and it seemed the only atonement for his sins was death. The curved jagged blade, still warm from the heated blood of the husky warrior, darted for Letho’s side, just below the line of her breastplate. Not quick and painless as her usual jobs, but it would have to do.
Only it didn’t do. He rotated his trunk counterclockwise, his right snaffling her dagger by the blade and shattering it effortlessly with a clutch of his metallic fingers and a hellish growl. His left, vitiated from the wound in the back, was still fast enough to catch bewildered Selena by the neck and throw her down on her face, making the woman let out a clamant mewl. Slamming his knee against her spine as he climbed on top of her, he pinned her body against the stone so hard it made the woman finally lost all links to her consciousness. He brought his scraggy right talon below her long pallid neck and his demented face so close he could smell her cherubic perfume mixed with three days worth of sweat. She was the last obstacle and he just stepped over it.
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