Once Nick built a fire a respectful distance away from the dormant pyre, he sat before it and laid Sorrow across his knees. The blade pulsed a soft crimson as he gently rested his fingers atop the obsidian. Sorrow’s voice floated in his mind, firmer than the stone and deeper than the night.

  What are you waiting for, pillager?

  “For Frost to come back, just like I did,” he said. “Violette, too.”

  Violette could be dead.

  “She’s not. I couldn’t find her body.”

  Just like you and Frost leave behind bodies?

  Nick drummed his fingertips across the flat edge of the sword blade, hoping it would annoy the ancient thing.

  “Violette isn’t a…demon, like us. If they killed her, I’d have found her corpse. She escaped, just like we hoped. She’ll come back. Both of them will. I only need to be patient.”

  Why, then, do you draw me? There is no blood to be shed.

  Nick looked around at the meadow, full of tall ryegrass. It swayed in the soft wind. In the distance, he saw the beginning of the Rockgrave Forest and the ruins within. There was an undeniable age lingering about, countless years stored within every stone. Even if this world was but a simulation, that simulation was old, so old. The knowledge of this weighed him down, and for once, he did not fight it with defiance. He accepted the solemnity it offered. Faintly smiling despite feeling no joy, he looked to the stars, and the black sun rimmed with blue fire.

  “Perhaps I wished to have company,” he said.

  Then speak with your mirror.

  “I can’t. Gareth took it.”

  The red pulsed a little deeper, as if the blade were brooding.

  I suppose I can indulge, since there is no escaping you. Is there something in particular you wish from me? Some advice I might offer, or wisdom of the Sinifel?

  Melancholy settled over Nick, and he gave voice to a question that had lingered in the back of his mind ever since finding Sorrow in the ruins of Abylon.

  “Was there happiness in your time?”

  What kind of absurd question is that?

  Nick took the sword, spun it, and drove the blade deep into the earth until it was embedded halfway up to the hilt. He left his right hand lingering, his fingertips on the cross guard, to maintain the contact.

  “You’ve told me of your war against the Alder Kingdom,” Nick said. “You’ve lectured repeatedly on how great your people were, and you’re certainly not shy about telling me why the current society is foolish and stupid and in need of complete annihilation. And you’ve most certainly not been shy about my failings.”

  He pressed his fingertip harder against the obsidian.

  “What you haven’t told me of is a single moment of happiness, or joy, or tranquility. Did they exist in this great Sinifel Empire of yours? Or did you know only war, brutality, and nihilism?”

  Sorrow’s glow dimmed, and it was a long while before it answered.

  What has brought on such sentimental desires?

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I just miss my mirror.”

  Or you miss the false father in the mirror. I am not blind to my surroundings, as much as we both may wish.

  Nick grimaced, and he felt his neck flushing slightly.

  “I asked you a question, and instead you mock me. I should have known.”

  He closed his hand around the hilt, preparing to lift it from the earth. Sorrow’s voice pierced into him before he could.

  I was a father, once.

  “You? Really?”

  Shall I tell my tale, or must I suffer your insipid interjections?

  Nick winced, and he tried to hide it by settling back down and shifting to get more comfortable.

  “Sorry. Carry on.”

  My wife and I named him Elimja. According to our oldest books, that name meant “Mistake” in the earliest form of the Majere language. And before you make another of your witless comments, know that this was a mark of love. The fated calamity was only four years away. Having children was highly discouraged, and outright forbidden to the priesthood, once the end grew so near. But no matter how little time remained, we wished to raise a child. We sired him in secret, hid my wife’s pregnancy for as long as we could, and then when the truth was revealed, I endured the punishments, even forfeiting my rank as high priest of the Sinifel clergy. Yet it was worth it when Elimja was born and let out his first cry.

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  “I’m surprised you and your wife were brave enough to take such a risk,” Nick said.

  What risk?

  Nick squirmed in his seat, realizing he didn’t really have an answer to that. Everything he knew about the fallen Sinifel Empire was fractured and piecemeal, much of it based on the art of their ruins, the bits of information Violette had mentioned, and the distorted fierceness of their ageless war beasts.

  “I just…I would think the final years leading up to the calamity would be an extremely dangerous time for anyone, let alone a child.”

  If a sword could sigh, Sorrow did.

  I have heard the stories of the Sinifel that survivors tell. The whispers have seeped into me from the minds of fools who wielded me as a weapon, seeking power and glory. We are the heartless, the heretics say. We cared not for life. We embraced chaos, selfishness, and indulgence. “The world is ending,” they imagine us shrieking from our orgiastic revelry. “Slaughter! Murder! Indulge, imbibe, rape, and steal, for what matters when the black sun awakens, and the world is doomed!”

  A doom did approach, but that did not unmoor us, Nick, nor send us into despair. No, it meant that each and every day I watched Elimja grow, I cherished it more than a thousand coins of silver. His first steps were worth more than any diamond or emerald. The sound of his laughter was finer than any wine. None of us, none of us, are guaranteed tomorrow. Unlike the heretical kingdom we conquered, or the one that replaced us, we did not believe we would last forever. Doom would come, we would suffer loss, destruction, and death as the judgment of the black sun fell upon us…and then would come the rebirth.

  Rebirth, Nick. Renewal. We were not fire. We were not wickedness. We were the dormant seeds, knowing winter snows approached and biding our time for the warmth of spring.

  You ask if I knew joy. You ask if there were moments of happiness, and tranquility, as if they were rarities unheard of in our sinful, wicked world. I experienced them each and every day, pillager. My son’s little hands wrapped around my fingers, and clutching them, he took his first steps. His hazel eyes lit up at the very sight of his mother. At the sound of my laugh, he clapped. Year after precious year, we celebrated, never wasting them, never taking them for granted.

  What debts we held, we settled. What grievances we carried, we shed. What doubts that threatened to cripple us, we overcame. We were unafraid in the face of death, which meant we were free.

  And then the great heretic froze the black sun and denied Eiman his due. He splintered time. He broke the seasons, forever imprisoning us in this eternal spring. And in return for that…that “gift,” he demanded we worship him as a god. If Yensere refused to bend the knee, then he would release his grip and bring forth the needed calamity.

  That is when our Sinifel Empire fell. It wasn’t when Emperor Gothwyr was beheaded by the great heretic. It wasn’t when our soldiers were burned in the ruins of what would become the Swallowed City. It happened when Vaan told our people death was now a choice. When the certain became uncertain, the inevitable now denied. That which united us, a communal acceptance of our own impermanence, was stripped away with the promise of an eternal kingdom, and a calamity, forever denied.

  Nick leaned closer to the sword, his forehead pressing against the surprisingly cold hilt.

  “What happened to your son?” he asked softly.

  I spent the ensuing days after the black sun froze preaching resistance to the people. I still thought the power of our prayers would be stronger than Vaan’s heresy, but it did not take long for the will of the people to turn against our priesthood. Too many sought to continue the lives they lived rather than face a tumultuous rebirth. They hated my words. They spat in my face. They…they rioted, threw stones, uncaring who was near. Who they hurt.

  Sorrow fell silent. Nick dared not speak. He would not be so disrespectful as that. In time, Sorrow’s words returned, heavy with the weight of centuries.

  One stone. One stone was all it took to claim Elimja’s life. The day after, my wife flung herself from the roof of our grand temple, her shattered body bleeding out on our holy steps. She left me a note. One sentence. That was all she needed. She knew I would understand.

  “I miss Elimja’s smile.”

  Nick remembered Sorrow’s words on that first day he’d found the sword, when he had approached the temple in Abylon.

  These steps. It is painful to look upon them once more.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Sorrow did not acknowledge the apology, but neither did he mock him for it. Instead, after another lengthy silence, he resumed his tale.

  By then, the war was turning, the great heretic’s armies swelling in number as people flocked to him from all corners of Yensere. Word reached us of his Five Harbingers, and how the strength of our war beasts paled against them. We were desperate. Our knights begged for power, and so I offered what was left of my life. Let me become a blade to wield against the heretic who ruined my family. Let my hatred glow crimson and spill the blood of those who would break the natural order of the world.

  “But now you yourself are immortal,” Nick said carefully, respectfully. There was no judgment here, not for someone who had once suffered so greatly. “Is that not against your tenets?”

  I was not made immortal, pillager. I was reborn. My hate, my pain, my misery; let them all serve a purpose. That was my hope. Let them bring about salvation to our majestic Sinifel Empire. I was considered the greatest of the four judgment blades, and when they carved the sacred oath into my obsidian side, my fury was the hottest, and my rage, unquenchable.

  Nick brushed his thumb against the arcane lettering, those five words written in a language hundreds of years old. Cataloger had refused to translate them, their meaning was so private and so severe. Even now, they pulsed the color of a furious crimson sun. He feared he understood them at last.

  “What does it say?” he asked.

  For a long while, silence.

  I, too, miss his smile.

  *

  “Hey, Nick,” Frost’s familiar voice called from the nearby grassland. “Look who I found.”

  Nick released his hand from Sorrow, finally granting the weapon his solitude. When he turned about, he grinned wide as Violette came racing past Frost to fling her arms around him.

  “I was so worried about you!” she said, which earned a chuckle from him.

  “We’re the ones worried about you,” he said, gently disentangling from her. She peered up at him, her amber eyes blinking away a few stubborn tears and her dark hair falling low over her face.

  “If you insist,” she said. “But I don’t care what you are. Just don’t leave me, all right? I’m with you always, isn’t that the deal?”

  He glanced over her shoulder to Frost, who stood looking maddeningly amused with her arms crossed over her chest. She shot him a wink.

  “That’s the deal,” she said. Her attention shifted to Sorrow, still half-embedded in the soil. “Something the matter with your sword?”

  Nick grabbed Sorrow’s hilt and yanked the blade free of the earth.

  “Just a friendly chat,” he said, tucking the weapon into his belt.

  “Sorrow is capable of friendliness?” Frost asked.

  He shrugged, and he had to turn away to hide the tightness in his throat and the strange, indecipherable heat he felt emanating from Sorrow’s hilt that quickened his heart and made his stomach clench as if he had swallowed a whole bowl of felberries.

  “You know how it is,” he said, patting Violette’s tentative hand settling on his shoulder to reassure her all was well. “You never know who is full of surprises.”