The Sword Speaks

He reached out and touched the hilt. The chamber disappeared. He stood on a battlefield he did not recognise — a plain stretching to horizons he could not find, under a sky with too many colours. Armies moved below in formations he had no names for. At the centre, a single warrior held a blazing weapon that he knew, with the specific certainty of things that bypass reason entirely, was the same sword now in his hand. The vision did not use words. It used the grammar of absolute knowledge: this weapon was made to end a specific war. The war was not over. It had merely been paused for a few thousand years, and it was running out of patience.

He came back to himself kneeling on the chamber floor. The sword was in his hand. The hum had stopped. Everything was very quiet. A disgraced soldier with a broken grandfather's sword and no future had walked in here. He sat with that for a moment. Then he said, to no one: "Alright." He stood up, and walked back toward the light.