The Hammer Unfalls

4.56 En Guard

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The sword that father had just put in his hand wasn't anything special. Its knobby grip and utilitarian edge resembled every other short sword carried daily by the soldiers of Wohn-Grab. But it meant something to Glim.

Father thinks I am ready.

“I’d already planned to do this, but your recent experience proves it even further. Welcome to the guard.” His father smiled, though his eyes seemed sad. “I wish it were under different circumstances. Let's try it out.”

Glim followed him to a nearby circle of flagstones where they squared off. Glim noted the height difference between them; nearly a head. He didn't compare himself to his tall father out of vanity or fear, but to gauge the angles of attack–and more importantly, defense.

The two crossed blades and began to fight. Not a real fight, of course; father always pulled his blows to ensure his sword never touched his son. Glim tried to do the same, but also wanted to land a blow. Indecision caused his blade to waver, and he nicked his father above the wrist.

“I'm sorry!” Glim said, dropping his sword at the sight of the blood.

“They are blades, son. That's what happens.” He picked up the fallen short sword and handed it back to Glim, then sat on a battlement to see to the cut.

While his father pressed a scrap of cloth against his wrist, Glim raised his palm and let shavings of snowy ice fall to mound over the wound.

Father nodded thanks. “I don't mind the scrape. It is worth it if it helps you remember one thing. If your blade gets nicked, you can repair it. It might take days of grinding the edge back into shape, but you can bring it back.”

“That's what you want me to remember?”

“No. Remember that once you've cut something, you can never uncut it. Never draw your blade unless you mean it.”

His father looked at him and Glim nodded, even though the words hadn't fully sunk in.

“You handled your sword well. Parried with the flat. Reduced my angle of approach. You've been listening after all.”

“I like your lessons much better than Master Willow's. You and I try not to hurt each other. He has to try not to hurt others.”

Getting sliced open by a sword hadn't irked his father at all, but he bristled at this. The ever-present resentment of Glim’s resentment. The moment grew awkward so Glim asked about the guard, and what he’d actually be doing now that he’d joined it.

His now-captain looked around to make sure no one would overhear.

“This fortress has stood for over three thousand years. Something is out there. Something that, if our mandate is true”–here he paused to touch the side of his nose, winking at Glim–“can destroy us all. If it ever comes we have to send riders south to Summerling Ridge. Warn Hammerfall. Get word to the rest of Phyria. We'd also send riders to Port Cantle, so ships could get word to Æolicia and Algidonia.”

Glim shook his head. The captain sighed and sketched a map into the snow with the sheath of his sword. Four continents, roughly in the shape of a U. Glim’s father jabbed a fingertip into the most remote corner of the tiniest continent.

“This is us. Alone in the frigid northlands. But it's not a bad life, eh? Living in peace among these beautiful mountains? We keep watch and warn the rest of Phyria if something comes. On paper, that's why we send riders to Port Cantle and down Summerling Ridge every spring. To keep the routes fresh in our minds.”

Her father chuckled at some private joke.

“Of course our actual job is to entertain trinket seekers from the mainlands. And the yearly route runs have become a race among the guard. I'll have you know, my Port Cantle time is the best in decades. Just over five days there and back. I don't recommend it. Boring tundra from horizon to horizon. ”

He drew lines downward and sideways through the snow. By the time he'd finished, it looked like a drawing of a potato with wildly sprouted tendrils.

Glim knew the trinket seekers, of course. They came by ships, then rode horses or sleds up the one well-worn path to Wohn Grab. Glim had met plenty of them. Most of them seemed perfectly happy to travel a week in either direction just to drink for a few days in the town hotel and shout stories to each other as loudly as possible.

“Why is this called Phyria, anyway? It’s the coldest place in the world.”

“Irony I guess.”

“What's out there?”

“No idea, my boy. There's no written record. Not for the last two thousand years, at least.”

The idea revolted Glim. How many generations had been squandered here, protecting an empty jumble of crags in the sky?

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That night Glim returned to the abandoned tower well they called home. As he walked he looked into the sky at the twinkling stars and felt insignificant. None of it meant anything. Wohn-Grab, their watch, their very presence here, were founded on nothing more than… continuity.

Patrol the wall. Why? Because your father did, and his great grandfather did. Glim pictured two mirrors where his infinite clones faded into the distance. In his mind he tossed a rock and shattered the hall of mirrors. The imaginary act of defiance gave him no more satisfaction than the reality of patrolling a fortress rampart for no reason.

The glow of coals bathed the walls with dim light when he opened the door. Glim leaned over them for warmth. The air he stirred caused the fire to flare up. In the burst of light he saw long black hair strewn across a bedroll. His new captain’s ponytail had come undone.

Glim tucked blankets around the sleeping man, which caused the scent of alcohol to fill his nose.

Not this again. Glim cursed himself for bringing up Master Willow earlier. In his father's mind, the lessons and Glim's mother were inexorably linked.

The snoring man shifted and opened his eyes.

“Don't look at me like that. I know she left us!” He sat up and rubbed his face. “Your mother was with me less than a year, but all these years gone and I cannot get her out of my mind. She must have missed Aeolicia.”

He trailed off and looked into the fire.

Glim could not follow where that gaze led. He'd never met Allora.

“No flaw at all, except a mole near her eye. And those eyes! I have never seen the like. They nearly shone out of her face. Such depth! Like crystal.”

His father shook himself out of the remembrance and looked at Glim blearily.

“That is where you get your silver eye, I wager.”

Glim swallowed. “I'll try harder in my lessons with Master Willow.”

Those words assuaged his father's agitation and he slumped back into his bedroll. In moments, snores filled the tower chamber.

As he stoked the fire, Glim fought against his own agitation. He rarely considered his mother. Sometimes he longed for the happiness other children seemed to have with theirs, but such pangs fled quickly. Should a lake miss the rain that fell from the sky to form it? Should a statue long to be a block of marble instead?

As far as Glim was concerned, his mother simply... wasn't. A faceless woman who wandered into the north looking for Elderkin trinkets, had some fun with his father, bore Glim, and left. Facts, neither good nor inherently bad.

But she bequeathed Glim one white eye which dismayed people, and a father who didn't understand the ice that ran in his own veins. Sneezing snowflakes. That's what essentiæ meant to him. And that is why Glim would overcome the legacy his mother had left him: Master Willow's tutelage. Maybe then his father wouldn't waste his life pining away in the dark for a woman long gone. He might start living again.