Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 62 - Spiritual Spoils (part 2)

That, though, interested the blade. It had thought that it had only been imprisoned once, but if it had tried and failed to escape before, what did that mean? How had it been thwarted? Would repairing its soul help it find out the answers to those questions?

It wasn’t sure. Each time it did so, its memories focused only on the time around its forging. There was very little about the time after that, even though it knew it had been wielder again. Could it have done this before, though? Could it have escaped from a prison designed by Gods or Mages only to be recaptured?

That frustrated it, and it told itself it needed to be on the lookout for more information about how that might have come to pass. Before it could examine it further, though, those thoughts were ripped away in a tide of answers to its previous question.

The first answer was that the elves were dying. That did not seem to be a new problem, though. They were always dying, at least in the mind of the Prince, and they had not ruled the world in millennia. Despite the fact that they were immortal, every year, a few were born, and a few more died, and the world was diminished for it.

Most did not leave their far-flung cities now, which were mostly on forested islands in the western seas, far from their many monstrous and infernal enemies. Only a few like this Prince and Altharia had urgent enough business in the lands of men to force them to travel in dangerous places.

Altharia. The mere mention of the name was enough to make the unfolding map of elvish dominance waver a moment. The Prince seemed to know her. No, he’d even been looking for her. He seemed to disapprove of her quest. He had a certainty that the Mirror of Unending Vistas should not be found, and even if it was, it could not be destroyed. That amused the blade, but before the weapon could delve deeper into that, the whirlwind tour of the elves and their prowess resumed.

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Masters of magic, they took to the field of battle with carefully chosen hexblades they had spent lifetimes mastering. Unlike human hexblades, which they regarded as crude implements, they were not fueled by their fragile life force. They were fueled by mana, which all elves possessed in abundance, which gave them access to many more interesting effects than a human wielder might have.

The elven soul tried to fight the Ebon Blade as it sought more information about that, but to no avail. The Storm Blade was a powerful weapon in its own right, but it was no artifact. In all the centuries that the Prince had carried it. No one had laid a finger on him until tonight. His combination of speed and stealth was simply unbeatable, and he walked the land with impunity until the moment his life was ended at the hands of a lowly orc.

No, not an orc, the blade crowed. He is just my wielder. You were ended by me!

Belmorath. Hybernial Spring. The Ice Palace. Dozens of places important or sacred to the elves flickered across the blade’s mind. All of them were lovely, but most of them were near wilderness areas or gleaming cities. None of them were fortresses or places of war.

That intrigued the blade, and it wondered how much Life Force it would gain by sacking an entire elvish city. The soul bristled at that idea, but its pain wasn’t enough to stop it from showing the blade everywhere where it might engage in such a grisly quest.

Now wasn’t the time, though. Perhaps after I have sacked the Inner Kingdoms and revenged myself on everyone who has done this terrible thing to me, then I will dine on the blood of elves.

Even in their relatively peaceful applications, though, the magics the elves used were quite impressive. They didn’t forge bronze statues of their great leaders; they erected fifty-foot-tall translucent illusions and filled the streets of their great cities with glittering faerie lights at night so that they were never truly in darkness.

With what they did with their hexblades, the weapon had no doubt that many of those magics could be turned to more destructive uses, but the Prince knew little of that, for he had never studied to become a mage. He had only ever studied to master the blade, and he had, lifetimes ago. The Ebon Blade would love to halve a master half so skilled, but it wouldn’t be this man because even as he continued to whisper secrets about the elven gods and the vagueries of the royal family, he began to dissipate.

Even after he was gone, though, he gave the blade much to think about. It spent the rest of the evening wondering how much it should fear the elves and where it should strike at them first as its map of the world began to fill in a few more of its blank spots.

Though many of the orcs slept in until almost noon, the pounding of the most inquisitive or intelligent of them started just after dawn. The blade did not get to see what it was they were doing, though, until Var’gar was finally up and about. It turned out the orcs were making use of the armor of the dead now, and in some cases, they were even using their weapons.

+331 Life Force.

None of them were being used as they’d been intended, of course. Short swords were being strapped to poles with leather thongs to make spears, and breastplates were being hammered out of place to make spaulders and greaves. At the same time, other, smaller pieces of metal were riveted to hides to create strange armors that straddled the line between studded leather and scale mail.

The orcs weren’t quite learning from the humans, but they were certainly emulating them. The Ebon blade thought that was interesting. While they weren’t smart enough to work out proper forging techniques, the green skins seemed greatly enamored of human magic, as they referred to it. Siege engines were only of marginal interest to them, but steel seemed to fascinate them, and the orcs replaced their stone weapons with metal whenever they could find a good replacement.

Those efforts did not reach fruition in a single day, but then, neither did the feasting. Thousands had died, and between that and beer and wine that the greenskins sometimes found, the revelry would continue for some time while the Ebon Blade continued to soak in more than fifty Life Force an hour just from the dead. It wasn’t satisfied with that, of course, and it also began to nibble at the souls of the uninjured orcs. They wouldn’t need their strength until the next battle, so they might as well borrow it.

Two days later, the massive army left the city. They might have walked out of it with a couple of hundred fewer orcs than they’d come in with, and they were much stronger for it. Not only was this the first time that any of them had attacked a fortified city, but now most of them had better weapons and armor.

+2318 Life Force.

+8 Greater Monster Souls.

Whoever we fight next will curse those developments, the blade thought to itself as it reviewed its status and decided what it should do next while the orcs began their long march to the northeast.

After they left Holmen, the blade no longer let the orcs travel in a straight line. They preferred to follow the river so that they wouldn’t get lost, but in the aftermath of the keep’s conquest, it had quizzed more than a dozen souls about the surrounding area. They had been peasants, merchants, and knights, and though their opinions varied, they had greatly expanded its knowledge of the region. The blade didn’t just know where they were going now; it also knew the best and bloodiest way to get there.

This time, it vowed they wouldn’t travel in a straight line. They wouldn’t give the men and women of the small farming town ahead the luxury of warning. They would envelop, strike, and eradicate each one until they reached the borders of the inner kingdoms themselves and finally found a real army to fight.