Zabinayah of One-Thousand Rapiers - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

I didn't manage to make a Weaponsmith today. Apologies. Instead, you can have this first chapter of a super edgy story that I honestly have no explanation for.  It was supposed to be a short story with 10 chapters, but I only ever made 1 and a half.

Weaponsmith will come tomorrow, together with tomorrow's chapter of Final Core or Sunflower =)

Tags: I don't know. Edgy ghost fantasy. Short-story and uh, hmm... *shrugs*

Enjoy!

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ACT I

Around and around spin the stars of the gloomy sky, blue dots swirling through the air, as if the heavens themselves had turned into a swarm of maddened, azure fireflies.

Laughter fills the cool night, the laughter of a woman, who holds her arms outstretched, spinning around and around and around, her tattered, blood-soaked robe twirling because of the breeze and the momentum of her movements.

She laughs and spins and dances across the field. The stars, all the while, continue to shine, glowing alight, as if they were the thousand eyes of many bewildered guests in a grand ballroom, all watching the strange sight of the creature, swaying by herself across the red meadow, her feet stepping over the swords, bloodied, over the bodies, maimed, and over the bones, cut, broken and pierced.

A sharp whistling cuts through the air as the crude, rusty rapier in her hand slices through the emptiness. Broken engines of siege and machinations of war lay strewn all around the battlefield, on which only one single person continues to move.

Thin blades lay everywhere, strewn across the landscape, plunged into the hearts and shoulders and breasts of every creature here, both human and inhuman. Metal covers the grasses, glinting with red, glinting with the light of the full moon, which hangs so heavily above her head.

Of ten-thousand and then some combatants, only one remains.

The stars continue to spin for a time, as does she.

— It’s so wonderful.

After all of these years of prayer and hoping and crying and begging and waiting and pleading for life to come to her and to bring her some great gift of adventure, of purpose, of calling, after years of waiting to die once those wishes went unfulfilled for a time longer than she can remember… She’s finally found it.

Purpose. No… a goal. Intent. A reason.

All of this time that she had wasted waiting, she really only had to go and get it herself.

The spinning stops as something grabs her leg.

The stars cease to move.

The woman lowers her gaze, staring at the other survivor of the battle, at the person who had interrupted her moment of celebration. The moment that she had waited years and years to finally have.

Zabiniyah lowers herself down, grabbing the hand of the man, which is clutching her ankle, the hand of the man who is asking for help, for mercy in words that catch and get stuck in the blood inside of his throat.

“Ah…” she smiles, looking at him. He is punctured in many places. Blood leaks from his body. Marrow leaks from his bones. Swords stick into his legs, piercing through his knees from behind, pinning him to the ground. Swords stick through his chest, angled from the side. “You’re so lucky,” says the woman, holding his hand against her cheek to feel the warmth of it, as she watches him fade away. “You know?”

“H- help…”

“Shh~” Zabiniyah lifts a finger to his trembling lips. “You should be happy,” she notes and lifts up the torn fabric of her dress. The man recoils, spluttering in horror as he looks at the half of her torso that remains beneath it. Only loose strings of sinew bind the area between her lowest ribs on the left side and the bones of her pelvis together.

The man chokes and splutters, his body shaking and then, a moment later, his head falls slack, striking against the ground.

The woman sighs a, mostly content, sigh. It still carries a hint of longing with it.

— The ability to die.

She gets up, looking around the battlefield at the blessed, at the ten-thousand bodies of the most virtuous, holiest vessels of souls on this world and then, falls to her knees in prayer.

Maybe this time?

Maybe now that she has proven her intent to whatever entity has bestowed upon her this burden of immortality.

Zabiniyah doesn’t know why it is that she can’t die. It had simply become apparent one day through happenstance and then it all sort of escalated from there. That was years ago. Far more years than she can even count, let alone remember.

Her fingers clench together, blood squishing out from between them. her forehead touches her grasped palms, covered in the ruby wet of a hundred and then some people, covered in the red of herself.

Her lips move, repeating a silent prayer that is not meant for the ears of the many corpses that lay strewn around her. The wind carries the stench of death across the battlefield, it carries the stench of her own entrails and bowls through the air, bathing her in an indescribable smell that must befoul and stain her pious words of pleading and request, because from the heavens, no answer arrives for the ghostly woman.

— Not now, just as in all of the years before.

Her long hair, torn and broken and frayed, moves as the cold gale carries it. Her ruined and tattered robe billows, as the wind blows towards the south, towards the heart of the world, towards where she must then go next.

Saddened at her lack of an answer from the powers that be, the ghostly woman rises to her feet, grabbing a rusty sword from the ground to look at it. It is one of a thousand.

The gods have not answered her prayers this time. The gods do not see it fit to let her die once again and so, Zabiniyah has no choice but to continue her journey.

She turns towards the south, having little to say that her solemn expression of disappointment does not already convey.

She drops the rapier, letting it rattle and fall amongst the corpses at her feet, letting it fall to the collection of rapiers that cover the battlefield, all of the same mark and build and brand.

If killing this army has done nothing to provoke the gods to end her life, then she will just have to go to the next city, to the village, to the next army, to the next regiment over and over and over until nothing is left.

Then, perhaps, the gods will have no choice but to acknowledge her. When there is not one single person left to look at on this entire world except for herself, they will have to look at her, to listen to her.

Should anyone be left alive on that battlefield that night, they might perhaps whisper of the ghost-like entity that had simply wandered off after the carnage came to an end, strolling through the carcasses and the gore as would an indifferent specter, having grown bored of its haunt.

They might whisper of the thing that has come to kill scores of men and women and children in a mindless, desperate hunt of a tired, ragged, gnawed entity that seeks death; of Zabaniyah of a thousand rapiers.

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ACT II

Alight shine the stars of a new night and Zabaniyah walks, wandering beneath the god-painted canvas, striding towards a destination, to her, still unknown.

The specter, the entity, glides and carries with herself the happy light of her celebration from the night before, from that battlefield.

For how many nights has she been doing this?

She doesn’t know.

For how many nights has she been wandering, in search of a place that will put her to rest? In search of a challenge that will destroy her for good? In search of the action that will finally provoke the intangible gods to take offense to her life?

She doesn’t know.

Zabiniyah doesn’t hate it here. She doesn’t hate life. She’s just had enough, is all.

It’s like being exhausted after a long day of fighting off sleep at work, at school, only to come home and then to lay one’s head down in bed at night and then to find insomnia as a companion.

It’s just… disappointing.

She’d like to sleep.

But instead, she returns every night, like the night before, destined to wander.

This is the fate of Zabaniyah, though she does not know why. However, after countless years of this, in order to put an end to it, she has decided to provoke the world, the gods, so that someone might notice that she is a thing that needs to be stopped.

— A thing that needs to be killed.

The moon is waning, the full moon of the night before beginning to lose its strength. But the phase of the moon doesn’t matter much to her. Whether it is full or crescent, waxing or waning, she returns nonetheless, as soon as the sun sets beyond the distant horizon.

After all, at night, that is when the dark things come to the world.

The woman in white crests a hill, following the small, forest path that a regiment had marched through not long ago. The dirt is still trodden and trampled, the sides of the road are covered in broken branches, twigs, leaves and signs of animals and mounts.

Upon that hill she stands, staring out towards the distance.

At night, that is when the villages glow the brightest.

Their orange, heartwarm lanterns shine in the sea of lightnesses and they, the lanterns, while fully intended to allow sight and security for their keepers, also act as a beacon for monsters, for bandits and for all the terrible things that creep and crawl on the outskirts of the long-cast shadows.

Awash in starlight, Zabiniyah stares towards the sky as she wanders towards the village.

The stars are very bright tonight.

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ACT III

Zabiniyah sits in prayer, her head held down, her hands clenched together by her face, as she whispers words to any who might listen, to any who might be willing to hear her pleas.

Bodies litter the streets of the village. Fires burn over roof-tops, spreading from fallen lanterns, disturbed hearths and unattended ovens. Carts, stalls, people all lay broken.

There seems to have been a festival here tonight. Though, for what purpose it was, she can’t really say.

A howl cuts through the air. It is wretched and anguished.

Hearing the most unusual sound, the specter slowly rises to her feet and spins, finding joy in the fruits of her hard work, despite her pleas having once again gone unanswered. 

Her feet tenderly step over the carcass of a mother, nesting her child against her bosom, both pierced by the same two thin blades, having fallen from the sky. Firelight trickles down to encapsulate her form, as she floats around the now empty village, like a whisper that is trapped beneath the growing cloud of smoke, which obscures the first glow of the sun - soon to rise.

The source of the howl sits before her, hunched over the bodies of a dozen and then some others; a boy. He’s not yet reached manhood and his hair is straight and shortly trimmed, dangling past his face. His hands are covered in blood and rapiers lay strewn all around, torn free from the hearts, which they had pierced.

His face buried in the red chest of a woman’s body, he stays there.

How unusual. It’s rare that anyone survives her spell.

Whatever unknown cosmic entity it was that had bestowed Zabaniyah with her magic, it had been overly generous with its effectiveness. A single rapier and then some for every gestalt within her presence, man, beast, fowl, elf, it doesn’t matter - rapiers find their way to this world from some other plane and strike, homing in towards their targets like a bird, returning to its true home.

— And yet, here is a boy who has not been pierced.

He howls, his voice muffling in the damp fabric of her robe, in the clamped space between his arms.

Oh well.

Zabaniyah bends down to pick up a rapier at her feet. Just an oddity of life, she supposes.

“What are you…?” hisses a muffled voice and Zabiniyah lifts the rapier into the air, looking at its blade, crusted with blood.

This isn’t his rapier. This one has been pulled free from the body of another. How odd. She looks around, trying to find the missing blade. One that must be clean and free of blood.

— It wouldn’t be right to kill him with the sword of another.

“WHAT ARE YOU?!” screams the boy and she looks down his way, seeing that he has freed himself from his self-imposed bind.

Zabiniyah tilts her head and then drops the wrong sword, grabbing the sides of her dress to curtsy.

It’s rare that she gets to talk to anybody.

…Has she ever talked to anybody at all?

Honestly, she doesn’t really remember at this point. There was the man, from the battlefield. But that wasn’t really a conversation.

“Zabiniyah, of One-Thousand Rapiers,” replies the ghostly creature, feeling the glow of the sun starting to break over the horizon. Her time is coming to an end, together with the night. “What is your name?” she asks to be polite.

“- I’m going to kill you,” replies the boy, before she can finish and she sees in his eyes that he fully means it. But she also knows that he knows that he’s biting off more than he can chew. A fighting spirit. What a beautiful trait to have.

The blade of the rapier presses through her chest, as the boy, having hidden the sword meant for him beneath his own mother’s corpse, strikes. The fabric of Zabiniyah’s dress cuts loose, revealing her missing insides, revealing the strands of meat and sinew that hold her whole.

The sun crests over the horizon and she begins to fade away, vanishing into nothingness for another day.

“I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!” he screams at her. “MY NAME IS AZRAEL!” he shouts, spit flying from his mouth. “- I’LL KILL YOU!” screams the boy, pressing the blade further through her, despite it striking nothing, as he rises to his feet, as he lunges towards the specter.

“I’ll look forward to it,” replies Zabiniyah, smiling and then, as the sun rises over the horizon, washing the village in the resplendent light of a new day, the ghost that she is fades away, leaving only one survivor of the carnage of that night. “— Azrael.”

She disappears.

The boy clenches his teeth, froth dripping through his pursed lips as the tears that he had been unsuccessfully fighting, now flow freely towards the ground as he falls towards it, his hands empty and senseless, save for the kiss of the cold metal touching his fingertips.

The sun rises and brings with itself a brand new day.