You are the very soul of lightning. You melt sand into glass and you thirst.
Where did you begin, sky or desert? You’re not sure. Like anything, memories pick up in the middle: a hilt in a palm, an oasis in the wasteland, disbelieving laughter, horror, foes crumbling into dust. How many hands have held you? You no longer remember. Once, you counted.
Once, you were as awed as your wielders when you drank blood, sweat, sweet water, wine, and that rare nectar—tears—ever eager and ever wanting. No longer. Now, without a master, you sleep and you wait for the next. For there will always be a next one, just as there will always be someone desperate enough to bear your thirst.
You are a very old and very clever knife.
You had many names once.
The magician finds you stabbed into an ancient library’s bookshelf with the varnish sucked out of it. It is not your most glamourous showing, you who have adorned the hips of heroes and villains this age has gilded in its epics, you who have malingered in treasure troves of monsters and monarchs. But it is a beginning, and you always like beginnings.
The magician struggles to wrench you free. She’s not strong, but she’s dedicated. Perhaps she can sense that you are more than a dagger inexplicably jammed into a kindling-dry bookcase. Perhaps she senses that this bookcase used to be alive, used to eat people like her, and now is only parched cedar thanks in no small part to you. Perhaps she merely senses you, the hum of centuries and sand and storms tempered into a single discreet blade.
When she finally pulls you free, you leech the moisture from her soft scholar’s skin. You don’t take a lot—you thirst (desperately) but you’re not stupid, and you’d rather not spend another two hundred years waiting because of your own impatience.
But you take enough to let her know you bear a cost and that this is it.
Voices of her six companions echo up a nearby section of the decrepit library, and she hides you inside her cloak. Later that night, alone, when she casts a spell to more precisely divine your nature, she will learn exactly what you are.
Endless Thirst, Undying Desert. The Unslaked. That-Which-Drinks-and-Drinks, Unforgiving Tithe of the Sand.
She doesn’t use you often, which is wise as her thin arms can barely support her books, let alone muster the full thrust you require to pierce something so private as a heart. Academically, the two of you are mismatched. But that doesn’t stop her from taking you across continents as she and her friends settle disputes, avert wars, and plunder forgotten archives and sanctuaries.
For a time, you journey as a watcher. It’s uncommon to be unused, but it’s not so bad a fate.
Then things turn.
Briefly, it’s a dragon, a bad one, in a snowstorm. Less briefly, it’s a new ally who proves to be an old foe, the aforementioned dragon in disguise. Then it’s a battle, she and her friends versus the traitor as he sheds his human skin and takes to the sky in a hail of frost. The magician evokes the most powerful spells she’s studied and yet it is not enough. Her friends have all fallen, the front line is gone, and she has no time to spirit herself and their dying bodies away.
The dragon is confident. You can’t say why you hate this, but you do. You have many opinions on how dragons should conduct themselves and this specimen is awful. He’s young and condescending, and when he takes his human form again to mock the magician in her own language, it makes you quiver with indignity. You don’t love any of your wielders—you are a knife and such emotion is obviously foreign—but a dragon should behave better than that. There are, after all, certain standards.
Ice rimes the traitor’s eyelashes and coats his fingertips as his boots crunch up through the snow. The magician unsheathes you. As much as you had thirsted for combat over the years, for something to call for your entrée into the field, you hadn’t wanted this. Not the volatile way she holds your grip, her other palm on the pommel like you too are a spell she is casting. You expect her to defend herself, though you are not quite surprised when she doesn’t.
She speaks in a strange tongue, foreign even to you, you sharp student of languages and eras, then flips you around and slices deep into her arm, enough to drench you in blood, though not enough to inhabit her casting. It’s a calculated risk, but she knows what you are as well as you do.
You drink, and she speaks a curse into being. The traitor is spellbound, that dragon-human face gone slack, his own blood, spit, and sweat pulled inexorably toward you even as the magician’s cheeks thin, her lips crack, and her eyes sting as you relentlessly take everything she has. So too with him, though he fights you more.
To his credit, he is energetic and mad. You, though, have played this game and won it for longer than he has existed. You are an object caught between two powerful magical furnaces, you, an endless sink, a limitless receptacle for power. He fights you first with frost, then ice, and then the freezing sleet of his soul itself.
It does not matter. You drink it all.
You exult when you win, when his body changes back into a massive snow dragon, limp and truly cold, but it’s a victory dearly bought. The magician’s breath stops melting the frigid air to mist, and you feel the heat seep away from her. It is a great pity.
You settle in to wait again, but something is wrong. Someone is still screaming, even though there’s no one left.
What have you done?
What has she?
The curse persists. So do you.
You are dug from a corpse in the snow. You are slipped from a hand in the market, from a body’s rib cage, from a bedside table. Always a series of violent ends. It’s not unlike before, the struggle and the grief, but now when your wielders die they don’t leave. They’re all here, with you, shrieking into the constant afterlife of whatever liminal space where you exist, where you have existed alone and quite frankly content in that solitude for millennia. No more. You can’t sleep. Each second is an eternity, waiting for the next unfortunate to stumble into your fatal orbit, and each soul only adds to the chorus inside you.
This is how you enter the merchant’s shop, wrung out with exhaustion. He won’t even touch you. He says he knows better, says he’s seen worse than you, but you doubt it. None of the other weapons here come close. There’s a sword in the back room that perked up when the merchant unsheathed you, perhaps scenting a worthy opponent.
You do not acknowledge it. You are above such things. That sword’s been out of battle so long it’ll jump at any chance for action. You, however, crave quiet.
The merchant examines you, and though he casts no spells (you doubt he has the capacity; he lacks the finesse) he knows enough of the strangeness on you not to touch you barehanded. Even then, the fabric on the gloves’ fingerpads is brittle when he releases you, fraying down to desiccated fiber.
He says something in a language you don’t know but can guess at: not very nice.
You suppose you aren’t.
And you shouldn’t even miss him when you’re stabbed through his heart later that week by a jealous client and his soul joins the litany, but you still do.
Then it’s back to flashes. Thieves, an auctioneer, then a rich baroness who buys you for her oddities collection. You think that maybe you’ll just be miserable and sleepless here for a few decades, that useless pocket change of eternity, but then you meet the dancer.
The dancer is not a performer and yet they are. They dance over the glass ceilings, down the walls, light steps to music only they can hear. They are an adolescent so intent on being taken seriously that they have shaped themselves into a consummate professional.
They are also a bit grubby, in that embarrassing rail-thin urchin way, but when they pick the lock holding you in your display case and take you up bare-handed, their hollow face morphs into an understanding you have craved.
Oh, they say in words you will later learn to decipher. You’re not just a knife.
You’re not sure what they see, but knowing they see it is an indescribable relief.
The dancer teaches you their language. Is it that bizarre, a lonely teen talking to a weapon, explaining nouveau grammars and intricate slangs, telling you stories? Maybe. You are a knife with a hundred ghosts. What’s normal? Certainly not you, and certainly not the dancer.
They are a shapeshifter, morphing their body from young to old, male to female and the wide space between with paint, disguises, and their own cunning. They tell you how they once followed an old woman for a day to learn her particular out-country dialect, how they loitered by the docks for weeks in study before matching the gait and gravelly voice of a midshipman. They natter on and on about the best way to stuff tunics, blouses, pants, or dresses to give a Certain Impression to the discerning viewer.
They sleep on rooftops, different ones from time to time, with costumes stashed in attic hiding spots across the wide city. One night between chimneys, in the guise of a wealthy young man, they break into tears.
What’s my real voice? I can’t even do it anymore. I forgot what I sound like when I’m not pretending to be someone else. I don’t even know who I am.
Sometimes an angry ghost will adjust your hilt in battle, angling the blade closer to the dancer’s throat. You wrest control back. Because what are you? Do you even know? Those souls weren’t angry before they found their deaths in you.
The dancer drinks some water. That’s the other thing. Since finding you, they are in constant need of refreshment. It is nothing strange to you; your wielders, like most living things, need water, need ale, need some moisture to keep from becoming sand. The dancer swallows and wipes their eyes.
“You know, maybe I’m all of it,” they say, slightly hoarse. “Everything always, everything at once. Maybe I’m just really weird.”
Somehow, on a fundamental level, you too understand being greater than the form that contains you. It is an understanding that feels even older than the ghosts.
You settle into the sheath at their side as they sleep under the triad of moons and ever-glimmering stars. The dancer’s breath evens out, though they keep you close as they sleep. They have drawn you quickly before, when an intruder stumbled onto their hiding place, and then watched their attacker melt into fine particles and dust.
“Wow,” the dancer had said, not in horror but wonder. “You’re really something.”
And that’s how it is beneath the canopy of stars on the roofs of the desert city: a companion asleep, comets overhead, a city clattering through the night just loud enough to drown out your ghosts, and finally a place as eternal as you.
It’s really something.
Or maybe it’s everything, always, everything at once.
Of course, nothing lasts forever.
Despite your cleverness, you always lie to yourself about endings. Foolish. Sentimental. You are a knife. The dancer is not. Surely you knew what was going to happen.
This is how it ends: you are in a fight. The dancer is disguised as a temple priestess today and someone thought they were an easy target. You delight in how wrong their attacker is about to be.
The dancer is one of those rare wielders who truly know how to use a knife. Not unlike the magician, though she wasn’t passionate about it. Very unlike the merchant, who you now know preferred the spear and who had long since given it up in favor of peace, much good though it did him. The dancer is grace made manifest. They dip and drive, parry and slice, and you are proud to be in the hands of someone who brings out all your best qualities. You are light enough to be fast and fast enough to be an ending.
All you need is an opportunity.
But you mess up. You’re so enraptured by the battle, this perfection of parry and riposte, that you don’t see the ghost reaching for the hilt at the same time the dancer’s foe summons friends from the alleyways. You and the ghost grapple for control, then you tilt, cut the dancer’s skin, and everything melts.
“Where am I?” the dancer asks. Their priestess tunic (actually stolen from an actual priestess) is torn in half, so they tie the top around their waist, chest bound, shoulders bare. “What is this place?”
“Oh, not another one,” says the merchant. “Are you wielding it? Because gods above and below, girl, boy, child, whatever—you are the problem.”
The dancer’s eyes track over the liminal space. There are columns, a plinth, and sand. To you, the sand is dimly familiar. A place once where lightning struck, perhaps.
“It is difficult,” says the magician from atop the plinth, voice gritty, “to enforce this little slice of reality on top of my protective field when you’re all spread so far apart.”
The merchant and the dancer sprint to her. Sweat drips down her brow, her hands tracing symbols to reinforce a warding array. Warding against what?
If they’re inside you, if this place is you, then—
A hand rakes across the wall of energy encapsuling the magician, the merchant, and the dancer. Someone, a bloodless husk of a someone, beats on it.
“Little problem, so you know,” continues the merchant in lightly accented dancer-language, “every person you’ve killed has ended up here.”
“I haven’t killed that many people.” The dancer crosses their goosefleshed arms. “I just stole the knife from a display case.”
“Such an indignity,” the magician says, fishing into a pouch of components to strengthen the spell, “having one’s flesh picked over by cutthroats. Understandably, all seven of us were frozen by the Depth of Winter, but—”
“That’s a legend,” the dancer gawks. “Like, the soulless snow dragon?”
The magician exhales. “While the Depth of Winter did betray and murder me and my friends, and while he holds the rare distinction of being both an arcane prodigy and insufferably nasal, I still wouldn’t go as far as to call him soulless. Grotesque, yes, of course.”
“But that’s the thing,” the dancer breaks in, “dude’s on autopilot. His body is all that’s left. He’s scary because he really doesn—”
“For the sake of all that is holy,” the merchant intercedes, sitting down and sharpening a piece of wood that has somehow materialized here, “spare us the legends, little problem. Time is running out and we need a plan.”
Frost crackles up over the hemisphere. Ice, after all, is just frozen moisture begging to be consumed.
“That soul had to go somewhere,” breathes the dancer.
“He has, admittedly, been a somewhat recent addition to our woes.” The magician flicks sweat away from her eyes, then frowns at the dancer. “I take responsibility for his provenance, but the original—and quite strict, I might add—wording of my spell stipulated that he would remain insensate. Asleep,” she adds, for the dancer’s benefit.
Did you wake him? No. Maybe. You weren’t taking as much from the dancer as you normally did. Food had been hard to come by and they had to be sharp for the inevitable fights. He was there, and cold. And you were so thirsty.
You’d never realized how much it occupied you not to drink. With hunger you could ignore the pangs, focus on something else and forget. But with thirst, there was no relief. Only that incessant begging of your throat for anything to stop it. You couldn’t sleep. You’d swallow and swallow, energy fled, hoping—
Hoping what? And when did you have a throat? What a foolish thought. You are a knife.
“How good are you with it?” the mage asks the dancer.
The dancer effortlessly spins the knife, a weird facsimile of you—can you see yourself in dreams? Is this one?—and catches it midair.
“The best,” they say. “I am the best this knife has ever seen.”
“May be enough. Cut the ties binding the ghosts here,” says the mage, passing her hand over you. “With that weapon, it should free them. My shield can’t protect you in close melee, though.”
The merchant raises his newly fashioned spear. “Then I will cover the little problem.”
“Got it. Then let’s go.” The dancer holds you up. A distant sun glints on your blade, and when they leave the magician’s sphere, you go somewhere else.
You always hate this. The size is wrong, there is so much missing from your back that it is best not to think about it, and you have an inadequate number of teeth. Attackers surround you and you growl, but all that comes out is a rumbling in the back of your throat. You growl again, mouth open in a hiss, urging forth—what? The word is prickling the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t remember.
Whatever you were expecting has clearly failed you, so you raise your claws. They are also embarrassing. You are so frustrated.
“Decided to fight back, little girl?”
Then you remember. You are being the dancer being a temple priestess while the dancer is being a knife. You look down. By your feet is a tooth or perhaps a talon. No. A knife. The knife. You must have dropped it when you were menacing your attackers. You pick it up. Its addition makes your claws look better, more whole.
“If you won’t give us that food without a fight, then fine. Get that freak.”
Enemies descend. An old game. You block and catch, sever and snap, and skin and bones collide and collapse. As quickly as they came, they retreat. You want to send them off with a pithy quip, but as you have momentarily forgotten how tongues work, the opportunity escapes you.
That is annoying but inconsequential. The dancer is unharmed. You are quite proud of that. A few minutes pass. You wish the dancer would stop being the knife soon because you have had enough and would like to switch back. You fidget. You have always envied the dancer their easy grace and wonder if you have perhaps inherited it. There is one trick in particular you like very much, where the dancer tosses you and you flip, over and over, until they catch you expertly on the grip.
It is inevitable: you toss the knife.
It flips, over and over, and when its blade catches the sun you realize the dancer’s still in there, severing the last of your ghosts. And you know in that moment that you can’t mess this up. You can’t drop it. You must not drop it. Your claw blunders toward the knife in artless panic and
blood
You are a knife, but you are also not a knife.
…ancient, older than any I’ve encountered. Name far different than other weapons, too particular—peculiar, notice how it loves etymology—doesn’t fit the schema, far more like what you’d call a—
A snowy form caught in stasis, the blistering heart of ice.
Lightning in the desert, sand struck to glass baubles, an eternal cauterizing thirst.
Part of you has always known.
—too dangerous—
—deserves a chance!
I can trap them both.
An exasperated protector: These things are bad business, little problem.
I fought off all those ghosts, let me save my friend.
That’s your friend?
Yeah. That teenage standoffishness. They protected me, fought off people who wanted to hurt me while I was here. They saved my life. That’s what friends do.
A pause. Six lifeless bodies in front of a dragon worth of silence.
That they do. Then a magician’s legerdemain grin, a trick within a trick within a trick. I’m listening.
I have a plan.
Souls release. A merchant waves over his shoulder and joins a passing caravan into stars and darkness. A master of magic performs one final showstopper of a spell and vanishes. A curse is broken. A baton is passed. And somewhere in a back alley of your heart, a thief waits as their cohorts finish the first part of the heist and get clear before flexing their wrists, then walking up and bumping into the very fabric of reality, apologizing, all while thoroughly picking its pocket.
At least, that’s what you think. It all happens so fast.
And you’re still patting yourself down, because you’re pretty sure something important is missing.
It takes you a long while to realize it’s your name.
The dancer takes you to a cold place you’ve been many years ago. It is a long journey but it is quiet, and you are so relieved that you spend most of the trek asleep. After all, the only things left in the knife are you and the dragon, and two is a nice, manageable number of souls.
The dancer is driven. They journey with that same fixedness of purpose with which they freed you from the baroness’ display case: their aspect of the professional dismantling a very specific problem. There is a dragon’s soul and then there is a dragon’s body. Arithmetic.
Deep in a cathedral of ice lies a gigantic corpse, rimed with frost. The dancer unsheathes you, takes a breath, and speaks the conclusion to the magician’s final spell. It is familiar, in the way all magic is familiar to you. This is a summoning. A name.
Endless Thirst, Undying Desert.
Then the dancer stabs you into the icy body and—
You rise. The wings are different, that’s the first thing. But the size is right. Your back is right. You have exactly the right number of teeth. Below you, the dancer gazes up in wonder, holding their dagger which is now coated in frost. It’s so cold it bites their skin and they have to wrap fabric around the grip, as another dragon wakes up in an unfamiliar place.
Your new wingtips scrape the edges of the cavern as you stretch to your full height and ice cascades in broken panes down your scales, the dancer below you laughing, saying that you’re both shapeshifters. But they must mean it in jest.
You are as you have always been: a very clever knife.
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Alex Yuschik is an assistant professor of mathematics in a snowy northern state. When not writing or teaching calculus, Alex enjoys video games, a wide variety of pigeons, and extravagantly crashing out over Japanese adverbs. You can find Alex’s other work in Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and GlitterShip, on Bluesky at @alexyuschik, or at alexyuschik.com. |