Not a Second More

The land had become so accustomed to the songs of war that the deafening waltz of screams became something of a lullaby to sleep-laden children. The screams tripped over the ever-widening cracks in the roads, lapping at walls and houses and trees, flooding in through chimneys and fissures and any windows dare left cracked. The distant hum and steady heartbeat of incomprehensible fires too powerful to quell vibrated through towns and lands not too far off, an unwavering and promised nightlight for children scared of what the darkness held.

The streets told the stories no one dared tell, though if you found yourself in a tavern late enough, you might have heard flighty whispers of their existence, echoes of battles and wavering courage, of cowardice, of loss. Forbidden stories enclosed behind locks, the keys destroyed by men who wished they could forget too, who wished they could lock up the memories of battles and wavering courage, of cowardice, of loss, and sink them to the bottom of the sea for no man to find.

No man dared look.

So many held no memory of a time before the wars. In fact, only the elderly (the old man the children knew to avoid for his rumored insanity, the woman on the edges of the forest who was really more of a spirit, the drunkard in the darkest corner of the tavern) had any memory of peace at all, and most had fallen into some convergence of dementia and paranoia.

They were easily brushed aside, their wisdom and ghost stories fading into the emptiness of air uninhabited.

But not I.

No, I remembered everything.

Life before the war.

A perceived peace.

Though I knew the truth forgotten long before the stories of war were locked away, before those who had once been youthful and smart were on the verge of old and crazy.

The truth no one knew but I.

To everyone, I was the villain. The devil in the darkness. The evil sorcerer of medieval fairytales.

And maybe it was true.

But even a sorcerer grows weary. For every second of a century, I had waged my war, plotted my revenge, fought my battles. A hundred years of the grating cacophony of wins and losses. And ever so slowly, like the blood dripping out of a shallow cut, each one began to mean less.

I never knew how easily one could forget what they were fighting for until it happened to me.

I knew there wasn’t much longer. For almost as long as I had been fighting, songs of a prophecy foretold had formed a silver thread, woven by skillful hands into the ballads of war, a hope that rode up higher where the tips of flames and arrows could never reach.

A Chosen One.

You’ve seen how the story goes. A prophecy. A Chosen One. A battle. A victory. You may surmise these as nothing more than tales in children’s books, but you’ll often find that even the most unbelievable of tales have some semblance of truth, some sliver of reality pieced into the cracks.

For where else would these tales have originated?

A hundred years, the prophet had whispered, her words etched in stone. A hundred years of war and the Chosen One would rise.

“One born in flames,

A child of the fire,

A hero to the land,

When the time seems most dire.

A hundred years,

Not a second more.

A hundred years,

And the end of a war.”

I wasn’t surprised when the silhouette of a man in the shape of a boy crested the hill on which I resided, the golden sword in his hands encasing a thousand stars in its hilt. A century, it had been. And I was thankful.

It would all be over soon.

It would have been easy to smite him where he stood, the quivering of his shoulders and the quickening metronome of his heartbeat loud enough for the moon up above to hear. But even in his weakness, his gaze was determined, his warm eyes set, a confidence only promises of a prophecy could effectuate.

There was no need for monologues or declarations of power, both of us knew the prophecy, both of us knew how this would end. It was foolish to believe otherwise, to trust a flicker of hope over the words of a prophet.

And I was tired.

I was ready for it to end.

My gaze met his as he raised his sword, the stars forged in fire coruscating under the eternal light of the moon, his feet spread as he shifted under its weight. He inhaled, the warm night air rustling through his hair.

“You know what the prophecy says,” he said, the words softer than I would have expected from someone so powerful, though, looking at him as he stepped into the canopy of moonlight, he was younger than I had previously thought. Naive.

Tired.

“I do,” I responded, forcing my words into something resembling a snarl, though I knew it was unconvincing. “It’s been a hundred years. This ends here.”

He shifted forward, pushing the sword towards the space I resided, his brows creasing as he looked at me.

“I have a proposition.”

Oh, this was unexpected.

“I’m not here to bargain. You’re foolish to think a mighty sorcerer would ever hasten to listen to the words of a boy.”

“No, just listen to me!”

The words were frantic for someone promised victory. I hesitated.

“Please...”

He paused, closing his eyes in a distraught attempt to realign himself, all his weaknesses exposed.

“I don’t want to be the Chosen One anymore.”

The stars cackled at my surprise, their flickering laughter gracing the ebony night.

“I’m tired of being the Chosen One. So I want to make a deal.” He reached into the satchel bumping against his hip, pushing up the flap to reveal the rainbow light glimmering off the contents inside. “In here is $20,000 worth of jewels. I know it’s a small amount compared to what you’ve acquired over a century, but it’s all I have. So here’s my proposition. You pretend to kill me, you get the jewels, and I go on my merry way to live alone in the woods. I’ll never bother you again, and you can do what you please. I won’t stand in your way.”

I narrowed my eyes, flicking them back and forth between the satchel and his face. It wasn’t plausible. It was a trap.

But even if it was, it didn’t matter. It was going to end.

“Are you really that much of a coward, to leave your people in the hands of a villain to do with what he will? To leave them defenseless and vulnerable?”

The tip of the sword sunk into the soft ground as the boy leaned onto the hilt, scratching the back of his neck with a nervous hand. “I’m not as naive as I once was. They really aren’t the good guys, at least, not anymore. I wanted to help, to believe I was doing good, but after taking the last coin from a widow with six starving children, or being ordered to kill a bed-ridden man who wrote something the king didn’t like, or burning entire villages to make things seem worse than they were to keep the people in fear, I wasn’t so sure anymore.”

He lowered himself to the ground, falling with a plop onto the grass. He patted the earth in front of him, indicating for me to join him.

I acquiesced.

“They’ve used me,” he continued. “They saw someone untouchable and they used me for their own selfish gain. Maybe they pretended to be good, on the surface, but it’s a facade to cover their corruption and greed. I hurt more people than I can imagine. Because it benefited them.”

His eyes flickered, the moonlight wavering as he blinked away tears. “It was a siren’s song, nothing more. Darkness disguised as light. They promised it was all for the end, that there was a good and just reason for everything they had me do. And I fell for it.”

Oh, how tired I was.

“I never should’ve believed them. But I did. And I want out. I’m done playing their puppet. If I kill you, I’ll never escape.”

It was most definitely a trap. A snare hidden in the open most part of the forest, obvious in an attempt to be unnoticed. But it had been a century, a hundred long years of reign, of power, of battle, and whether I wanted it to or not, it would all come to an end.

And oh, how I wished for it to end.

But maybe death wasn’t the only option.

“How can I trust you’ll hold up your end of the deal?”

He wrinkled his nose at the question, the faint freckles I hadn’t noticed before creasing, a mirrored version of the constellations I had spent years studying.

“You’re a sorcerer, right? The most powerful one to ever live. Create a contract, a magically binding one, and I’ll sign it. Put in any clauses you want, anything you think necessary.”

I pondered his entende, rolling it around in my head till it settled somewhere.

An agreement.

An end.

A nap.

“Fine,” I said, startling him with my resolution. Reaching into the pocket of my robe, I withdrew a simple black notebook, plain and unsuspecting to anyone but those to whom the magic was revealed. A quill followed.

The words appeared on the parchment as a storm would at sea: billowing and fluid and strong, the ink sinking into the particles of the paper, unyielding, permanent.

They’d find my fortress destroyed and the boy’s sword broken, they’d believe us both dead, the villain defeated in a final battle, the Chosen One sacrificing his life to save the people.

The war would end, the fighting cease.

“Sign here,” I indicated, placing the quill in front of the boy.

He blinked.

“You’re actually going to do this? But…”

“Just sign it and leave. Get out of my sight before I change my mind.”

His eyes widened, but he nodded, his hand moving quickly as the ink stained the page.

It was done.

Binding.

“Now leave.”

Jumping up, he nodded again, sliding the satchel off his shoulder and dropping it to the ground before darting into the depths of the forest, swallowed in the shadows of trees.

The sword he left behind, the stars forged inside flickering on the bed of grass before dying one by one, the black holes they created swallowing any matter that surrounded them till at last they disappeared too, leaving nothing to prove the existence of the boy other than a broken hilt, a satchel of jewels, and a scribbled name in a black book.

The land had become so accustomed to the songs of war that the absence of the deafening waltz of screams felt more terrifying than when they had existed. After a moment of peace, a single second after decades of violence, the people found a new war to wage.

But that’s how it always was.

The streets told the stories no one dared tell, though if you found yourself in a tavern late at night, you might have heard flighty whispers of their existence, echoes of battles and war, of Chosen Ones, of sorcerers. Whispered stories enclosed in song by men who never knew the truth, who wished they had known of battles and war, of Chosen Ones, of sorcerers.

No one looked for the boy.

No one knew what happened that day, no one knew the whispered confessions and the binding agreement. In fact, only the elderly had any notion there hadn’t been a battle at all, and most had fallen into some convergence of dementia and paranoia.

They were easily brushed aside, their wisdom and ghost stories fading into the emptiness of air uninhabited.

But not I.

No, I remembered everything.