Path of Glory

9

Defeat that enemy. Win the battle. That is a warrior’s way. Everything else, everything that’s not your battles and your victories, is just dust clinging to you. Reject it.”

Hadjar sighed. He’d heard all of this before from those who had already died, or had been killed.

“You’re wrong, Erhard.” Hadjar sat down on the sand of the training ground in a lotus position. “I’m not Einen. I don’t like to philosophize.”

Erhard looked at Hadjar, who was deep in meditation. He wondered if the young warrior who hated their Master so fiercely even realized how similar they were. It seemed to Erhard like he wasn’t speaking to a living person, but to the Shadow of his Master…

***

In a world where there wasn’t a single thing that would obstruct one’s view, a man sat observing an ocean of swaying grass, while leaning on a rock and watching a bird cleaning its feathers while sitting on the highest branch of a single low tree. He was middle-aged, with gray hair and wrinkles on his still young, but already aging face. It was obvious that in the prime of his life, this man had been strong and powerful. Now, he was gradually wasting away. But where there had been raw power and primal rage before, there was now wisdom. The Black General, sitting in his dungeon inside Hadjar’s soul, watched the sparse clouds floating across the sky.

“Who are you?” A raspy voice asked him.

Darkhan glanced toward the foot of the hill. An old man stood there, wearing a black cloak and leaning on a staff carved from mortal wood. His gray hair was pulled back in a tight braid. It looked like if the wind blew just a little harder, the old man would fall apart.

“So, this is what I would look like,” Darkhan drawled, then turned back to the clouds.

The old man struggled to climb up the hill, groaning.

“You seem familiar…” He said, and then stepped back. “You’re me.”

“In some ways,” Darkhan responded with a shrug.

“But you look so young… And yet… Why are you so old? Are you older than me?”

“I am.”

The fragments of the Black General’s soul that had been scattered across the world were, as strange as it may sound, of different ages. They were fragments of his mind. In other words, they were his memories. In some, there were fewer memories, and so they remained young. In others, there were more of them, so they turned out to be older. The one sitting in front of the old man remembered the exact moment the first Darkhan had been born. He was the oldest of them, but he still looked like he was the youngest.

“How did this happen?” The old man asked. “Why do you have so much... essence? You should remember our path of cultivation, no more than that... But you have the essence of thousands of thousands of years within you…”

Darkhan said nothing. He didn’t want to talk. He would rather watch the clouds floating in the sky. They reminded him of the old days. The days when his eternal life had had meaning… He wondered… If he’d faced the Jasper Emperor in a fair fight, instead of that weird battle eons ago, what would’ve come of it? When two creatures who were unable to die fought, would their battle be endless? Or would it be more like a child’s math problem: a minus combined with another minus producing a plus, and the only two immortal creatures in this nameless world ending up able to kill each other? Unfortunately, he never got a chance to test his hypothesis. Darkhan had gone into battle against the whole world, but it had defeated him and locked him up on that accursed mountain.

“You absorbed it...” the old man guessed. “You absorbed the shard that I... we... he... placed in that training artifact.”

“Hmm…” Darkhan drawled. He sat there, still gazing at the clouds. “He looked for slaves to free him from the mountain. It’s hard to call that training…”

“He looked for? You looked for... I looked for... We looked for…”

Darkhan said nothing. He remembered her hair. Black and thick. The color of a moonless night. It smelled of flowers and berries. It smelled of the first sweet scent of a field in early spring. It smelled of a morning with your beloved at your side. It smelled of the frosty morning after celebrating the beginning of a new cycle of seasons. It smelled like the first plush toy that a small child couldn’t bear to part with. It smelled… He’d lived for a long time and seen a lot. He could come up with ten thousand more metaphors and comparisons to describe what her hair had smelled like. But even the most beautiful words and the most magnificent of epithets couldn’t resurrect this fragrance. It smelled as only it could smell.

“Are you touched in the head?” The old man’s eyes narrowed. “You-”

He didn’t get to finish speaking. Darkhan didn’t move a finger, but the old man crumbled into thousands of black grains of sand. They flew up, carried by the wind currents, and were sucked into the black cloak that enveloped the Black General, making it a little longer.

“Ash...” Darkhan whispered, “The chains you created still hold me... him... us... on that mountain. But did it bring you happiness, Master of a hundred thousand Words? Man who wasn’t born and wizard from fairytales? Did it bring back your beloved? Have you become a god? Are you still trudging along amongst the mortals? You’re the last of those whom I was truly glad to meet in battle… I sense that the hour of our final clash is approaching... I hope you’re ready to die.”

***

“But I want a lollipop!” A little boy was tugging at the hem of his mother’s dress. “Why do we need a flower, mom? Buy me a lollipop!”

His mother kept her eyes fixed on a flower vendor, a handsome young man with multicolored eyes, who was standing in the middle of the city square and shouting:

“Flowers! Beautiful flowers! I don’t give change! Choose any flowers you like!”

Girls and women approached the man and he gave them bouquets from his huge bag. When it was the mother and the boy’s turn, the man gave him a red flower.

“I don’t want your stupid flower!” The child turned away and pouted.

“Take a closer look,” the man suddenly whispered.

The boy turned around. The flower, which the man was slowly turning in his fingers, turned into a sweet lollipop. The child grabbed it and immediately put it in his mouth.

“Thank you,” he said and, clinging to his mother’s skirt, disappeared back into the crowd.

The man straightened up and looked northward. The north wind was blowing.

The north wind, cruel and cold. Carrying only death and loneliness with it.