LEGEND - Part 2: Phoenix Rising
Chapter 1 – Prologue
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Three huddled around a low oaken table.
They spoke in a language of muted whispers and frantic hand gestures, faces ashen as their nervous eyes darted to and from the sepia-stained note lying between them—the source of their fear, Azure knew. It was like she could feel it, pulsing with the beats of their hearts, laced in their exhaled breath.
She pressed her back to the wall and faded into it till the wood was contiguous with her bones and she became static, immoveable.
"They can't make us," murmured her brother's voice. It floated with the waves of his anxiety, roiling into the shadowed hallway where she stalked, silent as she listened. "Can they?"
The silence was enough for him. It spoke louder than words.
"What about Azure?" Her brother again. "We…we can take her to a village, right? She'll be safer—"
"No." A heavy hand slammed down on the table. Azure flinched at the voice. "We leave for Caelum tomorrow. Azure stays here. No way am I letting my daughter live in…in a village."
The scorn in her father's words was undeniable; it'd spent years sharpening itself against those old memories, the ones he kept locked behind all his thoughts and all his words. Now it was a blade.
"Father," Marcel murmured, almost whispered, "she's only ten. She can't fight monsters. She can't mine on her own. She can't hunt."
Azure's bones froze up; her eyes narrowed indignantly at the fiery rush of anger coursing through her veins. Anger for her brother's doubt, anger for the confusion surging in her mind.
She left the wall, fists tightly balled at her sides, teeth grit so hard her jaw hurt. She walked calm and silent into the tide of deep gray shadows with flickering edges; silent till she found the door to her room and closed it behind her, sealing her inside—making sure her parents and brother could hear it from where they stood at the low oaken table.
Through the solid darkness, Azure traipsed across the floor, feet skimming against the wood grain should any small and dubious object catch her foot and send her sprawling down. She tossed herself onto the red woolen covers of her bed when her toe brushed one of the legs, mane of unruly flaxen hair fanning across her back and shoulders. She tilted her head and listened to the quiet voices she could no longer decipher, not through the shadows and walls that now came between them.
She couldn't see the redstone clock that hung on the wall beside the bed, but she felt it move as night lay claim to the world, swallowing the last fragments of day and hurling the sun far below the horizon. The moon was halfway to its zenith when the door to her room creaked open, when a lanky silhouette stood uncertainly beyond the threshold.
"What do you want, Marcel," she snapped after turning her head, voice muffled through her mask of hair.
Marcel clumsily traversed the darkened landscape of her room, stumbling over a stray book she remembered leaving on the floor the previous day, brought to her attention once again by her brother almost cracking his head on the wooden block next to her bed, the one that held the dormant redstone torch.
Azure lifted her head as he quickly regained his composure, dragging his thumbnail across the maroon tip of the torch, drawing a crimson spark from beneath the dust. Moments later, it flickered and glowed with the soft dimness of twilight.
She'd always favored redstone torches. Their light didn't waver. And, the bloodred color had always been pretty.
"How much did you hear?" Marcel asked nervously, kneeling at her bedside. She realized he was holding something in the hand he kept half-hidden behind his back; something blue and…almost glassy in the way it reflected the torchlight. "Do…you know what we were talking about?"
Azure scowled at him, her features bathed in red. "I heard you, Mother, and Father are leaving soon. For…hunting, scavenging, mining, I guess. And you're afraid of leaving me alone."
Marcel dropped his eyes.
"Wait—no. You're leaving some place called Caelum. But stop being stupid, honestly. I can take care of myself until you get back."
Her brother managed a weak grin. The light made it look murderous, and Azure flinched. "Y…yeah," he rasped, sounding like his throat was clogged with something. "You can take care of yourself. You're strong."
She glared at him. "That's not what you said to Father."
Marcel shook his head as if shaking away unwanted thoughts and feelings.
"That's stupid, too. You're only three years older than me, Marcel. I can do the things you can. I found that diamond last season, with Father underground. I even mined it myself." She wasn't going to admit to him that every time she thought of it, her arms hurt, her back hurt, and she winced when she remembered the way her eyes had filled with tears when Father refused to let her give up and watch the heavy iron pickaxe fall from defeated hands and clatter at her feet.
It didn't matter. She'd mined the diamond herself and got to carry it all the way home.
And that meant something.
"Yeah. I know you did, Azure."
Silence. And she had to break it.
"What are you holding?" She pointed limply at the glassy blue thing behind his back. He really thought he could hide it, didn't he?
Marcel pulled a strange face, staring down as he moved his arm. His hand gripped the hilt of a blade stained cyan by the diamonds that had been sealed in the skin around the earth's heart, below her feet. "Just a sword."
Azure's eyes drew wide. She stared, small hands burying themselves in the sheets of her bed. "A diamond sword," she corrected. And those were not mere swords. They were the blades that wielded Notch's power, they were manifestations of sheer beauty and deadliness. The blood of the mobs this blade would fell would stand out for all to see, red on blue, for all to bask in its long and violent history.
"Why?" she asked. Trying to remember if they actually had the two diamonds necessary to make a sword. She had hers, which hung in a frame on the wall—
Wait.
Her eyes flicked to the wall near her door that stood ajar. The frame was empty of everything but air.
"You—Marcel!" she snapped, glaring at him, lunging off her bed to grab his shirt in her fist. His shirt, or the sword.
"Whoa, whoa," he cried. Scrambling back and jumping onto his feet, lifting the blade to gain his balance. Though he held the most powerful weapon she'd ever seen, her glower did not falter. "The sword's yours, Azure! I made it for you."
She froze. He froze. The clock on the wall did not.
It ticked on. A few moments slipped away and died. Then a few more.
"For me? Why'd you go and do that?" Her voice was a rasp, a whisper.
"Because you'll need it."
She swung her legs off her bed and stalked up to her older brother, eyes on the sword. Not him. "Because you're going away?"
"Yes." He held it out, flipping the heavy thing around in his hand so he could point the hilt at her. His hand wrapped around the blade. "Take it, Azure."
There was something sad in his eyes.
Gingerly, she touched the polished wood of the sword handle. It was cold. Already she could feel the weapon's strength siphon through the wood and into her fingers—and her pulse beat faster.
She took the sword. Its weight anchored her arm to the ground.
Marcel started to back away. Still the red glow of the torch seeped into the valleys on his face, morphing his features into a mask of someone she didn't recognize.
"When will you come back?" Azure ventured. Tighter, she gripped the hilt.
Her brother almost paused. Almost—but he didn't.
"Goodbye, Azure. Use the sword."
The light from the hallway swallowed him then.
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Azure had been beneath the earth but she had not walked inside its heart. She had not seen cascading walls of liquid fire roll and burn down blood-red cliffs, feeding an ocean of orange and yellow. She'd never felt the waves of heat waft and roil over rocky beaches of cursed sand and drown the wisps of oxygen and cooler air that dared exist at the core.
She'd never been to Hell.
In a different place, someone else was in awe of a different sword—with a stained-black blade of pulverized stone, wielded by a skinless creature. A creature made of soot-colored bones, scorched dark by countless millennia living in the heat of the Nether.
A small boy had been running from something. It's hard to run when the ground burns like fire—but the sight of the otherworldly monster, a shadow against the firefalls behind it, had sent him streaking to the cover behind a mound of gravel. He crouched, burning fire seeping in through his pants and his skin, eyes wide as he watched the pseudo-skeleton stalk across the netherrack plateau. Above them swooped a high ceiling bathed in a thick red fog, pierced only by the small, misshapen stars that were clusters of glowstone, hanging precariously to the rocks. Like chandeliers with weak chains.
The creature wrapped bony fingers around the hilt of its sword, holding it slightly out to its side as it crept towards a shorter pink-and-green shape, crouching against the stone. A zombie pigman, reaching for a large brown mushroom half-buried in some soulsand.
Oh, the boy thought, suddenly realizing what he was about to witness. A predator hunting its prey, or a murder.
The Wither skeleton's footsteps were silent and ghostly. The pigman tugged fiercely at the mushroom before finally pulling it free.
The boy crept around the side of the gravel mound, struggling to get closer. His hands were stained blood-colored—almost impossible to tell in the red haze of Hell. He bounded up the slope of a hill, quiet as he could be.
Something told him the Wither skeleton knew he was there.
The ghastly creature loomed over its prey, casting no shadow, still as the stone of its sword. The pigman greedily shoved the mushroom down its throat, its golden sword lying forgotten a few blocks away. The Wither skeleton watched it eat, head tilted as if it was fascinated. The boy's eyes were glued to it, watching for any flicker of motion that might give away its attack.
There was none. The skeleton's sword strike was too fast—but he knew it was the flat of the blade that slammed into the pigman's head, he knew the pigman felt it coming half a moment before it hit. The creature let out a guttural scream, throwing its head down against the stone, mouth still crammed full of mushroom.
The blade tore across the back of its head, green blood pouring from the wound. The skeleton took half a step back, taking a moment to stare with empty sockets at the blood on its sword, to watch it glimmer and gleam as it dripped off the tip.
The pigman had scrambled forwards to scoop up its golden sword, whirling to face its attacker with an unbalanced stance. The skeleton darted forward with deadly speed, slashing its sword back and forth across the body of its opponent, mouth half open, skeletal fist clenched. The boy could see the panic in the pigman's eyes as it feebly tried to block the violent strikes, clutching its frail sword in trembling, rotting fingers.
That's where the Wither skeleton was aiming, he realized—the pigman's fingers. One or two more slashes and it couldn't hold its sword anymore, not without hands. Even more blood gushed from the pigman, and the skeleton let out a hollow moan of anger, the first sound it had ever made, trembling in its dark bones. It reached forward with a skeletal hand and buried its fingers in the pigman's chest, hooking around the old bones that held the half-dead creature together beneath its rotting skin. The boy's shoulders hitched in sudden terror; he shrank into a ball behind his rocky sanctuary.
The skeleton hauled the still-alive creature over its frail shoulder. Its knees didn't even shake, not once. It was sturdy as stone, unyielding beneath the dense weight of the pigman, body wracked in violent spasms as more blood trickled from the punctures in its chest where the skeleton kept its fingers. The other hand held the sword, point hovering just slightly above the ground as it started to walk, slowly, towards the edge of the plateau. The edge, jutting high above the ocean of liquid fire.
The boy stood, climbing over the netherrack he'd hid behind. Silent as he trailed behind the Wither skeleton.
It stopped at the edge, almost hanging over it. The pigman's stump wrists tried to claw at the skeleton's ribs, soaking the creature's bones with more blood. It let the pigman slide off its shoulder, chest still impaled by the skeleton's fingers. It let out ugly grunts and moans, eyes rolling wildly in its head, legs jerking. The Wither skeleton raised its blade, and the boy could see its jaw move, ever so slightly, though no sound came from its maw.
He crept up, halving the distance between them, terror pulsing in his mind and his heart. But he knew he wasn't going to run away. Some part of him wasn't going to let him run away, not yet.
The Wither skeleton held the zombie pigman's dying body over the edge, dangling above the roiling ocean of lava. Its sword streaked through the air, slashing through the pigman's midsection, below its ribs. Half of the creature fell away, followed by a cascade of blood turned dark by the ocean's fiery glare.
The pigman's jaw unhinged in a stuttered scream of agony. More blood pulsed from the jagged half of its body the Wither skeleton still held, green streams of it falling chunks and chunks till it fell in the fire, sizzling like acid. The skeleton tensed its fingers, ripping through more skin, more bone. Then the sword flashed across the creature's neck—and stopped halfway. The remnants of the body shook and jerked, not alive—it couldn't still be alive.
The sword made more cuts. The creature bled. It was like a ritual—like the skeleton was trying to wring as much blood as possible from the pigman. Half-severed organs hung from the upper half of its body. Chewed-up mushroom bits still clumped in its mouth.
All the boy could feel was a sick fascination. He even dared get closer as the body began to slide of the skeleton's bony fingers, to watch as it began to plummet to the fire below.
The skeleton peered over the edge, before turning its empty eyes to its hand—black bones stained green. It rotated its wrist, inspecting the flecks of blood dripping onto the netherrack at its feet.
The pigman wasn't prey, the boy realized. His blood slowly began to freeze as his eyes bored into the back of the skeleton's skull.
He wanted to run away.
The skeleton turned its head, skull grinding on the bones of its neck—halfway around till its empty eye sockets, drowned in shadow, locked with his human eyes. The boy shivered. He wanted to run away.
The skeleton broke his gaze, turning its attention back to the puddles of blood at its feet. Almost like it was disappointed it hadn't fallen into the ocean below like the rest had.
Suddenly the boy was running again. Away from the skeleton—far away. He didn't look back. He didn't see if the evil creature tried to follow him, but he knew, he knew—if it did, it would have caught him. If it did, he would have died, cut into pieces above a vast and endless ocean of fire, bleeding red instead of green.
He knew the Wither skeleton had only stood, a breath away from the cliff's edge, watching him run away.
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Sorry for the awkward mood-shift in the middle there.
And the wordless cover. The site's having problems with image editing.
Anyway! Prologue is done. I want Wednesdays to be my update days, but I think I'll eventually just go back to what I usually do, posting when I have crap done. Chapter 2 will be finished and posted soon, probably.
So, things like swords and Wither skeletons were in the prologue for a reason, obviously. SPECULATE. I'm pretty sure this will be better than part one. If you haven't read part one, you shouldn't be here, but whatever.
I'll probably respond to any reviews you might leave in PMs. AND... like I did last time, I'll take OCs however you might want to send them. Mostly because great character submissions made the last story much better than it would've been otherwise. So, review and send me characters. Do it.
-Angel