Prologue (Part 1)
Authors note: Yes that is right prologue part one. Luckily there are only two parts but still the prologue is lengthy, predominately because I'm longwinded. Yes, that is a new person I'm adding for this fanfic and yes he will be the co-main character. Co because Siegfried will be important as well.
Please review this and send any comments or questions you might have. And have fun, that's kind of important. If your not having fun stop reading… after about Chapter 3 or so because for now I'm doing the none-to-fun backstory work.
P.S. Most of the dialogues is in the story actually German but I may have other languages moved in depending on their location in the world. If that occurs it will be translated to English for your convenience.
He was born the son of hedge nobility in the Holy Roman Empire. The father was no one of import, the vassal of a vassal of an Elector. His family had few enemies but his father felt so certain that those few would kill the son out of vengeance that he never bothered to give the boy a name. In later years he would have been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. In his time he was an eccentric.
The boy lived a cloistered life. He had his four-walled room, his books and a sword. And a pen, a pen with lots of ink. He wrote, more then was necessary, pages upon pages. He could write twelve tongues but could speak three, which were Latin, German, and a little English. None of his books survived the fire.
As part of the dieing tradition of feudal obligation, the boy learned to use his sword. His father taught him inside the boy's room. His father who always came dressed in full armor for fear his son might stab him…on purpose. The boy had a predisposition to the sword, or maybe it was that it was one of only three things he could do in the years he spent his cage. Either way he grew to be quite skilled with his weapon of choice, the bastard sword.
It was well that the father wore armor for the son would have stabbed him. The boy felt little emotion. His ability to empathize with others was severely stunted and feelings were alien to them. Whenever he read a tragic story in one of his books and felt that mist of sadness gather in his body he would try to expel it like a disease. His feelings were things that were meant to harm him and he fought against them.
As time passed and he read books talking about the world outside his room he developed the desire to escape. To go out into the world and…
He didn't know what he wanted to do once he got out but surely it was better then being stuck in this room.
The isolation had more adverse effects and with each year that passed he became more socially inept. He could speak German and Latin but his way of speaking was stilted and strange. The only things that gave him the ability to speak with what little vernacular knowledge he had were his discussions with his mother. She was amazing, for all of his fathers paranoid tendencies he was liberal with education, which both wife and son benefited from. She had a firm oral grasp of fully ten languages but, unlike the boy, could write only one. His talks with her were brief but molding. And the boy took to molding quickly.
However, when he was twelve, though he didn't know he was that age, it being impossible to mark the passage of days in a room with no windows, things changed.
The night was calm and had the boy been outside he could have heard the birds screaming placidly on their branches. The night was pregnant with a sense of foreboding. Silver-etched silence reigned in the woods near the castle. Two red eyes moved through the brush along with a third larger one.
The boy was going over another book that future generations wouldn't remember. It was Summa Theologica by the sainted Thomas Aquinas. The boy had not displayed a desire toward the theological life style and truly his isolation had numbed him to the need for religion. However, he was quickly running out of books that he hadn't read and this was one of them.
The night was tense and had the boy been outside he could have heard the birds go silent and flutter from their branches. The three eyes were getting closer. The sword of Damocles was poised.
He finished reading the paragraph he was on as dinner was slipped through the crack of his door. Beef drizzled rivulets of blood on an iron plate releasing a faint steam that laboriously carried the smell to his tasting nose. The scholar devoured hungrily.
When he had finished he sat down at the desk, papers flutter with the wind of his arrival and the painted shadows in the candlelight. He wrote:
La espada del agua1
is the last of the saga
Der schwertführer2
Touches on the fervor
His pen stopped abruptly as he finished his last r. Had he heard something? A high grating whine came through the door, but not just through the door, through the halls. The sound was from so far away and had reverberated so many times over it was impossible to ascertain where it was originating from. "aaaaaaaagh" the sound came again through the door. What was that sound? He hadn't heard it before but it was tantalizingly familiars. Ransacking his mind a memory came when he had sliced himself with a sword in his younger days. The pain had seemed so intense then and he had just started making noise not bothering to give words to the pain. The English word for this was scream, German schrei, French chillido, Portuguese grito, and in Russian крик.
Someone was screaming? Why? Curiosity infected him but he could neither get out of his stone prison nor look through the solid wood door. He ears pricked to attention as he heard feet shuffle down the hallway. He heard the lock release as the person opened his door. It was his mother. "Come, hurry, we are leaving." She blurted in a rush.
The lad merely slanted his head and stared at her confused. "I don't have time to explain," she said "now come on." She began down the hall and turned around pleading him to come. Before he left he grabbed his sword but when he returned to the verge of his room he hesitated. This was his chance to escape. He breathed deep and charged through and after he mother, who was already sprinting down the corridor.
He quickly caught up with her. Men-at-arms and other servants were running down the hallways in frenzy. What had happened? His mother yelled into the air in front of her and let the sound drain back to him, " Someone has attacked and infiltrated the castle we need to get your father and escape!"
Someone? It had only been one person? This was indeed a frightening proposition.
At that moment they turned a corner and slammed into the air in front of a large cavernous room, dinning area perhaps? The boy thought. That's when he noticed the fighting…and his father.
The old lord of the castle was facing off against an azure-armored knight with a massive…Bidenhänder…no the hilt was too long; it was a Zweihander of some kind, a great sword in the layman's terms. The dark-sky colored knight slew three men who advanced to help their master with a single circular swing of his sword, which was as much a creature of flesh as an object of steel. Such mastery! He is the quintessence swordmanship. However, the knowledge that her husband was doomed did not sit well with the boy's matriarch and she began to run toward her husband in an unthinking attempt to help. The boy, however, knew his mother could not hope to win and grab her wrist in an attempt to stop her. His restraint back fired, he mother forward momentum combine with his inertia caused the matron to slip and fall backwards banging her head on a peak in the texture of the stone floor. Blood began pouring from her head and silently a pool of it began to expand form her head. The child knelt beside his mother but she was already lost. His emotions flickered to life and he would have cried had he not heard the death scream of his father.
The boy's eyes shot to the blade swinging abomination, just now taking time to register the sickly growth on the man's right arm. His father was on the floor in two very different locations. The nightmare, the boy had no other word, even in his erudite mind, too place upon the creature but somehow felt it fit into place perfectly, turned its red eyes to the boy.
The boy left his dead mother in a pool of her own blood and dashed back down the corridor from whence he came. He had no idea where he was going, this being his first time out of his room; he took random turns and hoped not to find a dead end. The clamor of his armored pursuer rang in his ear reverberating through a distracted mind.
NO! I killed my mother she dead, muerto, mortuus, taub und gefühllos! So he sprinted blindly through the corridors pursued by both a man (maybe?) and his own self-loathing. Something he would become intimately familiar with in later years.
As he went further through the halls flames became more and more common. Flames that were not in anyway contained and were eating at the surrounding stone wood supports. He could feel the bits of soot he was running through hit his exposed skin. He swelled the flame around his and also the stench of burning flesh for here bodies littered the floor. He was following the man-beast's way in and thus he must be approaching an exit.
He passed an open an iron door into the massive, burning entranceway to the keep of the castle. He stopped and slammed the door behind him. Throwing down the bar and placing his outstretched left hand on it to keep it closed. If he held long enough the azure armored abomination would die of asphyxiation or immolation.
The mutated miles slammed its blade into the door making a slight indent and shaking the door and the wall that contained it. However, the boy held his left hand against the door. Another shock hit the door and the sword burst through in a plowing thrust near the boys arm. It hovered there and he watch as an eye, an eye, that was in the middle of the blade made visual contact with his. The eye had a dark iris but from the pupil flared flames which sliced their ways through the iris to the white of the eye. It lids opened wide in a voiceless scream. Stop looking at me, I'm not a sinner, I didn't mean to killer, AARGH, his guilt flared to unholy life.His right hand impacted the eye which was disgustingly soft yet oddly resilient. The creature on the other side of door screamed in pain withdrawing the blade and slamming it massive form against the gate. Another indentation formed. He heard a loud crack over head. His mind exploded.
He found himself on the ground his left arm pinned under a burning support beam. The nerves on his arm were magma biting into him. He pulled on his arm. Nothing. Agony blanketed his mind and sent him into a panic. Adrenaline was in him. He yanked his arm free and ran. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. The beast was still slamming on the portal but at least now the flaming wreckage further barred it. Still…
He let his mind clear, though the blackness of his mind blinked red. The flames in the rafters began to hop down the walls. Making small jumps they moved into a line from wall to wall forming a wall of fire. Get through that bastard!
Guilt coursed through his mind, pain coursed through his arm, and he coursed through the burning hallway to the night. He stepped into dark. He nearly threw up.
This was the first time he had left the keep. He had never been to or seen such an open area and the empty air made him nauseous. Now he did throw up.
Looking at the ground as he ran straight he vomited on the ground. He couldn't stop; he didn't know how long the barrier would hold the berserk bastard. He wished he hadn't eaten so recently as he coughed up partially digest beef on the run. A thought hit across the head. Can it track me by following the trail of regurgitated foodstuffs?
Fortunately, his stomach was now empty and he was coughing up dry heaves.
He didn't know how far he had gone, he couldn't look up for fear that he might become even sicker, but he trip over a root. He kept his eyes shut, his stomach convulsions were beginning to stop and he didn't want them to start again. He must be in the woods though so he moved forward carefully with both arms extended. After, groping his way through the woods for what seemed like hours began to hear a faint whooshing noise. No more like a thousand…bells ringing in a cacophony. He felt his foot slip on something and he fell forward. Banging his head on a hard object, he blacked out.
He woke up and by without thinking opened his eyes. Convulsion racked his stomach as his body tried to loose whatever still remained in his stomach, with little success. The idiot that he was, the boy had opened his eyes looking straight up into the sky. Shutting out the light he rolled over and buried his face in the dirt. Laying their prone, face to the dirt he must have looked like the most pathetic ostrich ever born, at least if his book descriptions of the ostriches were true.
He opened his eye again and look to the side. Again he started to convulse. Again he jammed his head in the dirt. He groaned, Agoraphobia if my Latin does not desert me. He tried to move his left arm up to near his face in a futile pathetic gesture but he couldn't feel it. He looked at it from the corner of his eye and noticed that as he moved his shoulder the arm just dragged. The pain came back in his mind as he recalled the timber crushing his arm from the elbow down. He hoped it wasn't permanent. Oh well at least it doesn't hurt anymore. He knew he was in denial.
For the next few hours his eye would open and shut as he got used to the open spaces. It wasn't particularly comfortable; he had a root digging into his crotch creating a strange mix of irritation and pain. He shifted to alleviate the problem. When his Agoraphobic reaction had ebbed to a mere light-headedness he began to get. Up. When he was fully erect the world swirled around him and he had to kneel and steady himself with three limbs,two feet and his right hand.
The same bell sound tinkled through his aching head calming him a little. Surveying the area his gaze alighted on a brook that was running over some rocks. That's what I lost my equilibrium on; he thought remembering his fall last night, no, that's not the phrase… I lost my balance that's it. Bending down he dunked his face in the liquid ice, taking down mouthfuls of the precious serum. Down stream the water turned black as soot from the boys face clouded the clear water.
Vaguely he wondered how the murderer, the other murder I must remember, hadn't killed him. Surely it could have caught up with him. Maybe he was lucky and it couldn't see him in the pre-morning dark. He didn't feel relieved by the thought. He was so troubled by the thought that he didn't notice that the head that should have been pulsing with pain from striking a root was completely clear.
He began to follow the stream in its path down a hill and through the forest. While he walked he inspected his left arm to see if it was broken. All the bones seemed solid but the skin was burnt and seemed to even have partially melted and reformed in some places. He was now very glad he could not feel the arm.
He hoped the stream he was following would take him to civilization so that maybe he might find a doctor or someone who could fix his arm, how dubious that. However, the brook dumped its contents into a large basin at the bottom of which was a pond.
Decsending the slope that fell into the pond he stopped at the brink. Staring down he noticed a face on the water. He had read about these they were called Speigelbild, reflections, отражение, or reflexión. This is what I look like, he thought staring at the alien face.
The face was young, and early adolescent, he would probably have two more growth surges left. The hair was an unruly mess that fell to his eyebrows in the front and to the middle of his neck in the back. From his hair he could determine a little of his lineage. It was mostly brown and guessed based on the area of the Holy Roman Empire he was in it was probably Saxon blood, maybe the southern vanguard of the Jutes had sired him but that was less likely. However, he must have had a recent Gaelic ancestor as threads of blond intertwined their way through the mat of brown. His eyes, however, he was less sure of, at least as to their decent. They had a yellow iris. He didn't know of any European or Eastern peoples with yellow irises.
After, the brief distraction of descent, he stood up. He was growing more and more accustomed to the open spaces. Though he still felt uncomfortable, and his hand when to the back of his head to scratch an imaginary itch, he was capable of standing on two feet and felt ready to leave for the nearest town. Picking a direction at random he left into the world.
1: Spanish The sword of water
2. German The fire sword /I don't believe the grammar is right but that's because I needed it to rhyme