3. Myrkblade

The morning light was over the horizon, and already I was up. After the card game, I had only gotten about two hours of sleep that 'night'. But, to be honest, darkness was never truly my time to rest. I've always felt that my body was made to be nocturnal. Not in the dark, morbid sort of way. But rather as a gifted feel for obsidian in the air.

But my greatest of concerns existed in the realm of light. Thus, it was my every day duty—as a Titan as well as a human being—to raise my body from the shadows and seek out meaning and purpose where the living most habituated.

Morning at the base of the tower meant receding tides and cool running low over the dew-covered sawgrass. Just to the North of the bluffs there was a patch of dry ground covered with tall blades of green and brown that shook and shifted in the wind. It was there that I meditated every morning that I could. A hero's talent is not something to leave undisturbed. Like an aging muscle, it must be pulled and flexed to preserve the greatest dexterity. Afer all, to those who are given, much is required…and much of the 'much' is time and commitment.

I held my body stiff in a pose—as if frozen in the middle of a threatening strut or advance on some invisible enemy. My right leg locked as a pillar. My left balanced on my right knee, jutting my left limb outward, above which was a torso with two hands gripped firmly to a slender wooden sword.

Myrkstaff.

I held the blade at seemingly awkward angle. The hilt was raised by my two hands well over my head, though the body itself was aimed seventy degrees downward and a little to the left. It was the ugliest pose to maintain…but the act of maintaining it was where the beauty came in.

I was nearly still as a statue. Yet I could remember the early days when so much as attempting this pose for ten seconds caused every muscle in my body to shake and quake like I was experiencing a seizure: followed by the inevitable collapse of my exhausted, adolescent body to the ground.

Years of obsessive practice and meditation had smoothed out those errors in self-control. For a while there—when my life wasn't so busy or demanding—I had sessions in which I could hold that position for excess of thirty minutes. Yes, it was self-torture. But I knew I would emerge strong in the end. My goal was to make every position of weakness and awkwardness in battle a thing of regularity in my mind and my muscles. I learned how—in any scrape or in any predicament—to right myself back again so that I had once again attained an advantage over my foe.

My eyes were closed under my usual jet black shades. A puff of wind greeted my face, but I stood resolute. Soon I exhaled, my breath showing, and I envisioned for myself a random shadow before me.

In the blink of an eye, I 'fell' out of my torturous position and glided forward with a spiraling, horizontal thrust of Myrkstaff, followed by another step forward and a killer vertical strike, then ending with an upward jab that—if facing a mortal opponent—would have lifted the skull off the vertebra.

Then I spun around in the grass, Myrkstaff at ready. I envisioned the line of advance from which I had come and recovered it in the opposite direction, exercising every graceful swordstrike that I knew. Parrying invisible blades. Slicing through shadowed limbs.

There is no proper name for the fighting style I have endured to emulate. I learned it from a very young age by my mentor, whose energy had left his body a long, long time ago. I learned from him a philosophy I tell only a scant few souls: for its application lies in the very same few who are capable of understanding and wielding essence of the metaphysical.

The energy granted us all in life is not indicative of living alone. The actions we commit from the day we are born to the day we die are full of as much destruction as construction. Birth is a death of its own, and from the very get-go we are destroying things in order to construct things.

Oxygen into energy. Matter and protein. Water and carbon dioxide.

Elements flow into us, through us, and back into their domain for the process to repeat. Existence itself is the construction of destruction as well as the destruction of construction. The presence of one of the two factors cannot maintain itself without the other. It is the duality of everything that is absolute in a universe that's always expanding and yet always growing colder.

Thus, from a young age, I learned to respect that to wield destruction meant also to wield life. I learned to use the Myrkblade---not to save people. Rather, I learned to use the weapon to hurt people and stop people from robbing others of their salvation. To fight crime and simply say that one is "saving innocent lives" is ignoring all the evils of society whom we pummel, stomp, and shove into remission without regard for their own personal motivations.

In saying this, I've not meant to ever excuse the treachery of vagabonds in Life. But merely to point out that it is a foolish thing to expect nothing but pacifism as the main ingredient of vigilantism. In the life I have chosen, I fight people and people get hurt. It's an inevitability that is as cruel as it is beautiful, for I have chosen to believe that the will and salvation of the Innocent is worth more than the desires of the Aggressive. I have long since come to closure with my role in the fight against evil, and take full responsibility for the enforcement I must make to see to the establishment of peace.

I was in the middle of more direct advances; swishing at every angle in my sword and then 'forcing' myself into uncomfortable poses in between so as to randomly simulate enemy advantages. True, one can never rehearse one hundred percent accurately on his own, but I pride myself in a fairly decent halfway percentile through my solo training.

I call it 'meditation' because I do not know any other word for it. When I moved into the Tower and caught glimpse of Raven amidst her chanting, I assumed we had something fairly in common and thus took the liberty of stealing her word. Yet, I always felt that while Raven channeled power from the rift of another dimension, I was always attempting to summon the elements of our very own.

At the precise moment in my exercise, I froze and tightened my grip on Myrkstaff. My eyes narrowed behind the dark shades and I inhaled slowly. The wind around me kicked up a bit, and ink-black smoke rose from where my feet met with the dew-laden grass. Soon there was a billowing cape of black myrk all around my figure. It shook out from my limbs, draped down from underneath my shades, and met together in a spiraling vortex that crawled up the length of my weapon and enveloped it in a warbling mass of onyx power.

Myrkstaff—previously a wooden sword of antique nature—had once again turned temporarily into Myrkblade. The myrk was a field of shadow energy that emanated from the Spirit of Destruction I had so long tapped. As long as the Spirit of Construction was held deep inside of me, I could keep the dark energy at bay. I was in perfect balance…perfect harmony…as I always was in any other circumstance save only for the fact that now my energies had literal translations in the physical dimension.

The myrk fed off of the wind…the light…the ticking of time (if there is such a thing as Time). I've always felt that myrk was the wind gauge of fate itself. It spoke to me with shadowdance where gravity would give in with any slight lean of my legs. It showed me the fractures in the Wall of inertia and matter displacement. By holding still to the hilt of the blade, the universe was merely a dome that spun around me. It was a fragile thing which I could cut and force my way through if I needed to see the ambiguous goal at hand. For if one thing was still a mystery to my meditative outreach, it was the future.

Smoke flickered like black fire under my shades. I suddenly parted my legs and my arms and swung Myrkblade to the side; trailing vapor behind it. Where my feet and hands pointed, the blades of grass parted and flexed back in trembling fear.

I suddenly twisted in a spiral and held the blade horizontally by my face as my whole body tensed upward. The grass licked around me and formed a momentary cyclone at my feet.

I slide three fingers down the broad side of the blade, aiming the flickering black tip at some unknown horizon with my left eye. Like a spring, I spun around and swung the sword down with a gasp. A few blades of grass lifted by themselves. I swung the blade up and jabbed downward. Soil flew to the left and the right a couple feet off. I spun, held the blade close to my chest, and suddenly shot it upwards. The energy of the Destructive blade itself lifted my body like a rocket ten feet up. A patch of fog near the tower formed a gash of pale blue sky. And soon I was floating slowly down—foot by foot—to the ground on a cushion of living smoke that soon dissipated where the grass quivered to a stand still.

I took a deep breath. There was one bit of energy left to unleash. I crouched down low, twirling the blade around two hands—skillfully exposing only the dull, broadside of the vaporing nightmare to my skin alone—before springing my whole body towards the sea and jabbing the blade outward with an exhale of fury.

Pebbles flew up from the bluffs…then silence…then a monumental series of flashes in the ocean surf one hundred feet away; as if God had skipped an invisible monolith four or five times across the crashing waves.

Then the smoke was gone.

Myrkblade returned to Myrkstaff.

And I stood up straight and relaxed.

The morning sun raised its nubile head.

I sheathed the sword and faced away from the sun. The light was awfully scalding to my eyes, but I at least stretched my arms so my back could embrace its subtle warmth.

Soon I smiled and headed back up the rocks to the base of the Tower.

Now, I thought, I should be ready for Robin…