Slave Girl 3: Chapter 61 (Patreon)

Kreer’s question hangs in the silence. Between us the sword that had just sang sits quiet.

“Soul?” I whisper, my gaze slowly running along the blade. At my side Rosa finds my hand and grips it tightly. “Toke’s soul?”

“Tell me how you came by this weapon.” Kreer says. “Leave out no detail, however minor you believe it to be.”

Clearing my throat I tell the tale of magical minotaur that had hidden in plain sight on the old platform where my work crew and I learned to fight under the northman Toke’s tutelage. As I retell it the images, the smells, the screams, the terror, the pain and the chaos all come flooding back again. My battle with Toke, the blood on the bronze, the ‘statue’ rising up in the center of the platform and that moment of confusion as Aristocles studied the towering minotaur figure we all thought was inert while Lucas turned a xenophobic and magiphobic eye toward Rosa. Now that it was coming back to me I remember clearly how fresh bronze stretched between the fragments of dull green patina reflected the nearby bonfire to make the figure look molten. And then…the statues moves! Poor Aristocles, completely unaware, has his head crushed beneath a clenched metal fist. Next the mournful wail of Colly and the twang of Cassie’s bow, arrows splintering against the body of living copper. I rally the men, a brotherhood of sweat and blood united to protect the common people beyond the forest, and together we fight like lions. Rosa, through fox’s eyes, sees the beast and reverts to a childlike state as she remembers her mother and father’s death but soon snaps out of it when sees me threatened. She tries to use her portal bracelet, a blinding flash as magic counters magic like steel parrying steel, but then she cries out that it was the ring absorbing the blood and that the statue was just a puppet manipulated by the ring’s blood magic fueled control. That same sinking feeling of helplessness fills me as I remembered how we fought so hard only to watch the bronze heal itself as the ring soaked in Aristocles’ blood. And then…Rosa! In a cloud of glowing forest nymphs, my humble slave girl is unleashed and the monster, for the first time, understands pain. Battling the magic of the ring Rosa pulls the blood back away from it, slowing the creature, and giving us hope. We regroup and attack the thing with all we had. The minotaur recognizes the truth threat. Swatting us aside like flies it locks its terrible gaze onto Rosa. I am pulled down by that sinking feeling of impotent horror as I relive the moment that I sat dazed and watched the minotaur charge my love. And then…Toke! From out of the darkness, from out of legend, charges a raging berserker to save the life of the only one of us who could actually hurt the thing. That song of battle, the one I’d just heard moments ago, fills the night as he rains one powerful blow after another down onto the beast. Decades a slave disappeared as the raging warrior recaptures his youth in one final blaze of glory. It was magnificent! To this day I wonder if he might have bested it had the shaft of his ax not shattered. But it had. And a moment later the jagged arm of the beast, it’s hand cleaved off, stabs up into Toke’s belly to pierce up toward his heart. The distraction allows me a moment to recover. I stab my father’s pugio down through the ring in the beast’s partially cleaved nose and I pull with all my might. Rosa pulling power and blood from the ring, Toke’s blood pouring everywhere, every sinew of my might focused on rending the magical ring from the bronze…my blade, the ring, the bronze, the magic and the blood begin to merge…begin to stretch…the handle impossibly pulling longer as the blade distends and elongates until…SNAP! The statue falls, the dagger turned sword drops, and all goes quiet.

All of this I tell Kreer, minus the parts involving Rosa’s magic despite his request for the full story. I knew even as I said it that the omission would leave unexplainable gaps in my story but even as much as Kreer and Rosa had become closer he was still a registered mage of the Empire and duty bound to eradicate slaves with an arcane gift.

As Kreer sits and digests the story I had told him I continue to stare at the blade. Reliving that harrowing experience reminds me that when I found it after the battle lying on the mossy earth it was still crimson with Toke’s blood fused into the steel itself. The red had faded over the days and I hadn’t even noticed until now. Toke’s blood, spilled as the man was dying, was a part of this weapon as much as the ancient bronze and the steel of my father’s dagger. But his soul!?

My relationship with the proud yet broken man was…complicated. We had met during a fight where I was helping to defend Aristocles’ shop while he was a slave thug sent to cause trouble in which he toyed with me, despite my advantages in youth and physical size. Later he was a hired slave brought to the farm to join my work crew in hopes that I might learn from him as his combat prowess had left me both humbled and impressed. When he arrived he had been beaten savagely but, as strong of will as of body, he stood proud despite the pain. I did all I could to make peace with him, I even admired him despite the way in which we met, but we could never truly be friends. Not while I was free and he was enslaved. Two men could never truly bond as equals in such a situation. When I asked him to train the rest of us I never could have imagined what he would ask for in return.

Even now his twisted logic where he would train me only to fight me to the death when we were finished left me puzzled. What I did understand though was that he was a man whose powers were fading and with them his hopes of ever being free to see the fields of home once more. He would find an escape from slavery one way or another. In retrospect I now could understand how during our first encounter he had seen potential in me, not simply in my natural gifts and aptitude but in my courage and honor and mercy to those less fortunate. It had awakened something inside of him, something nearly ground to dust after decades of forced servitude. By his own will he wanted to spend his last days forging a warrior worthy to carry his wealth of experience from his days up north and in the fighting pits of the arenas and on the streets of Grumentum. As his song was pushed from his lungs, during his last rattling breaths of life, he whispered his final words not to his gods but to me. He called me…his legacy.

I could still hear the battle cry ringing in my ears, foreign words fearlessly bellowed toward toward a windswept land in hopes that his far off gods might hear his lone voice. Had this ‘Odin’ heard his cry? Had Lady Freyja witnessed his savage bravery? Had his noble ancestors seen his final moments where he rose above the broken man he’d become to transform into that mythic berserker for one glorious moment of heroism, a bright beacon of northern light so far to the south? Had they welcomed him home to give him his place among their hall of warriors?

It seems not. It seems he had never left my side. How could he have? We knew not his people’s customs and rituals. We did what we believed was proper but nobody in Grumentum knew the proper rites to lay a man like him to eternal rest. Perhaps his gods had been waiting for him but he had no path through which to reach them. Maybe, just maybe, instead of his spirit lingering between worlds for an eternity of non-existence, a grim extension of his years enslaved, Toke had found another path to immortality, one where he might still hear the song of steel against steel and taste the hot, bitter tang of blood on his tongue.

Chapter 62