[Complete] Ch 7.1 Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain Sheathed Against Injustice? (Patreon)

Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain 

Sheathed Against Injustice?

Story Starts

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Chapter 7.1

The Aporia of Want

I woke to an unfamiliar ceiling.

Dark beams. Plain plaster between them. No gilding, no frescoes. Just wood and whitewash and a faint water stain in the far corner that Shirou had probably been meaning to fix for months.

I loved it immediately.

Last night had been marvellous.

Not perfect. That was the point. Perfection was the one thing I could conjure at will, and it had bored me for a thousand ages before I ever set foot on this earth. As a goddess of lust, pleasure had always been mine to command—every nerve an instrument, every sensation a note I could sustain or sharpen or bend into something exquisite. In Tenkai I could turn pain into pleasure with a thought. I could take a mortal's climbing want and stretch it, hold every soul in a room at the very edge of climax until the edge itself became a kind of eternity. I could guarantee that no one ever fumbled, no one ever laughed at the wrong moment, no elbow ever landed where an elbow should not land.

And that was precisely the problem. If I had wanted perfect pleasure, I should have stayed in Tenkai.

To describe last night, you would only need three words.

Messy. Human. Unrepeatable.

The initial awkwardness. Four people finding each other's rhythms, learning each other's preferences one murmured reassurance at a time. The mistimed orgasms. The laughter in the wrong places that turned out to be the right places after all.

Even descending had not given me this. That was the secret most mortals never guessed: we who came down from Tenkai were reduced, yes—our Arcanum sealed, our omniscience muted, our absolutism folded away like a gown too fine for the season—but we were only ever as close to mortal as a deity could be. Close was not the same.

Which was why I cherished the day I met Horn, and the arrangement we struck.

An actual mortal body. Not a vessel, not a costume—flesh that tired, skin that bruised, a stomach that growled at inconvenient moments in front of Mamma Mia. It remained the best decision I had ever made. In this body, no two experiences were ever equal. The first perfect bite of a prized dish was never the same as the second, and the second visit never matched the first. Every pleasure was mortgaged against its own ending, and that made each one singular. Irreplaceable.

This was why so many of us had descended, in the end. Oh, we had mingled with mortals before, in other realities compatible with our natures—worlds where we walked among them without ever diminishing, where we were worshipped and feared and fed on prayer. But those worlds never strayed far from Tenkai in truth. We remained ourselves, untouched, and inevitably our influence dwindled, our stories calcified, and the mortals moved on without us.

This reality was different. This world took us in only on condition that we be lessened, and in return we granted its children the means to grow far beyond what mortals could otherwise achieve. Gods lining up at the gates of heaven to be made small.

I had gone one step further than any of them. And lying in a merchant's plain bed under a water-stained ceiling, warm on three sides, I could not think of a single regret.

I sat up. The blanket slid down and pooled in my lap, cool air finding bare skin, nipples suddenly pert from the cool air. I turned towards the window—Shirou preferred thick, dark curtains, none of those gauzy things that coax a sleeper awake by degrees. A single bright blade of light cut through the gap at the curtain's edge, and its angle told me what my body already suspected.

Not morning. Closer to noon.

Half of Orario would already be about its business.

The first thing my eyes found, of course, was the shirt.

Shirou's shirt—the one he had shed almost immediately once the night turned from drunken fumbling into something more deliberate and passionate—draped over the back of the chair by the wall. Collar up. Facing the bed.

I had put it there.

Oh, the Familia of Justice. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to smother the laugh before it woke anyone. Discovering that Astraea and all her earnest daughters had spent an entire day trailing Shirou in matching trench coats had been the most entertaining surprise of my season. I had only meant to glance at him through my mirror—he had been standing outside the Guild, waiting, endearingly punctual—when the mirror's edge caught eleven identical silhouettes and a certain god of travellers holding what could only be described as a briefing. Hermes conducting theatre from inside a wooden box. Asfi Al Andromeda distributing her marvellous little inventions like a long-suffering quartermaster. I had turned the mirror fully and watched the whole thing unfold.

Which was how I saw the resonance crystal go to the Gojouno girl. And how I knew, when a disguised figure bumped Shirou's shoulder outside the Guild and brushed his collar, exactly what had been planted there.

So when we four tumbled through his door last night, and clothing began its migration to the floor, I had—with great care and greater malice—rescued that particular shirt from the floorboards and arranged it on the chair. Collar towards the bed. Unmuffled.

Somewhere across the city, an entire Familia of justice had spent the night learning precisely how their neighbour entertained guests.

'Forgive me, Astraea.' I did not mean a word of it.

A soft sound pulled my attention back to the bed.

Rose lay sandwiched in the middle, her tail curled loosely over Sophie's hip, her face pressed into the pillow with an expression of undefended contentment. Sophie slept sprawled on the far edge, one arm flung out, dignity abandoned entirely. And between Rose and me—

Shirou. His back to me.

His broad, bare back, and everything written upon it.

'It would be easy.'

The thought arrived unbidden, the way it always did around him. I let out a slow breath through my nose and lay back down, fitting myself against him, my knees tucking behind his, my arm sliding over his side. He didn't wake.

My hand glided up his back, and my fingertips found the Falna.

Though the Falna was not the only thing written on him.

Below its lowest line, a shade left of his spine, sat a scar. Old, pale, underneath the ink of his falna—and its twin sat on the other side of him, over his heart, where my cheek had rested some hours ago. Front and back. One wound. Something had gone through this man—through muscle, through bone, through the heart itself—and by every law of mortal flesh, the story should have ended there.

Rose had found it first, last night, her fingers stopping on his chest mid-everything. A legacy of a misspent youth, he'd said, in the same tone a man uses to explain something mundane, and kissed her before she could arrange the next question.

A misspent youth.

Another line in his ledger of impossibilities. I filed it with the rest.

I traced it slowly. The hieroglyphs of another goddess, glowing faintly even at rest, arranged in a script no mortal in this world could read and only a handful of gods would recognise. My fingers followed the lines and, in the privacy of my own head, I redrew them—imagined my valkyries there instead, my boar, my falcon-feathers, my name burning at the crown of his spine.

Mine would look better on him. I was quite objective about this.

I had mixed feelings about the goddess who had actually blessed him.

Alaya. A curious deity, that one. Across the span of realities—and I had seen more of that span than most who now walked Orario's streets—divinity waxed and waned. Whole pantheons guttered out like candles when their worlds stopped believing, or stopped needing them, or simply moved on. But two persisted, always, in every world where they existed at all: Gaia, who interceded for the planet, and Alaya, who interceded for humanity. Not worshipped. Not loved. Simply there, the way gravity was there. A will without a temple.

And humanity's will had, for reasons unrecorded, wrapped its seal around a noodle vendor.

That such a being had descended to this world—pressed her mark into a mortal's back like any common goddess signing her Familia—and then ascended again, leaving him behind...

I was quite possibly the only deity in Orario, save one, who knew for certain what those two pillars of light on the fourth day of the sixth month had been. And the one exception was the reason the whole affair had been possible at all. Ouranos sat beneath the Guild like a mountain, and nothing descended past Orario's walls without his knowledge. Alaya's visit had been permitted. Which meant there had been an agreement, and I would have traded a great deal to know its terms.

My working theory—and I turned it over now, my palm flat and warm against his shoulder blade—was that Shirou was Ouranos's child. His only one. The old god had declared neutrality since time immemorial, had taken no Familia, blessed no mortal; but suppose he had found one he wished to keep. So: ask a visiting power to descend, stamp the Falna, and ascend, leaving behind a godless adventurer whom the Guild—Ouranos's Guild—guarded with suspicious devotion. An agent of Ouranos's will, hidden in plain sight behind a noodle cart.

It was a tidy theory. It had exactly one flaw, and the flaw was fatal: a Falna whose goddess had returned to heaven could never be updated. Every drop of excelia Shirou earned pooled uselessly beneath a locked seal. What god arranges an agent and then stunts him? Ouranos was patient, not wasteful.

So the theory was wrong, or incomplete, and the truth was stranger. The truth was usually stranger, with him.

My gaze slid lower, beneath the emblem that crowned the Falna—an orb, orbited by two concentric rings, and at its centre a human figure inscribed within circle and square, arms and legs doubled and outstretched. Humanity, measured and bounded. Alaya's mark, presumably; I had never seen its like on any other back.

And beneath it, the first line of his status. The line that had nearly undone four months of patient disguise when I read it last night, in the dark, over the shoulder of a sleeping man.

Reality Marble: Unlimited Blade Works.

I lowered my head until my lips hovered a breath above the words. I did not touch. If I touched, I was not entirely certain what I would do next.

I was, among other things, a goddess of magic—the seiðr was mine before half these children's pantheons had names—and so I knew what those two words meant, even rendered in divine script on a mortal's skin. A Reality Marble. The rarest heresy a soul could commit: to reject the world's truth and answer it with your own. To carry an entire world folded inside your heart and, at need, unfold it over reality, overwriting creation itself within its bounds.

Such magic almost never arose in humans. It belonged to beings whose perception had drifted so far from the common shore that the world could no longer convince them of itself—minds alien by nature, or made alien by ages of life. Even the long-lived races rarely managed it. This world's elves, for all their centuries and their forests and their insufferable poetry, thought in shapes far too close to human; a longer life spent having the same kind of thoughts brings you no nearer to holding your own world inside your chest. The fairy races of certain other realities, now—those creatures carried an inhumanity woven into their very foundations, and I did not doubt some of them could bloom such a magic. But an elf of Orario? Never.

A human or any of the other inhuman races of this reality? Practically impossible.

And here was the thing that kept me lying awake in a merchant's bed at noon: no Falna could grant this. A god's blessing translated a soul's accumulated experience into power—it unlocked, refined, elevated. It did not invent a second world inside a person. Ability written on a back had to have its root in the soul beneath.

Unless the root was already there. Unless the soul had carried the seed of its own world all along, and Alaya's or Ouranos's blessing had merely watered it—fast-tracked into full flower something that had been growing, quietly, for a very long time.

Which meant the man breathing slowly under my arm had held this thing within him long before any blessing touched him.

I had seen his soul, that first day in the market. I saw it still, whenever I let my eyes soften and look properly. A vast grey field, patched with green, under a twilight sky of grinding gears—and blades. Thousands upon thousands of blades, planted like grave markers to the horizon, every one of them a conviction given steel and edge. And most of them rusted. Notched. Broken at the hilt or snapped at the tang.

A world's worth of swords—broken and splendid, mortal and divine and stranger than either, all of them planted together.

'It would be easy.'

There it was again. His back lay bare before me, the Falna unguarded, the man himself trusting and asleep. One shift of will—Syr set aside, Freya assumed—and I could have him. Charm him awake, or simply take; there was not a lock in this house or this city that could keep me from something I had decided to claim. The Familia next door would hear nothing they hadn't already heard. By evening he could be in Babel, in silver and my colours, and the field of swords would be mine to walk whenever I pleased.

I closed my eyes and let the temptation move through me the way one lets a wave pass, feet planted in the sand.

Because that was the trouble with being what I was. War, death, beauty—I had presided over all three since before this world had a name for me, and his soul spoke to every one of them. A battlefield after the fighting. A graveyard of purposes. Beautiful, achingly so, and dulled—dulled the way a blade dulls, through use without mercy. I would never forgive myself if I took it now, tarnished, when I could instead see it restored. Reforged. Every one of those thousand-thousand swords blazing whole under a clean sky.

What would that even look like? I genuinely did not know, and there were so very few things left in any reality of which I could say that.

The honest truth—and I permitted myself honesty at noon, in bed, where no one could hold it against me—was that I had not planned to be here at all. Last night was meant to belong to Rose and Sophie. As Syr, I had taken a genuine liking to the two Guild staff. I considered them friends.

I had intended to see the three of them off at Shirou's door, walk back to my tower, and enjoy the evening through my mirror like the civilised voyeur I am. Perhaps reward one of my children with my company; Heith had earned something, healing him so boldly in front of half the city.

But I had lingered at the merged tables, and I had watched him talk with Astraea.

He spoke to her without deference—no bowed head, no honorifics beyond courtesy, a mortal addressing a goddess as though the distance between them were a table's width and nothing more.

I had, of course, watched Shirou with other deities, and he treated them all the same. Even the day Aphrodite tried her charm on him—I nearly declared war that afternoon—the charm didn't truly take purchase, and he had treated her all the same when he served her.

But that was not what bothered me.

Astraea, star-crowned Justice herself, had leaned into it, delighted. And his soul—

His soul had flickered. Brightened. Just a little. Just at the edges, like a banked forge answering a breath of bellows, warmth rippling out across that grey field whilst he discussed orphanage repairs and common tables and the feeding of a wounded city.

For her.

I was not proud of what I felt in that moment, but I have never wasted much effort on that sort of pride. It was jealousy, plain and green and entirely beneath me, and I felt it anyway. Because it was unfair. What did Justice know of a field of swords?

Oh, justice could extend its purview to war and violence when it must. But—

His soul was a battlefield. Every blade in it forged for a fight, broken in a fight, planted in the earth of a fight like a marker over the dead. That was not her country. Astraea could walk its border and admire the tragedy of it, weigh its deeds on her scales, but she could never read it. A landscape like that was made for a goddess of war. It was practically addressed to one.

And yet it had brightened for her, and not for the grey-haired waitress who fed him gossip and stole bites of his cooking and had spent four months building, brick by patient brick, a place at his side.

So I had stayed. I had walked through his door with the other two, and I had made certain the night included me. And if a certain shirt happened to end up on a certain chair, as a small tax on the goddess who had made his soul flicker—well. Justice, I'm told, is about balance.

Rose stirred, murmured something that might have been a form number, and burrowed deeper into the pillow. Sophie's answering snore was profoundly unromantic. Shirou's breathing never changed—slow, even, the rhythm of a man who slept lightly everywhere except, apparently, here.

I settled my hand flat over the Falna, over the seal of an absent goddess and the name of an impossible magic, and felt his heartbeat come up through my palm. Steady. Mortal. No two of its beats would ever be quite the same; no moment of him would ever repeat.

'It would be easy.'

To let this body sleep. To rise as Freya. To turn him over and let him wake to silver eyes, and end the game in a single morning. Every instinct I had carried across a hundred realities pulled in the same direction, and I lay there in my borrowed mortality, thoroughly and deliciously tempted, holding the whole of my divinity still by the width of a breath.

But I would tend this field. However long it took, whoever watered it in the meantime—in the end, he would be mine.

For now, my jealousy remained untempered. And according to what I had overheard of Asfi's briefing, the earpieces would not come off for some hours yet.

So, for once, the Goddess of Death, Love, War, Lust, Fertility, and Magic would take justice into her own hands.

I began to trail kisses down Shirou's back, descending lower.

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End

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