Chapter 212: Space Sword

The Elder crouched at the edge of the chasm.

It was the first time Encrid had seen it gather itself. For five days, it had only walked. Slowly. Steadily. Never hurrying, never stopping, the way a glacier moves. Now its great legs were bending beneath it. The rock at the edge of the chasm cracked under its weight. Small stones broke loose and fell into the Riven, bouncing off the walls of the gorge on their long way down.

Its blind head was lowered.

In the ruin of its right eye, the hilt of Rael’s greatsword caught the last of the red light.

And through the Star, Encrid could feel the thin cold thread that ran into its body from somewhere far back in the horde. It was not loose anymore. It was pulled tight. Tighter than he had ever felt it.

Something was telling the Elder to jump.

Encrid knew exactly what would happen if it did.

It did not need to clear the gap. It only needed to reach the end of the Span. Its weight would come down on the deep-folk’s stone, and its tusk would go into the bridge the way Ulrich Vance had said it would go into the Wall.

A wedge.

The bindings would not hold that. Not after the Earth Splitting Sword had already cracked the northern end. The Span would break. Not cleanly, the way the Grand Magus’s spell would break it. It would come apart in pieces, and the pieces would fall, and the Magus’s spell would fall with them.

And the Elder would be on the south side of the Riven.

With everyone.

Encrid looked at the Elder.

He had six forms.

He went through them in his head in the space of a single heartbeat.

Falling Talon would press it down. It was too heavy to press down. Winter Fang would pierce it. It was too big to die from a hole. Frost Sword would hold it for a breath. Ruin Sword would break a piece of it. Earth Splitting Sword had already been used. Severing Heaven was a cut for the sky.

None of them were enough.

The Elder was not a beast. It was a mountain that walked.

You did not kill a mountain by hitting it.

The Elder’s legs bent further beneath it.

Fourteen seconds.

And at the very bottom of the borrowed memories, in the oldest and faintest of them, a man stood on a mountainside with nothing below him and the sky above him.

And he cut something that was not there.

? ? ?

Encrid had not noticed it before.

It had been buried beneath everything else the token had given him. Beneath the six forms. Beneath nine generations of courtyards and winter forests and torchlit walls. So faint and so old that the token itself seemed to have passed over it.

He noticed it now.

He did not understand it. He only knew that it was there, at the bottom of everything, older than the six forms. Older than the Gannon name, perhaps. A shape that had been lost so long ago that no one alive knew it had ever existed.

The six forms struck at things.

The seventh did not.

The six forms cut through the air, and the stone, and the flesh of the beasts. The man on the mountainside had not cut through any of those.

He had cut what held them.

Encrid was an Absolute now, and for thirteen more seconds. He could feel the world the way that man must have felt it. Not as things. As the place the things were in. The stone of the Span and the air above it and the empty gorge below, and the Elder, crouched at the edge of the chasm. All of it, resting in something. Held by something. The way a reflection is held by the surface of a lake.

And a surface could be cut.

For one moment, Encrid hesitated.

What if he was wrong?

He had never performed this form.

No one had, not for longer than anyone could remember. He did not know its name. He did not know whether a shape half-glimpsed in a stranger’s memory could become a real thing in a real hand. If he swung and nothing happened, there would be no second swing. The Elder would land, and the Span would break, and everything he had done in the last fifty seconds would have been for nothing.

Then he thought of Ulrich Vance.

Standing between the tusks in the dark, with a forest full of Roamers around him. Not moving. Not attacking. Waiting.

He waited, Rael had said. I didn’t understand why.

Encrid understood now.

Ulrich had not been afraid. He had simply known that there would be one moment, and only one, and that he could not afford to spend it early.

Encrid lifted his sword.

He did not raise it high. He did not draw it back. He held it in front of him, at the height of his chest, the point angled slightly toward the Elder’s head.

He was very calm.

He had never been so calm in his life.

The Elder jumped.

It came off the edge of the chasm in a single enormous bound, its whole weight hurled forward behind its lowered tusk. The rock where it had crouched exploded into dust. It filled the sky. It blotted out the red light. The air in front of it roared like a storm wind.

Encrid waited.

One heartbeat.

Then he moved his sword.

It was a very small movement. Smaller than any of the other forms. A single short stroke, left to right, at the height of his chest.

The blade did not touch the Elder.

The Elder was still fifteen paces away, in the air, coming down toward the bridge.

The blade cut the space between them.

"Gannon Family Swordsmanship," Encrid whispered as he swung. "Seventh Form."

The name came to him at the same instant as the movement, as if the two had always been one thing.

"Space Sword."

There was no sound.

There was no light.

There was only a line.

A thin black line, appearing in the air in front of Encrid’s sword. It was not a crack. It was not a shadow. It was not anything. It was simply a place where, for one instant, there was nothing at all. Not air. Not light. Not even dark.

The line ran from left to right across the space in front of him.

It ran across the place where the Elder was.

Across its neck.

The Elder did not stop.

It came down onto the end of the Span with all its enormous weight, its tusk lowered, exactly as Encrid had known it would.

It did not land, however.

To be precise, its body landed. Its huge legs struck the stone of the bridge, and the Span shuddered from end to end, and the deep-folk’s bindings screamed.

But its head did not come with it.

Its head was on the other side of the line.

It fell separately. Slowly. The great blind head with its single tusk turned over once in the air and dropped past the end of the Span, into the Riven. Rael’s greatsword went with it, still buried in the ruined eye. It fell for a long time. Encrid did not hear it land.

The body stood for a moment on the end of the bridge.

Its legs were still braced. Its weight was still leaning forward, toward the south, toward the place the thread had told it to go.

Then it slid sideways off the cracked edge and followed the head down.

The Span shook once more as the weight left it.

Then it was still.

[ ?????? ]

[ *?????????&**?????? ]

[ Error!! ]

The system, as expected, glitched.

? ? ?

Magic Castle bonus Chapter. Thank you @Nagii344~