The last thing Sergeant Aldric Voss felt was mud.
Not clean mud. Not the soft earth of a riverbank at dawn or the cool soil beneath a farmer's boots. This was battlefield mud, thick with ash and copper, soaked through with the kind of darkness that no amount of rain could wash away. He lay face-down in it, cheek pressed flat against the ground, and thought, absurdly, that it was warmer than he expected death to be.
His body had stopped listening to him three minutes ago. The wound in his back, between the fourth and fifth rib on his left side, perfectly placed, had seen to that. Too precise. He had spent seventeen years killing men, and he knew the difference between a lucky strike and an intentional one.
Someone had waited for the perfect moment.
Someone who knew exactly where to stand.
"Garon," he whispered. The name turned to blood in his mouth.
His second-in-command. His brother in arms. The man who had held his daughter's hand at her naming ceremony four summers ago, laughing with his big stupid laugh while the baby cried. The man who had been standing exactly three feet behind him when the battle line broke.
The sounds of war continued around him, steel grinding against steel, men screaming words that had long lost their meaning, the low groan of the dying folding itself beneath the noise of those still fighting. But Aldric heard none of it anymore. His world had narrowed down to mud and cold and the very specific clarity that comes to a man in his final moments.
He had always assumed death would feel like sleep.
It did not.
It felt like being poured.
Like water forced through a gap too narrow to hold it, like everything he was, the memories, the muscle, the seventeen years of war and the six years before that of a boy who had wanted nothing more than to tend his father's land, all of it compressed and threaded through something impossibly small until he came out the other side in a shape he did not choose and could not understand.
There was heat. There was pressure. There was a sound like a forge running at full blast, iron screaming as it surrendered its old form to become something entirely new.
Then nothing.
Then everything.
He became aware of himself slowly, the way a man wakes in a room he does not recognize, piece by piece, detail by detail, the wrongness assembling itself before the panic has a chance to follow. He had no hands. He knew this before he understood anything else. No feet, no chest, no lungs drawing breath. He could not blink because he had no eyes, and yet somehow he saw, a dim awareness of the space around him the way a blind man senses a wall before his fingers find it.
He existed. And the shape of his existence was long and narrow and cold.
What, he thought, with the stunning calm of a man who has already spent all his capacity for shock, is happening to me?
The answer came not in words but in sensation. He felt the weight of himself, heavier than a man, denser, the kind of mass that sits in the world and refuses to be moved without real intention behind it. He felt the edges of himself: sharp. Terribly sharp. And at one end, a point that tapered to something that could split winter air and not feel the difference.
He was a spear.
A spear.
Seventeen years, he thought, with something that might have been a laugh if he still had a throat to produce one. Seventeen years of war and I come back as the weapon instead of the man holding it.
He tried to move. Discovered he could not. Tried to speak into the dark and found nothing answered him. He lay wherever he had been placed, stone from the feel of the cold pressing in from all sides, and he waited with the patience of a soldier who had learned long ago that most of war was simply waiting.
He did not know how long it lasted. Time moved strangely without a heartbeat to measure it by.
But the waiting ended.
Light came first, thin and grey, the light of a sky uncertain about the season. Then sound: wind moving through broken stone, the distant call of a bird, and footsteps. Careful footsteps, the kind that tested ground before committing weight to it.
The stone above him shifted. Scraped. Moved aside.
And she found him.
He could sense her the way he sensed the wall, not with eyes but with the strange awareness his new form had given him. She was young. She crouched over the place where he lay and for a long moment she simply looked at him. He felt her gaze the way iron feels the approach of a lodestone, a pull, a quiet recognition, something in her tuning itself to something in him.
Then she reached down and wrapped her hand around him.
The moment her skin touched the shaft of his body, the world roared into clarity. He felt everything at once, the warmth of her palm, the even and measured pressure of each finger, the absolute steadiness of her grip. No hesitation. No flinch. No trembling. Most people, he somehow understood without knowing how he understood it, could not hold him for long. Something in his nature turned away the uncertain hand and the fearful hand alike.
She was neither uncertain nor fearful.
Interesting, he thought, despite himself.
She lifted him from the stone and held him up against the grey sky, and he had his first clear sense of her. A young woman with dark hair falling loose around her shoulders, wearing clothes practical enough for long travel but clean enough that she had not been traveling very long. Her face was still. Not the stillness of someone exercising caution, but the stillness of someone who simply did not animate the way other people did. No curiosity in the eyes. No excitement at discovering a legendary cursed weapon buried in ruins. No wariness at all.
She looked at a demon spear the way a person looks at a chair they are considering whether to purchase.
"Hm," she said.
That was it. Just hm.
He found, to his considerable surprise, that he could speak to her. Not with sound but with something more direct, a pressure that formed itself into words inside the mind of whoever held him, if they were willing to receive it. He did not understand the mechanics of it. He simply found that he could, the way a man in a foreign country discovers one morning that he has begun to understand the language without remembering the moment he learned it.
Put me down, he said.
She paused. Tilted her head exactly two degrees to the right.
"You can talk," she said. Not a question. Not surprise. Simple notation, the way someone notes that rain has begun.
I can. Put me down.
"Why?"
Because I don't want to be held by a stranger. Put me down.
She considered this with the same unhurried calm she seemed to bring to everything. Then she rested the base of his shaft against the ground and held him loosely at her side, point toward the sky.
"Better?" she asked.
He did not answer, because the honest answer was yes and he was not prepared to give her that. Instead he said: Who are you?
"Kira," she said simply.
What are you doing here?
"I was looking for something useful." She turned him slightly, examining the blade at his tip with the same flat expression she had worn since the moment she pulled him from the stone. "I think I found it."
I am not useful. I am cursed. Everything you have heard about this spear is true. I bring ruin to whoever holds me. Seventeen wielders before you, all dead. He did not know if this was entirely accurate, but it felt like the sort of thing a cursed weapon ought to say, and more importantly it felt like it might work.
Kira looked at the point of his blade for a long moment.
"Seventeen," she repeated, and something shifted in her voice. Not fear. Not the wise hesitation of someone reconsidering a decision.
It sounded, unmistakably, like interest.
"That's actually quite good," she said. "I've been looking for something reliable."
He went very still inside his borrowed metal body. And in the silence that followed he became aware of something he had not noticed before, a smell, faint and specific, clinging to the hem of her travelling coat. He had spent seventeen years on battlefields. He knew that smell the way he knew his own name. He knew it the way a man knows the voice of someone who has wronged him.
What is that? he asked.
"What is what?"
That smell. On your coat.
She looked down at the hem with the same mild attention she gave everything. Then she looked back up at the grey sky.
"Oh," she said. "I passed through a village on my way here."
She began walking, carrying him with that same steady and unhurried grip, and the ruins of wherever she had found him fell away behind them. Ahead was an open road, and beyond the road, visible above the treeline, a column of black smoke rising from the direction of the nearest settlement.
What did you do? he asked, already understanding that he did not want the answer.
Kira was quiet for three steps.
"I told you," she said. "I was looking for something useful." She adjusted her grip on him slightly, comfortable and practiced, as though she had spent her whole life carrying a spear. "There were people in the village who decided they didn't want me to leave."
Aldric Voss, who had survived seventeen years of war, who had come back from death as a weapon made of iron and old fury, felt something settle in his chest that had no business being there because he no longer had a chest.
It felt very much like dread.
How many? he asked.
She thought about it. He felt the pause, unhurried, the same pause she gave every question, as though all things deserved exactly equal consideration regardless of their weight.
"Does it matter?" she finally said.
And somehow the fact that she had to think about it at all, that the number was not immediately present in her mind the way it would have been for any person still carrying guilt, was worse than any specific answer she could have given him.
The smoke continued to rise behind them. Kira walked forward without looking back, without slowing, without any of the small physical signs that betray a person who is running from something they have done.
And Aldric Voss understood, with the cold clarity of a man who has already died once and learned that there are worse things than death, that he had absolutely no idea how to make her let go of him.