Facets of Fantasy: Legacy

“You will live as long as I. Maybe even longer. You know that, right?”

“Yes, Teacher.”

The street was full of noise. All around them Kyoto rose, with its face of glass and steel and concrete, and its voice of bicycle bells and street vendors and bustling crowds. A city more than one million strong, a city that dwarfed the city of his youth – the same city, the same Kyoto as it had been then. But his youth seemed a million years ago now. In reality, it was scarcely more than a century.

“I'm barely an old man. If the cycle had not begun... Who knows how long I would have lived?”

His student nodded. A giant of a man, a blond foreigner from a land he'd barely known in his youth; the land of the Eagle. A strange man to inherit the Sword. A strange man to guard the Book of Truth. But he had been the best choice; he had humility, despite his strength. And he was skilled, moreso than any of his other students. It had been the best choice.

“How old are you really, Teacher?”

He thought.

“I was born in the Edo era. I am one-hundred and sixty-two years old. My body is perhaps sixty.”

“How does that happen, Teacher?”

His voice was like a child's. He barely spoke Japanese, and his words were simple, clumsy. David. Like the small man from the Christian Bible. Though he wasn't small. Or Christian, at least as far as the Teacher knew.

“The Sword keeps you alive. The doctor... Your friend, he says it does something to DNA. Rewrites it. The old ones said it rewrites your destiny; maybe that is what they meant. Listen carefully: Now that you have inherited it... I am going to die. Every day I go without it, it's as if I age a year.”

“But Teacher – you said nothing-”

“Draw the Sword.”

“But-”

“Draw it.”

The Sword unfolded from David's arm, shining, living metal, from the ancient times. From the previous cycle. If the Teacher was old, then the Sword was – how old? How many guardians had held it? How many bodies had it bonded to, like it now bonded to David's? The thick strands of biomass flowed from his powerful forearm, intertwined at the hand, forming the hilt. The weapon purified, intensified, distilled into liquid metal and poured out to form the glinting blade, the blade that could cut through anything. A symbiont, the doctor had called it. A living creature, bonded with the host.

He admired it. He had never seen it like this before, in another man's hands – not since his own Teacher drew it that fateful night in Satsuma.

“This blade will be your life, David Blaze.”

“Yes, Teacher.”

“You will use it to guard the Book of Truth. Until it passes to another. Until you die. Only then will the Sword move on. Only then will your duty end. It is not seemly for a Guardian to grow old in peace.”

The student caught on. His clear blue eyes searched the old man's face, searched for a clue beneath the snow-white eyebrows, between the crow's feet that lined his ancient eyes.

 “This blade will be your life, David Blaze. And yes. When your teaching is complete... it will also be my death.”