Blades Falling Softly, page 1
part #1 of The Brightest Shadow Series
Blades Falling Softly
A Novella of The Brightest Shadow
Version 1.0
© 2021 Sarah Lin
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Addendum
Attached to this letter is a troubling, oft-overlooked manuscript. The first several sections appear to be a simple manual of blade techniques and sein arts; well above average, but not truly remarkable. Yet as it progresses, it claims to record events that, if true, would be disturbing indeed.
The Taynol Valley is indeed a region in southwestern Nol, but given the toll of the conflict and subsequent riots, it is difficult to verify any of the claims made. One might be tempted to believe the manual is a fictional attempt to explain those events, except surely a mendacious author would not include such unbelievable claims. And if their attempt was to mock our Savior and Hero, why place those alleged secrets in an event of relatively little importance?
What I can confirm is that the two families named are real: Anyinn Tayn was accomplished enough to be placed in her clan's shrine, and there are records of someone named Canumon leaving the enemy military. For that reason, I include this manuscript despite my considerable doubts.
Anyinn
Every time Anyinn laid down her sword and picked up her quill, she found herself hesitating. The decisive strokes that came so easily in the courtyard abandoned her when she attempted to place them onto a scroll. All she had written so far covered only the humblest basics of what she hoped to leave for her descendants.
Her eyes wandered from the dried words to the activity in the courtyard beneath her. Just over the rail, students spun and twisted through the air, like leaves caught in the wind. They were children still drunk on their understanding of sein, leaping about in ways that would be suicidal in an actual battle, but they only brought a smile to her face. Still, to find anything worth writing, she would need to look onward.
The older students mostly trained beyond the first group, more reserved and more dangerous. Yet as Anyinn looked over their movements, she saw no insight that was worthy of inclusion. They were the steps and lunges that had been taught by her father and that she had taught to her children. If she wanted her manuscript to add anything to the legacy of the Tayn clan, she needed something new, something beyond the experiences of her own life.
Setting aside her quill, Anyinn gathered her robes around her and slid over the side of the balcony. She no longer saw or felt the rail and the marble floor - unchanged after so many years - only the landscape of the students around her. Though she could have named every one, they occupied a thin list in her mind, not the flood of memories from the previous generations she had trained.
Except the smallest of them, of course. Anyinn smiled as her gaze found its way to her daughter Heraenyas... at the same moment one of the students let out a cry of rage and pain.
Anyinn saw the student, a young man from a distant branch of the clan, pitching wildly toward a display of weapons. He had drawn deep on the sein within his soul, but without understanding or filtering it, leading to his own strength recoiling against him. It was clear that he would strike the weapons, jarring them from their places to scatter over the courtyard. She had more than enough time to intercept him, yet she found her hand flying to draw her sword, not to assist.
As the young man crashed into the display rack, Anyinn swept in faster than her students could blink. She pulled him back with one hand and grasped the rack with her other... but not quickly enough. Several of the blades flew from their places, directly toward Heraenyas. All the speed she'd spent a lifetime training gave her only the capacity to watch the blades flying toward her daughter, not to intercept them in time.
Yet Heraenyas leapt on instinct, hopping away from the weapons. In the next moment, the steel rang out against the wall, Anyinn swept up her daughter, and all the other students finally turned to look in shock.
Anyinn desperately wanted to hold Heraenyas tight, but she could already feel her squirming. Though she still saw the little girl dancing with flowers in her hair, she knew that her daughter no longer wanted to be treated as a child. Indeed, she'd just proved that she had begun to grasp the basics of her art.
So instead Anyinn set the girl down and turned to her students, her fear transmuted into anger that she struggled to swallow. By the time she reached the group, she had made her face calm, but all of them stared at her in apprehension. The boy most of all, already having dropped to one knee with his head lowered, so she spoke before he could begin an apology.
"How could this accident have been avoided?" she asked, her gaze meeting each student in turn before falling on the boy.
"I... I lost control of my sein." He stopped to swallow, only briefly managing to raise his eyes. "I was attempting... a technique too advanced for me."
"Perhaps." As Anyinn continued looking down at him, the simmering of her anger subsided. She thought of him as a boy, but that was only her age speaking: he was a young man, no doubt chafing at the limitations of the clan's teachings. "I heard not just pain in your voice, but anger. Why was that?"
"The power... it made me angry, and I started moving before I knew what I was doing."
"No." Anyinn knelt by the young man and grasped his shoulder firmly. "You have forgotten your earliest lessons. To think of sein as merely power is to forget yourself. Sein is everything that you are, and though that can be a great strength, it can also be a weakness. The flaw was not the technique you chose, but attempting to wield anger within you that you did not understand."
"Then...?" The young man finally dared to look up, hopeful, but she shook her head.
"Someone of your age should not be making such mistakes. I will send you back to your uncle for remedial training until he approves."
The emotions across his face were all so obvious: shock, indignation, shame, and eventual resignation. No doubt he thought this was the end of his life, humiliated in front of his peers and sent away - she remembered how such lessons had felt at his age. The fact that he lowered his head in acceptance instead of arguing spoke well of him, however, and he had many years to grow.
Though Anyinn gave the others a short lesson, her mind had already wandered on. As soon as she coaxed the atmosphere back to the peace of training, she turned to Heraenyas. Her daughter had her hands calmly tucked in her sleeves, an imitation of an adult, but she couldn't quite control her smile or keep herself from hopping back and forth.
"Mother... I did well, didn't I?" Heraenyas looked up at her with such undisguised eagerness that Anyinn couldn't help but smile in response. One day clan politics would teach her not to show her emotions so openly, but not yet.
"You were as swift as a waterfall, daughter. Not many with so little training could have avoided injury."
"I wanted to strike them!" A small hand shot out in a fist displaying more excitement than skill. "To knock all the weapons down just like you do! But... I jumped before I could think about it."
"And you did the right thing. Using your sein to move swiftly is a very different task from using it to block steel." Finally Anyinn reached out and touched her daughter's shoulders, caressing them affectionately. This, at least, the girl tolerated.
Sometimes it was difficult to believe that Heraenyas was her daughter, for all that they had the same dark hair and eyes. At that age, Anyinn had been shy and obedient, never even dreaming of something so aggressive as striking weapons out of the air. Yet her daughter threw herself into fights against children years older than her and eagerly pestered everyone she knew for stories of war.
It might have been the girl's nature, but Anyinn couldn't help but wonder if she had been responsible. The girl's two older brothers had both been far calmer children, clearly reflecting their parents. Their eldest had become the epitome of a Tayn warrior and though their second had left his sein training, he had become a responsible merchant philosopher.
Yet somehow, when she and Noreinu had decided to have one more child, they had produced Heraenyas. The girl had swept aside all of the phantasmal daughters that had once occupied Anyinn's mind.
With disaster averted, Anyinn gave her daughter a few suggestions and spent some time instructing her students on the finer points of sein. By the time she was done, she almost felt inspired to write something new, yet when she sat down, all her insights seemed pedestrian.
Before she could so much as wet her quill, the peace of the training chamber was disrupted once again: the doors slammed open and a young man strode inside.
She recognized Boulanu as one of the clan's independent warriors, usually traveling throughout the western forests. The fact that he had not come to train was obvious enough in his eyes and made undeniable by his combat robes and hat. Students went bareheaded as a matter of humility - though Anyinn suspected practicality played a larger role - but Boulanu wore a peaked hat at a rakish angle.
"Anyinn Tayn!" He must have seen her, but still made a show of looking over the students. "Enemies stand at our gates and the time for gentle instruction has passed! I challenge you for the position of school representative!"
"What are you doing, Boulanu?" Anyinn rose to her feet, keeping her hands within her sleeves to show she didn't acknowledge his challenge. "What enemies, and
"The fact that you don't even know what we face is another reason why you must step down! I have seen Deathspawn rising in the east and they will soon be upon us. Against such monsters, your Tranquil Blade will be meaningless."
Seeing that he would not back down so easily, Anyinn slowly walked to the marble floor, where a space rapidly cleared. She had heard tales of "Deathspawn monsters" but was not convinced they were anything more than human beings attempting to mask themselves in fierce legends. There were no more real Deathspawn in the world than there were winged lions or destined heroes.
When they met one another in the center of the marble diamond laid out for challenges, Anyinn lowered her voice to speak to her challenger alone. "Boulanu, are you certain you want to take this path? You must know how it will end. If you have concerns, you are always free to speak with me."
"You cannot stand against the strength I found in Nol Efeltalia! Stand aside, before they sweep us away!" Though Boulanu shouted, she caught an edge of fear in his voice. He took a deep breath and his sein swelled within him... vaster than before, but ill-considered. She doubted that he could even perceive his own soul with all his senses.
Like so many young warriors, he mistook force for strength. As the chimes rang to begin their match, Anyinn sighed. She had not wanted to humiliate him, but she could not ignore an official challenge from within the clan.
Like most careless warriors, his movements were all elaborate techniques and no footwork. No doubt he called his punch the Bull Rampaging Through the Forest, but his feet moved in a conspicuous line. Anyinn barely needed to call upon her sein to gently redirect his fist with the side of her sword.
Then she cast her free hand forward in the technique she had spent her life crafting: the Tranquil Blade. A sword appeared in his chest, formed not of steel but of memories. It shimmered so briefly it might not have existed at all, if not for the immediate undeniable effect.
Her opponent's eyes went distant as for an extended moment he lived her experience of resting beside a crystal lake, feeling nothing but contentment as she watched the leaves drift into the water through the dappled sunlight. She had forged the memory of that perfect day into a weapon that drew no blood and left no mark. Though his sein remained strong, only briefly overcome by hers, he slowly settled to the ground, his rage draining.
In return, Anyinn let his displaced sein stream through her. It was no concentrated experience, instead flashes of emotion and memory he had drawn on to attack her. More of the fragments were fear and concern than she had expected, driven by shuddering memories of threats. More rumor than substance, she thought, but she was surprised by how deeply he feared these supposed Deathspawn.
Some of her students began to whip their sleeves approvingly, but Anyinn silenced them with a glance. She bent down beside her fallen opponent, catching his gaze as he struggled to return to the present. He would find his rage again, so she considered a salve for his pride and spoke quietly.
"Now, speak clearly: what can you tell us of this threat we face?"
The tale that emerged was calm but fragmented: supposedly these Deathspawn had been attempting to infiltrate their lands through deals with Nolese merchants. It was unclear if this faction had a government or if they ignored the Nolese Coalition, but now they intended to invade the Taynol Valley by the ancient rites. Rumor had it that some so-called Deathspawn had already been spotted and that they would be forcing their claim within days.
As Anyinn settled back on her heels, her students scattered into rumor and gossip. The threat was not so illusory after all, if someone really did intend to invoke the Taynol Valley rites. But the very fact that they intended to claim ownership of unoccupied land through the traditional channels suggested that this was no invasion of monsters. Indeed, the rites could only be invoked by residents of Nol, so unless their claim was a pretext, she saw only clan politics in his story.
Yet it meant far more than that to her students, drunk on ancient tales of great wars. Seeing that no meaningful work would be done that day, Anyinn dismissed them with a futile command not to spread hearsay. As they dispersed, she carefully rolled up her manuscript, cleaned the training grounds, and finally locked the doors with the key around her neck.
By that time, only Heraenyas remained, eagerly miming strikes in the air. As they walked the long path back to their home, the girl jumped between rocks in a path of her own. Eventually even that was not enough outlet for her eagerness and she turned around to look at her.
"Mother, do you think the Deathspawn are really invading? Will there be war?"
"Perhaps there will be violence between clans, but I do not think it will be war." Or so Anyinn hoped, her mind falling back to the battlefields of the Efeltalian civil war. Even two decades past, those memories had teeth.
"But what if the monsters come? Are they really ten feet tall with burning eyes and lightning for hair?"
"That is a question for your father, I think. I have heard many tales of bizarre foreigners, but when I met them, they have all been humans of different shapes and colors."
Heraenyas sulked to the next rock, clearly having desired a better answer. She remained there as Anyinn caught up, then spoke in a lower voice. "Are you going to fight them? You're the strongest in the clan, right?"
"Not nearly." Anyinn chuckled as she bent to brush some of the wild hair from her daughter's face. "But as the school representative, I would be among those sent out if they invoke the rites. Whether or not there is any fighting will depend on the truth of these matters."
"Can I come?"
"I think you know the answer to that, don't you?"
Heaving a great sigh to indicate no one in clan history had ever been so unfairly treated, Heraenyas turned away and skipped ahead. Even her movements remained somewhat muted until they arrived home, unless that was Anyinn's thoughts coloring her world. As she grew older, sometimes she worried that she saw expectations and memories instead of what lay before her.
When they reached their home beside the cliff, Heraenyas ran in shouting of the day's events, and Anyinn smiled despite everything. She made her way to the door more slowly, seeing not so much the building as the events that had built it. Their sons begging to sleep on the roof as children, repairing the doorway as adolescents, walking out the gate to begin their own lives...
Though she moved as lightly as the wind, Anyinn's soul stumbled heavily by the time she entered. The sight of her husband bending down beside their daughter did much to warm her again. "You must be hungry after all that work," Noreinu said gently. "Why don't you wash up so that we can eat?"
"But Father..."
"I need to speak to Mother. You come back and join us." With that, he took off his artist's hat and flopped it down over her head. Heraenyas giggled like she never did in the school and tottered into the house half-blind.
As their daughter left, Noreinu rose to his feet and Anyinn was surprised how slowly and carefully he moved. When she looked at his face, she saw the river of their lives together more than his exact features, but she noted that his hair was grayer than she remembered. He had left his own sein training as a child, so the years weighed far heavier on him.
Anyinn took his hand as he rose and pulled closer to kiss his cheek. His hands were more lined than they had once been, but what she noticed was the paint staining them. "I see that you've been painting today."
"Poorly." He squeezed her hand and slid his other arm around her waist in a motion as practiced as any technique. "But I have no inspiration to write anything, so I made some feeble efforts at a canvas."
Though he was known as a playwright, Anyinn privately thought that her husband's painting was his greater skill, despite his protests. The dream-like brushstrokes might not be the current style in the Coalition courts, but she found them beautiful. Whereas she didn't doubt his skills as a writer, but all too often he stayed close to familiar war epics or the perennially popular romances.
"I wasn't able to write anything today either," Anyinn said as she put away her manuscript, "even before all the distractions. But I suppose Heraenyas has already told you the dramatic stories?"
