Wyborn

[Dhampir]

Melquiado Hashoma stood from his camp and packed his kit in silence. His horse lay in the grass nearby, and did not stir in slumber. Daylight had not yet come.

This must be it, Melquiado thought to himself with impatience, all bound with desire. The lines of the winds, the many lines gathered from all corners of the Earth, converged at a point on the horizon not far off. They would no longer fight the crooked rain of last afternoon. But to the long wanderer, who suffered many wounds while following instructions and his own intuitions that led him into desolation, to Melquiado there seemed no reason now that propelled his journey.

He cast the dice to reassure himself, that this is the true end of his Diamond Path. He leaned on his sword, inching closer to read the three faces of the die. They rolled four times each, cast in straight paths, and delivered the number 18. Nine, completion; and he must strike in two steps. In two steps, he thought. Two advancements, until Melquiado finds the golden fruit. Toward this prize his life raced entire, the life of a rumored legend to the Lonesome Era, the warrior that exposed all seven of the False Grails that he carried now in his satchel. Walking carefully with his blade and heritage as his great burden, Melquiado had always sought the land promised to the last son of the Kirimohu. Though sometimes beset by jackals, gnolls and other kin of Belmont, he walked his Diamond Path no matter how blood-stained; and now he only asked himself, is my kingdom to have desert origins?

The sun rose. Melquiado fully undressed from his pajama furs of deer and wolves, and packed them onto the saddle. He paused a moment to tune his wild cello, a berimbau with four strings that could just as smoothly nock arrows, and wore it across his front. “Let’s go Chester,” he said to his horse, a fairfax mustang, and got him up from the grass. He saddled the lazy horse in crisp morning gray. They only rode a short distance, under an hour, before the winds grew torrential. Melquiado shivered as his outer kimono ballooned whipping in the wind and he regretted not to wear the heavy furs. But within minutes the winds ceased, and Melquiado came to a small altar within a grove. The kensei recognized its design and dimension; a crying eye with a single tear, when viewed from above: to the floor in relief.

Melquiado jumped down from Chester’s shadow, and approached the altar. There, he saw four colors—four turns of the dice, he thought—and recognized them the same as the clothes he wore: purple hakama, red inner gi, blue kimono, and his long green floppy cap. Within the teardrop was the hollow space of a keyhole.

Step one. Upon the altar Melquiado quickly smashed the seven False Grails, eager to be rid. This was the destruction of ancient heirlooms, and Melquiado's final act in deposing the seven false kings he'd overturned, philistines pretending divine heritage. The winds howling behind them began to bellow in destructive tendency, ripping leaves from the autumn trees and trumpeting the end of the Lonesome Era. He drew his instrument’s bow, and upon his borticello he began a New Orleans nocturne painful and funerific: “the Stale Dirge, & Rattle of the Skeleton Keys.”

He felt the notes echo through the strings in his fingers and continue their harmonic progressions, growing faint and remote amidst the winds from all corners of the Earth that gathered together to bellow in his ears; and they must have carried him from that world.

---------

“Here we stand in a fresh, strange land,” Melquiado Hashoma said to himself, gone now of Chester, as he always said to himself when arriving for the first time in foreign country. The winds had landed him in the middle of an empty town. He admired with detachment the sky's dense blue, fringed with fronds of palm. There is a light in the sky, but I would not call it the sun, he thought. There were monkeys in the palm trees and they grew from every veranda, but he could see nor sense no one.

Melquiado stood before an idol that sat in a scum-ridden fountain. A great bear was carved from golden cedar, rendered gentle in slumber through artistic expression, and garlanded with violets. And Melquiado found bedrock faith that could not waver, that this city seen one morning through the eye of grief was the true promise for Kirimohu. For the Black Blade, and the destiny of grief for anyone that might wield it, would only be suffered if it also carried an oath of protection from high authority. And it was on the day he received the Black Blade, many grains of sand ago, that he received the first prophecy of his fate, and the last to be fulfilled: “you will find the Bear and you will tell him he is dead.”

Melquiado drew the Black Blade from his knight’s belt, tied at his spine: straight like a ninjato, longer than a katana, and double-edged like the ancient tsurugi, and cleaved the bear’s head in one advance. The cedar did not splinter and split as easily as thread.

Melquiado spun in the sunlight toward the empty square. "I am Melquiado Hashoma, son of Kenselah, and upon the might of the Black Blade I proclaim this the Kingdom of the Kirimohu!"

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Rock. ROCK.

[Dhampir]

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