Spirit Speaker

The smell of battle never changes. Smoke, sweat, blood, filth. Its nauseating scent clouded the battlefield, where dying men lay mingled with their dead comrades. Our dead comrades. My dead comrades.

She lay in my arms. My Captain, My Liege, My Queen. Her blonde hair matted with drying blood, her face ashen and pale. The wound on her side was bleeding. She didn't have long.

I wept.

She raised her shaking hand to my cheek. "Do you weep for me, my teacher?" She whispered. I pressed my lips to her shaking hand and was transported back to when I first met her thirty years earlier.

"Yes, majesty. I weep for you." I replied. "And I weep for my soul. I failed to protect you, and I deserve damnation for it."

My queen smiled, her blood-spattered face serene in the red haze of blood and smoke. "No, 

Lukas, you have fulfilled your duty. And you will serve me again in the glorious halls of our gods."

"With all my heart," I whispered. 

Tears glittered in her eyes, "Call me by my name?" She asked, her voice quiet, weak. "Like you did when I was a little girl."

"Anna." The name fell from my lips freely, and those two syllables carried every ounce of love I had for her. 

She smiled, her hand tensing in mine, and through my own tears, I watched the fire in her eyes went out. Her hand went limp in my grasp. Her breathing stilled. She died.

I closed her eyelids, pressed my lips to her forehead, arranged her body into peaceful repose, and raised my head to face her killer.

He was clean. Far too clean for a battlefield. He sat on a stone above us; a terrible smile graced his shocking beauty.

"Master Lukas, why do you weep for the dead?" He said, his voice smooth and sweet. I felt sick to my stomach, his words sharper than any wound.

"Stand and fight, traitor." The words fell weakly from my lips as I staggered to my feet. My head spun, and my wounds ached, particularly the one where the spear pierced my chest.

Blood sputtered from my lungs as I groaned with effort.

"Teacher, why fight the inevitable? Should you not wait gracefully for your end? Your queen awaits you."

"She was once your queen, too, Raethan."

His eyebrow twitched, the only sign my words made an impact. Soon, the errant movement was banished from his perfect face, and he was once again calm.

"I'm sorry that it came to this, Lukas." He sounded genuinely regretful. He stood, his rusted, jagged, bloody blade drawn from its sheath silently, deliberately. He walked towards me in slow, measured paces, his weapon raised and ready.

He was the better fighter he always had been. IIargia, my staff, lay shattered at my feet, destroyed in the titanic battle to protect my queen.

He raised his sword, my perfect, lost apprentice, and let it fall.

And cool darkness took me.