The dying priest had given him one useful piece of advice about the woman at the summit: if she spoke his old name, he was not to answer. At the time he had thought the warning pointless. The old name belonged to a house that no longer stood, to parents buried without markers, to a boy who had entered the war carrying a spear because swords cost too much. He had not heard it spoken in years. By the time he reached the final stair, even he sometimes had trouble remembering what the name had sounded like in his mother's voice.
The mountain trembled beneath his boots as he climbed. Fighting continued somewhere below, though the stone swallowed enough of the noise that he heard the battle mostly through vibrations in the walls. A hard impact would shake dust from the ceiling. A deeper one meant something large had died. He had learned not to guess what. Six times during the ascent, the black sword in his hand had grown warm for no apparent reason. Six narrow scars now crossed the blade near the guard, marks no smith had put there. The seventh place remained smooth.
He had lost his helmet before sunrise. One gauntlet belonged to a dead king. Three ribs moved incorrectly when he breathed, and the charm stitched beneath his breastplate had been repeating the same useless warning for the better part of an hour. He ignored it. There were healers somewhere below if the lower terraces had not fallen, and there would be time for healing when the woman at the summit was dead.
The last door stood open.
No guard waited outside. There were no bodies on the landing, no traps he could see, and none of the red fire that had followed him through the lower halls. He remained at the threshold until his breathing slowed. People had been telling stories about this room since before his grandfather's birth, though none of the stories agreed about what lay beyond it. One claimed a throne carved from the first king's bones. Another promised a chamber full of naked revelers who had been dancing without rest since the war began. Soldiers in the western army swore that anyone who entered would find exactly what he most wanted and would never come out again.
The truth was a dining room.
A small fire burned in a brick hearth. Rain tapped at two narrow windows. Someone had set bread on the table beside a dish of butter, a bowl of late pears, and a bottle of dark wine. There were two chairs. One had been pulled out for him.
The woman sat in the other.
He had seen her before, but never this close. That surprised him. She had been present at sieges, treaties, executions, weddings, and once on a hill where three armies had spent an afternoon trying to kill one another because each believed the other two had betrayed them. He had always known when she was near. People stood differently. Old arguments returned. Men who had spent years hiding what they wanted suddenly found the courage to ruin their lives over it. Yet through all those years he had never stood close enough to notice that one of her horns had been broken.
She looked worse than he did. Her armor had been black once, with dark green scales fitted over the joints, but half the plates were cracked and one side had been repaired with wire. Blood had dried beneath her ear and along her throat. Her red hair was loose and badly tangled, and there was a burn across her left hand that had not healed. She held a pear in the uninjured one, turning it slowly by the stem while she studied him.
Then she spoke the old name.
He nearly answered.
That was the frightening part. There was no command in her voice. No pressure entered his thoughts, no charm tightened around his heart. She said the name the way someone might greet a late guest, with a tired familiarity that suggested she had every right to remember him.
He remained silent.
The woman's gaze shifted toward the sword. She saw the six marks and stopped turning the pear.
For a long while the only sound in the room was the rain.
When she finally spoke, the anger he had expected was absent. "You brought them with you."
He glanced at the blade. The scars had always looked like damage to him. For the first time he noticed that the third one was pulsing faintly.
The pear slipped from her fingers and rolled across the table. "Of course you wouldn't know."
He crossed the room before she could say more.
Three strides should have carried him to the table. After the third, he was farther from her than when he began. The dining room stretched around him, walls retreating until the hearth became a pinprick of orange and the table seemed to stand at the far end of a cathedral. He kept moving. The distance lengthened with every step.
The woman had not left her chair.
He drove the sword into the floor.
Stone screamed beneath the blade. The room folded with it. For an instant there were hundreds of tables, hundreds of fires, hundreds of wounded red-haired women sitting at impossible angles around him. Then the false distance snapped. He was beside her.
She threw the table.
It should have struck him as wood. Instead the edge hit with enough force to send him through the wall.
He fell into summer.
Warm river water closed over his head. He surfaced choking beneath a blue sky and heard children shouting from the bank. The smell of crushed grass brought back a memory so quickly that he forgot the sword in his hand. He knew this river. There should have been a mill downstream and a willow bent low enough that boys could jump from its branches. The mill had burned before the war. The willow had been cut down years earlier.
Someone splashed behind him.
His younger brother stood waist deep in the water.
That was almost enough.
The boy smiled and held up a frog between both hands, waiting for him to laugh at the same stupid joke he had laughed at the first time.
The man plunged the sword through his own memory.
The river split from bank to bank. Water hung in the air on either side of the cut, fish suspended inside it, while darkness opened along the riverbed. He stepped through before the wound in the world could close.
He returned to the dining room with water pouring from his armor.
The woman had risen.
Her face had changed. He had seen grief often enough to recognize it, though finding it there made him hesitate in a way the river had not.
She looked at the six marks again. "The one beneath the salt city was afraid of empty rooms. He never told anyone. I found out because he slept outside my door for thirty years and pretended the corridor was cooler." Her eyes moved to another scar. "She hated sweet wine. Every painter gave her a jeweled cup anyway because none of them ever sat at a table with her."
He pulled the sword free of the floor.
"I don't want their stories."
"No. You only wanted their deaths."
The room went red.
Something thin passed through his chest.
He looked down and found a thread running from beneath his breastplate to the woman's burned hand. It was no thicker than sewing silk, yet the sight of it made the sword suddenly difficult to hold.
The desire to raise his arm disappeared.
Nothing numbed him. His muscles remained strong enough. He could feel the leather of the grip, the ache in his knuckles, the sweat cooling beneath his armor. He simply could not remember why he had ever believed lifting the blade mattered.
The war could continue without him.
Someone else could finish it.
He had done enough.
The relief of that thought was enormous.
His fingers began to loosen.
The woman watched him closely, and he understood why entire kingdoms had failed before her. She did not need to put anything inside a person. There was already too much there.
He looked at the table.
The pear had rolled to the edge and stopped.
Such a stupid thing to notice.
He remembered soldiers below splitting their last food because the supply carts had burned. He remembered a girl in a field hospital insisting her brother needed water more than she did. He remembered six armies climbing a mountain because people who would never know one another had decided there ought to be a morning after this one.
Wanting the war to end had brought him here.
It did not have to carry the sword the final few feet.
He raised it anyway.
The woman's expression broke.
The thread snapped.
For the next few moments the room could not decide what it was. Stone became rain, rain became a palace corridor, the corridor opened over a battlefield, and the battlefield turned sideways beneath his feet. He fought through all of it. Once he found himself falling upward toward a red moon and cut his own shadow from the sky to stop the ascent. Once she struck him with a hand that became six hands before impact, and something in his shoulder tore badly enough that the arm stopped obeying him. He changed hands. When she filled the room with people he had failed, he stopped looking at their faces.
She ceased trying to frighten him after that.
She became angry.
The fire in the hearth climbed the walls. The rain outside turned red against the windows. Far below, the battle faltered as something passed across the mountain and touched every living mind at once. He felt it only faintly from here, a pressure of old desires suddenly remembered. Soldiers deserted. Others charged. Someone who had been waiting years for a chance to confess something chose that moment to do it. Three commanders killed their own messengers before realizing they had misunderstood the same order.
The woman stood amid it all with blood running freely from the wound in her side now. "I thought I would be glad when you came," she said. Her voice had gone hoarse. "I practiced hating you. There was time enough for it."
He wiped blood from his mouth.
She looked at him with an expression he could not place. "They used you up too."
He advanced.
She moved toward him at the same moment.
Their weapons were not the things that struck first. The hearth vanished. Every window in the chamber burst outward. A section of the mountain disappeared with them, leaving open night beyond the room and a view of fires thousands of feet below. His sword met her bare hand and cut halfway through the palm before stopping. She caught the blade there, blood running along both edges, and pulled him close enough that he saw something behind the anger.
Not fear of dying.
Fear of something else.
He twisted the blade.
She let go.
The sixth scar flared white.
The woman screamed.
He had heard monsters scream before. He had heard cities do it too. This was smaller. A person seeing something taken away.
She seized his sword arm with both hands. "Get them out."
He did not understand.
She struck the six marks with the heel of her burned palm.
The sword split open.
There was no metal inside.
Six lights spilled across the chamber.
They did not form people, not completely. One seemed too tall for the room. Another cast the shadow of wings despite having none. Something laughed softly from near the ceiling. A shape crouched beside the overturned table and reached for the abandoned pear.
The woman stopped fighting.
The man almost killed her then.
The point was against her throat. One movement would have done it, or he believed it would. He had believed similar things before.
She watched the six lights fade.
When the last disappeared, she sat down on the floor.
Her hand was still bleeding badly. She pressed it against her leg without looking at the wound. "I wondered whether they would stay with you."
"They're dead."
"Yes."
The simplicity of the answer unsettled him.
Below them, horns began sounding.
His army had reached the upper terraces.
The woman heard them and looked toward the missing wall. Dawn had begun gathering behind the eastern mountains. It was faint, hardly more than gray beneath the clouds, but after a night that had lasted so long the color looked unnatural.
The man raised the sword again.
She nodded toward it.
"Go on, then."
He did.
The blade entered beneath her ribs.
There was less resistance than he expected.
Her body jerked once. She gripped his wrist, not to stop him but to keep herself upright. He felt her blood running warm beneath the broken plates of his gauntlet. For several breaths they remained like that, close enough that the whole war seemed reduced to an injured man holding a sword inside an injured woman.
Then she laughed.
He had heard that laugh from across battlefields.
This one was different.
Almost relieved.
The floor beneath them opened.
A circle appeared in the stone.
Six portions were already dark.
The seventh waited.
He looked from it to her.
She was watching him, and he realized too late that he had never once seen surprise on her face after the sword entered.
"What is this?"
"The burden we carried for your precious world."
"What do you mean? What burden?"
She tried to answer and coughed blood instead. It took her a moment before she could speak again. "The True 'Monster' we kept locked away."
The circle brightened.
Something rose from its center.
Not treasure.
Not a weapon.
A sheet of black material thinner than paper unfolded between them. Writing moved across its surface too quickly to read, lines appearing beneath lines until the thing seemed covered in thousands of tiny marks. Only the words at the top remained still.
The man read them.
LET THE DEFEATED WAKE ONCE MORE OR PERISH.
Then hundre of words and paragraphs seemed to be visible and not visible all at once.
He stared at the top sentence.
The woman sagged against his arm.
"You expected mercy from the Gods? You thought we were evil didn't you?"
"No."
Her eyes were losing focus.
"Then why kill us?"
"It was my duty."
She looked at the black sheet.
"How about a deal then? Or better yet, a wager."
He almost laughed. "With what left to bet?"
That faint, exhausted smile returned.
"The existence of our world."
The answer meant nothing to him.
Behind the door, boots struck the upper stair. His soldiers were close now. Soon they would enter and see the last of the seven dying on his sword. Soon banners would be raised. Messengers would run until every surviving city knew the war was over.
He looked at the sentence again.
It seemed almost cruel to refuse. Giving up his accomplishments for an unknown peril.
"What happens if I don't?"
The woman's gaze drifted toward the approaching dawn. "Then this ends here."
He waited for the threat.
None came.
That frightened him enough to make him read the sentence a second time.
The smaller writing beneath it continued changing.
There was too much.
His shoulder was failing. Blood had filled one boot. Men were shouting his title in the corridor now, getting closer, and somewhere far below the mountain thousands of wounded people were waiting to learn whether they were allowed to stop fighting.
The woman closed her eyes.
For the first time since he entered the room, she looked harmless.
He knew better.
Perhaps that was why he believed himself safe.
He cut his thumb on the sword.
The woman opened her eyes when the blood touched the black page.
He pressed his hand beneath the final line.
The seventh portion of the circle went dark.
Across the continent, the gates began to close.
The woman exhaled once and became very still.
The soldiers broke through the door moments later and found their hero kneeling beside the last body, his bloody hand resting on a sheet of black glass.
They never saw the writing.