Legend

by Jonathan Wood

At the age of twelve I found a sword that spat lightning and hissed fire.  Men came in its pursuit and it danced in my hand, carving them into the history books as my first kills. 

It led me on. At thirteen my traveling companions taught me how to take the lightning and fire into myself and push them back out into the world.  At fourteen I did battle with chitin-clad hordes, delivering my homeland from evil. 

At sixteen my name was revered.  By the time manhood was upon me, I had a temple of gold and a hundred concubines.  The next year, I had an army, the next, an empire.  I read ancient texts and learned to pull force from the ground beneath my feet.  I reshaped the known world.

At twenty-five I had seen and done all things.  I wandered to the edges of the maps and beyond, into shadows.  I battled with a creature made fully of limbs–no head or heart, only hands and feet, elbows and knees–for five days, pulling the land around us to a shred, sitting in a bubble of my own puissance.

On the eve of my twenty-seventh birthday, while my people prayed for my return, I came across a woman in a tower, a great serpent coiled around its base.  I swore to rescue her. 

In bloody victory I learned my mistake, I learned of the bait and the trap.  Weakened from the fight she bested me, easily.  But when my strength returned I withered iron chains to weed grass and tore free. 

She caught me once more.  We battled once more.  Years our battle raged.  We tore down the world about us.  We tore each other into new forms, each more ragged than the last. Down to nubs of flesh and bone, held together only by the power we had gathered to our breasts.

And then I lost. 

I was undone.  I was nothing more than a scared child gripping a sword as men advanced.  And the sword did not dance, and I did not win. 

As my adversary stood over me, she said, “Thank you” to me.  She blessed me, put her hand on my bloodied cheek, to feel the heat leaving me.  And for the first time in my short life, I finally understood power.  Finally, I knew magic.  And then it was gone.