Free A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales by Scott Fitzgerald Gray Page A

doomed heart
burns the fear of what the grey blade is, of what it becomes.
    It is the heart of summer, the cicada song a silver haze, and he
is the Green Priestess. He is the holy seeker of the Kingmakers, the name that
is given to the Green Priestess’s path. His is the longing to restore the
greatness promised by the sword that is Kelastaen, the long history reflected
in a razor edge of grey steel. A line of kings once straight as haft and blade,
then broken. Waiting to be restored now with the hated Empire’s fall.
    He feels the enmity of these two spirits that die with no
knowledge of each other. Feels a hatred twist out between them, entwined in his
own experience. Caught within the warp and weft of the past unfolding as a
thousand histories touching those minds.
    He looks forward then.
    Ripples spread out from the blade where the wind sends spiral
clouds of autumn leaves around it. That shroud of red is the color of the Green
Priestess’s hair, falling and spreading like a stain of blood when the storms
come. He feels the shadow spread in echo, senses the future open up within it.
    For long years, the sword stays hidden within his shadow. But in
every future, every line of time forced open before him, there comes a time
when he senses a figure step up to the crown of the narrow ridge once more.
When it leaves, it holds the grey blade in its hands.
    On each path, the figure’s shape is different, shifting between
all the possible futures that the shadow holds. On each path, a thousand-thousand
blades fit two thousand-thousand hands, all the unreckoned possibilities
branching out from this place, this time. But as far as he follows, he feels
each path lead to the same place of blood and shadow. Black and red occluding
all futures into a dead haze.
    From the depths of the spirit heart that has defined him since
the beginning of time, he mourns.
    A storm of seasons passes. He loses track of them, senses the
stars sweep past as endless arcs of blue-white fire.
    He slips back, senses the Blood Knight fall, claw its way forward,
die, fall, fall and die in an endless cycle. But no matter how many times the
Blood Knight dies, no matter how many ways the grey blade is hidden, no matter
how strong the magic of this place that hides it, he feels the sword reclaimed.
    He knows this. The future unfolding before his thought.
    As the Green Priestess does, other Quick Ones seek and find the
sword. They die in battalions to track it to this place, seizing it as they
crush the bones of the Blood Knight, the Green Priestess beneath their feet.
The grey blade is taken, its wielder slain, claimed, slain again over endless
lifetimes of the Quick Ones in their endless search.
    For untold thousands of undone years, he touches the Quick Ones,
feels their movement along the fringes and boundaries of his realm. He hears
their spirit songs carried on the summer wind, senses the impressions their
lives and minds make on the other creatures of the wood. Ripples of shadow.
    Within the spirit of the Green Priestess locked tight inside him
now, a light burns like white fire. He feels it sear him, looks within the fate
of the Green Priestess to feel it flare brighter, scouring the shadow of the
Blood Knight’s oath.
    He feels it as the sword is born, senses liquid steel glow the
white of first daylight, poured in a shroud of smoke and shrieking flame. The
weapon’s mold is a slab of perfect black marble broken off from the throne that
once sits within a ruined hall, walls pulled down and overgrown five hundred
years before. The history and power of that throne is drawn within the blade,
and as its white metal cools first to blue, then grey, its heat splits that
great slab asunder, leaves it rent upon this makeshift foundry floor.
    A song threads within the lives of the Quick Ones that he hears
for the first time. And over a year of days that are a moment for him and the
earth from which he drinks and the sun that is his heart, he comes to
understand