None, however, was stranger than the Blade of Anothqgg. It came into my hands the way so many had before: I slew its owner, my lover. I plucked its hilt from the wilted worms that had been his fingers, even as his manhood — which had, only moments earlier, displaced flesh inside me — pulsed with the ebb of his final heartbeats.
That owner had been L’kmi.
His death, like our lovemaking, had come swiftly and with passion. Our nakedness only added to our savagery. But I had learned everything he’d had to teach, and more. He was no match for me. I knew his tricks; I knew his stance; I knew his every flinch and instinct. He knew mine, too, but he had failed to heed his own maxim. Sentiment killed him long before I did.
Gripping his sword for the first time, I noticed that it was not common. Moonlight shone through the greasy clouds, crackling with sparks, and each flash of luminescence was refracted from the steel in a different way. It was solid, surely, but it seemed to dance like a flame. Despite the fact that I held it in my hand, I was unable to tell how far it stood from my eyes. When I stared at it directly, its image writhed and blurred like a lungfish clambering back into the mud, caught by the corner of my eye and then gone in a blink. But when I looked away, the sword became more vivid, as if my mind projected the reality of it outward rather than the other way round.
It was then that my soul screamed.
The blade didn’t move, yet it entered me. It fractured like glass, everywhere at once, filling the air and the hidden space around the air that I had never before seen, or imagined, or imagined I could imagine.
The pain could have split the sun.
A voice came. Somehow I heard it over my own howl.
“You are neither the holder nor the wielder of this, my Blade,” it thundered and whispered and purred and ululated in a billion languages all at once. “You are but its Sheath. You will hold it in your soul, quenching its thirst for death, until I have need of it.”
I no longer felt confusion or pain. Or more accurately, I was no longer able to recognize them. It was then I realized the truth: L’kmi was no fool. He knew what I was, and he had trained me regardless, and he had led me to kill him, to release him from this curse.
I stared in bemusement. How L’kmi — an average swordsman in practice, truth be told, better at thinking about killing than killing — could gain such a weapon in the first place, I have never come to know. Perhaps ownership of the blade doesn’t pass from the strong to the strong, as it does in battle, but from the weak to the weak, like a plague. What that speaks about me, I don’t care to speculate. All I can state without doubt is this: that night my soul became the Scabbard of that dread Blade, forever to incubate its unimaginable mass like some teratoid fetus inside me.
If tracing one’s own path across the Ocean Amorphous was difficult, tracking another’s was even more so.
Or so I could only hope. I first caught wind of the woman following me — for it was clearly a woman — a week prior. Her boat must have been at least as swift and silent as mine, but her musk was unmistakable. Since then, I had barely slept. Not that sleep has come easy to me over the years since I became the Scabbard of the Blade of Anothqgg. My soul had been thrown countless times across the dimensions untold, strapped to my master’s hip as he waged war with other Great Old Ones, in a war that I had come to understand was an uprising against their masters. The Gods had Gods of their own, and to them Anothqgg was as puny as I was to him. I could gather little of this from my vantage; as my body slumped in a kind of stasis on this stinking world, I was flung elsewhere and otherwhen, my spirit shuddering in ecstatic agony each time Anothqgg sheathed and unsheathed his Blade. Each time, he asked me, “Do you receive this Blade unto your soul? Answer me now, for every time I commit slaughter with it, you must agree to let it return to its Scabbard before it can be so quenched. You may refuse, of course. But then you will remain here, in the void, at my behest, adrift for all eternity.”
What choice did I have? This wasn’t a window into death, a reprieve from my burden. This was everlasting nothingness, to be endured awake and without hope. Each time Anothqgg posed this conundrum of me, I assented. No torment could have been worse.
When I did return from his battles, which might have lasted seconds or centuries, sleep eluded me as much as did tranquility or succor. I was alone, more alone than alone, my only reason for existence to serve as a functionary — nay, a function — of a being beyond my perception or comprehension. The irony was not lost on me: I was the Blade’s Scabbard, yet I was a stranger to it, and it to me. When I caught sight of the hilt, I could see the many skulls — some human; some horned; some grotesque, bulbous sculptures of bone that might have only come from the ossuary of the netherworld — that encrusted it. For all I knew, it wasn’t a sword at all, but the tusk or toenail or eyelash of some vast, gargantuan entity that dwarfed even the Gods of the Gods.
Such thoughts churned through my brain as I set the trap for my pursuer. Exhausted from constant flight, parched from drinking half-filtered mud, subsisting on steamed ferns and the repulsive pulp of the lungfish, I halted for the night and devised an elaborate web of vines in the clearing around me. As I did so, the ground quivered. Nearby, the bottomless mud of the Ocean Amorphous burbled and slurped. Was the Drifting to take hold tonight? I pushed the thought from my mind as I finished tying and concealing my apparatus. I squinted at it from one angle, then another. I wove the trap according to the arcane geometries I had observed, if never fully understood, as my soul had dangled from the belt of Anothqgg on some quasar-strewn battlefield. These geometries were impossible to devise according to the calculus of this flattened plane, but I relied on brute cunning to construct an admittedly paltry facsimile, just enough to render my trap invisible — that is, assuming my pursuer was not able to exist in more than one point in space and time simultaneously. Perhaps I would be so blessed.
Satisfied with my handiwork, I leaned against a large stone, smoothed by the millennia of the Drifting, and dared to let the tremors lull me into a trance. The opal moon shone down, mottled as if by disease. What lies upon that moon, I wondered, and beyond it? Was it a thing, or a lack of a thing? A globe or a hole? Were moon and sky perhaps made of some similar viscous liquid, like a yolk within the white of an egg? If so, could it somehow be hatched? The cosmos itself, that is? Was Anothqgg himself the hen? Or the fox come to poach? Or the mother of universes who devours her own young? My mind swam as I beheld that orb, that orifice, white within black. Positive space became negative, and negative positive. A profound throe of disgust sickened me to the marrow.
My loathsome reverie was cut short by the suck of footfalls in mud.
There was no posturing, no blustery preamble. I leapt to my feet, my hand on the hilt of the Blade. My master slumbered, so it was mine to draw into form, its only intersection in this dimension. As such, it appeared almost common, save for the shimmer it caused in the air around it.
“I am Ili, the Sheath of the Sword of Pnthai,” the woman intoned. Her voice was hoarse, her hair yellow and wild, her limbs sinewy and thin. Her face was contorted in spasms of barely checked excruciation. For a moment, my heart clenched in harmony with hers. Another Sheath? Here, in this world? The things we might share with each other! The tales we might tell! The pain only the other could understand… Sentiment, all of it. I held my breath until my ribs ached, crushing the softness inside me.