| THE LORELEI SIGNAL |
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| Written by Keir Alekseii Roopnarine / Artwork by Holly Eddy |
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| Silver Burdens |
The moon glowed eerily as darkness came to grace the lands beneath Suyin's feet. She stood on a cliff, looking
down upon fields lit by starlight and moon-glow, holding in callused hands a sword that shone with its own light.
Memory was so strong here, on this, the fields of an old battle: the fields of an old home.
When she was young, a child of less than six, she frolicked through this land with her siblings and neighbors, playing
games of tag and acting out scenes from legend. Life as a child was so simple.
When she grew, she met a man who came to be her husband, lover and friend. With him she led a happy life for
many years, bore him three children, and wept for him when he died.
It is a hard thing to outlive a loved one, and an even harder thing to watch them die.
Suyin released a long-held breath and sighed mournfully, turning her back to the majestic view of roaming meadows
and what had been, once upon a time, her home.
As she walked away from the cliff's edge, the wind caught her unbound hair, billowing it out behind her like a
raven-colored silk cloak.
Her metallic armor glinted in the moonlight so that from afar she looked like a glittering apparition, as she trekked
down to the land she had abandoned.
With every step memory haunted her. The wind whispered in her ears and lent voices to the images in her head.
She looked at the sword in her hand, the weapon she had grown to both love, for the good she knew she could do
with it, and despise, for the life the blade had brought to her.
Sword Bearer.
Title.
Burden.
She remembered the day the stranger had given it to her, remembered his eyes as silver as the moon: the mark of
the Sword Bearer, the mark she now bore. Her previously brown eyes had become pale to reflect moonlight even
in the day.
She saw her husband die, when her children were just that, children, the oldest no more than eight.
Then, she came to bear the sword. She watched her children grow old while her body refused to age.
What mother wishes to outlive her child?
Perhaps, just perhaps the pain would ease if she had grandchildren, or great grandchildren, to watch play in the
grass. Just as her children had, just as she had.
But no. The only grandchild she might ever have had died unborn in his mother's womb as her son's wife withered
away to the sickness that was a harbinger to war.
She had done her job, then. Fought the coming of evil with old magics and, in the end, won a costly battle. It was
time to pass the sword on, time to put herself to rest.
Suyin had reached the bottom of the cliff, and now she walked to the center of the old battlefield, the older town.
Like the man before her, she was to choose another to carry on her role, to be the Sword Bearer in her stead. But
Suyin was not a woman to take pleasure in giving others a lifetime of pain. Instead she had kept her burden for as
long as she could, seeking another way to release herself from its bonds.
Raising a mailed fist, she plunged the sword into the earth and whispered in a tongue most thought long dead; words
that released her from the sword's service.
The pain was sudden. Her body aged rapidly, no longer protected by the sword's enchantment. Skin sagged, hair
grayed, flesh rotted till there was only bone.
Then the bone disintegrated, its particles caught by the wind and taken into the night 'til all that was left was a single
sword, silver and finely worked in the pale light, waiting for another to take hold of its hilt and bear the burden that
so few wish to withstand.
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