As the sun set and disappeared into the horizon, it seemed to smile. It was rather rare for the entity to radiate heat, suggesting a smile these days, but today, not a single person shed the blood of someone else; the war had come to a close. Which is why two people sat shoulder to shoulder, watching the sun set alongside one another, but they had long since stopped paying attention to the horizon. The male of the two looked down at the gift that she had given him: It was a sword. It had been forged by the king himself, while the engraving along the blade had been done by none other than Alexandra; it was a beautiful piece that the woman across from him had named Rising Tide.
"I think I understand, but just in case, can you run that one more time?" The man asked with a hint of amusement as the woman twitched in annoyance. She was beautiful, her caramel skin accompanied by the ever-present freckles that only came from her hours in the sun. Her long curly hair and those brown, shifty eyes. He let out a low breath as she began her explanation once again, "Rising tides are violent and destroy many fishing villages along beaches and bays. They are uncontrolled disasters that harm the lives of many people." She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts, before an almost sad smile came across her face as she said. "Not only that, but I call this sword Rising Tide so that you may remember these exact words I tell you from this moment forward. Rising Tide is meant to help achieve the wielder's goals, with nothing holding them back. This sword was crafted by 2 of the greatest minds in the entire kingdom. It was made for the express purpose of protecting our home, but by my right as the heir to the throne and with this new name, I give you a new reason to wield this blade: to be free. Fight not for others if you don't wish, or if you do, then do so, when this sword is in your hands I want you to fight for yourself, kill others who you wish, or spare them; Rising Tide is a tool to express your freedom to others, granted by me... something that I cannot attain for myself." When she finished, her anguished grin morphed into a loose smile, not truly portraying any emotion, and brought the knight into an embrace.
The seductive whisper to pick up the glistening blade was alarmingly loud. The knight stared at his weapon in a mixture of awe and bewilderment. He could swear he just saw it grin at him, but surely that was just a trick of the light… right? He inched toward the weapon with great hesitance, yet an even larger well of curiosity towards the longsword. It didn't look all that dangerous right now. Then he paused in his crawl-like walk to the sword; come to think of it, why was he even nervous about the blade? Sure, it was an extremely lethal weapon now, but it's not like he could just die from a simple mistake these days. Just thinking about that fact made him feel a bit queasy, and he quickly shook it away. With a dead sense of smell and a bitter taste on his tongue, he gathered his courage and quelled his hesitancy to pick up his speed.
With the bonus of a faster pace, he got to the center of the area and stared at the sword in front of him. It was strange; last he had seen this weapon in front of him, the dragon engraved into the weapon had been tossing around excitedly at the thought of ending the lives of its and its wielder's enemies, yet it was strangely still. Not to mention the blinding orange light that emanated from the sword was vacant. It was both enticing and alarming to him. He knew better than to believe it was a figment of his imagination, though. Consequently, he picked up his pace once again and, within moments, arrived at the center of the circle.
Staring down at the sword with curiosity, he reached for the hilt of the weapon and grabbed hold of it with a tight grip, and ripped it out of the cold grey stone, creating a small cloud of dust around the tip of the shiny weapon. In a single motion, the blade exited the cloud of airborne rubble and swung upwardly till the tip was at eye level. Through the inky darkness of the visor, he gazed at the weapon with an expressionless gaze, while Rising Tide woke up from its slumber. Within moments, the dragon across the lustrous came back to life and quickly slithered its way up the blade to meet the gaze of its master, which created its dilemma: how did this two-dimensional representation of a dragon manage to change its shape, and have more than just the single side it had, let alone animate itself and gain its own consciousness? To quell the incoming headache, he decided not to give it much thought and instead deemed it more important to test the sharpness of the weapon.
Breaking eye contact with the dragon, his gaze shifted to the right, toward the tall walls of the newly created valley still painted in the same sickening red as the rest of the lengthy trench. Not a single shred of doubt was spared as he pivoted his body to meet the direction his eyes were facing and instantly cocked his left arm all the way, and launched the blade at the stonehenge in a split second. With tremendous force, the glimmering blade tore the air apart ferociously, causing torrents of strident winds to ripple in the vacant space in the clearing. In the chaos, hints of the red surface were ripped from the hot stone and whisked away by the yelling gales, never to be seen again. It was as if the winds were creating a path for the blade to travel without getting a hint of red on its pristine form. In what felt like no time at all, the point of the longsword found itself in front of the red wall. Its blistering speed didn't waver in the slightest as the sword made contact with the wall, yet out of all the outcomes that could've happened, the singular one that the knight had not thought of was the one that happened: The blade, one sharper than any other weapon used against it, simply bounced off the stone wall with a shill ring, before unceremoniously hitting the bloody surface with a muffled clank. It was completely blunt.
As a large splash of bodily fluid flew like a geyser upward, the red liquid that didn't was quickly draining, and consumed by the blade with an appetite far outclassing something of its size. The knight watched the scene with an unreadable expression behind the helmet; it was completely baffling. With the same absent expression, he watched his sword absorb the blood at a frightening rate while a strong orange glow began to emanate from the place the sword was last seen, and not long after, there was no longer any blood on the surface of the valley; the sword drank it all. Frozen in place, he stared at the weapon, not a single thought materializing in that time frame; he simply looked at the illuminated weapon blankly while its hazy hue shone like a small sun. On edge, the knight took a step back, then several more. Something was amidst.
'An abnormal hole in the center of an undisturbed corpse, and at the center of it was Rising Tide…' His heart dropped, then jumped to his throat, followed shortly by a slight tremor in his hand, and in an instant, the knight turned tail and dashed away from the insatiable weapon. Rising Tide may have been a gift, but he could always summon the weapon back once the haze had removed itself again. Unknown to him, Rising Tide had begun falling into the stone, tearing through it with alarming speed, not leaving a single rugged stone behind in its long downward spiral until its time was up.
The knight had already found himself well up a rib bare of any milk when the bone began to tremble with power, or more likely, terror of Rising Tides' power. It had nearly bled that entire section of the snake dry, yet the trembling was as though the sword consumed an entire giant's sleeping form. The trembling turned into constant, violent jerking that encircled what felt like an entire section of the plateau, which only reaffirmed the knight's suspicions about the beautiful weapon. He redoubled his efforts, then tripled those as he swiftly made his way up the metaphorical ladder, otherwise known as the derelict bone, trying to make his way to safety. He may have been immortal, but being eviscerated by what he believed to be a large explosion of gore would still hurt, and even though he had faced a lot of physical pain in his expansive existence, that didn't mean he enjoyed it.
Letting go of a long breath, he continued forward unrelentingly with a spiteful vengeance to keep the fire of adrenaline burning and not going out. It was getting harder and harder to get a good handle on his ticket up due to the constant and paroxysmal vibrations in the skeleton, yet he managed to get a semi good grip on the long rib as he continued to scrounge away from the growing danger zone, until finally, he had arrived at the at the surface level. Not a moment sooner, a geyser of pure red consumed the blue sky above, eclipsing the dimming midday sun, and darkening the world around the serpent exponentially. Just as the bodily fluids reached the peak of their ascension to the cloudless sky above, it fell, and it fell hard. Waves of red speedily made their way back down to the surface; the odorless wellspring had been sealed beneath for a few moments. In a few fleeting moments, the knight's mind focused on a rather unimportant detail in this moment as he stared up at the offending wave with a blend of emotions that could only be assumed to make a skewed form of fear. He was lying on the top of the rib he had been climbing previously, the rotting meat having been taken by the sun in the fleeting moments of his hasty retreat from his weapon, leaving the rib completely clean.
It's strange. It took nowhere near as long as it had previously to implode. Rising Tide took in a lot more blood than it had when the snake was still alive. Could that be the reason? More blood equates to less time?' He was well aware of the disgusting tsunami within arms' reach of him, but he had already accepted the fate of it all; there was no escape, so there was no reason to worry over it. While his mind quickly created an array of theories about his weapon of choice, the raining blood continued to inch closer and closer, yet the low thumps caused by droplets of blood hitting his armor never invaded his ears. Nearly automatically, the catastrophic wave of innards was evaporated by the heat of the sun and turned into nothing more than particles dancing in the breeze before being ultimately taken away by said breeze. He only noticed this after the sunlight once pierced his visor, showing his distant, dark brown eyes for a few moments, then quickly returned to reality, yet the torrent of questions never ceased.
Pushing himself into an upright position, his eyes left the light, encasing them in the regular cocoon of darkness. Sighing, he got back to his full height and turned his attention back to the bottom of the valley he had been in previously, and more specifically, the gaping hole that went perpendicularly to the bottom of the corpse. Though light bathed much of the entrance of the tunnel, the darkness had battled the light to a stalemate, keeping the light from pushing itself any closer to the bottom of the pit. The knight just looked on with a hint of dismay before collecting his weapon in the cloud that enveloped his hand, along with the sheath that had gone missing at some point in the fight.
'... Did I lose something else as well?' He thought to himself inquisitively, he didn't have much these days, seeing as it had all disintegrated at this point. A few moments later, it hit him. Blinking, he fastened the dulled sword to his waist and quickly reached behind him and pulled off the tattered remains of a maroon cloak from his back. The hood had been ripped off at some point, and the bottom of the rag had also been torn off during the desert conflict. Disheartened, he removed it from around his neck with a slow motion of his right arm, got down on a single knee, and placed it gently on the rib he was currently standing on and watched as the wind picked it up, and took it away just as it had taken most of the snake's corpse. Sighing mentally, he got back to his full height once again and steadily began sliding his way down the bone.
After finally arriving in the cavernous valley inside the corpse of the false god, he glanced up at the dimming sky. In the vicious heat of the desert, the sun somehow appeared higher in the sky than it actually had been, which was only being proved by the vast sea of dark blues, indigos, and blacks were only pierced by the spears of heavenly orange light of the sun; the night was coming. Not noticing the condition of the skeleton, he simply sat down in the center of the clearing he had been in previously and watched with fascination as the sun fell to the west while the moons–although outside of his line of sight–emerged from the east. It was nice. He had rarely seen this before his imprisonment. The ravishing wars and bloody battles frightened beautiful days, leaving the skies uneasy and dull grays most of the time, and the knight had added a lot to that fire throughout his years under his king, then following his queen. As the thoughts of the queen planted themselves into his already damaged mind, he seemed to shrink into himself despite his rather large frame and even larger shell of protection until a sudden motion left him in a position akin to that of a starfish. The mental fatigue had caught up to him a long time ago, but this time, he couldn't force it down. His eyes drooped while a yawn echoed outward from the helmet, and thereafter the knight fell asleep, before the sun had even finished setting, and with a heart heavier than even the sky itself.