While the mercenary knights chivvied the local militia back into the walled city, we, that is the two elves who ignored each other, the Gnomish first mate with a penchant for bragging, and me, the human verser rode around the town toward the thousand foot tall butte which was actually the hilt of the Sword of Night. The rest of the sword plunged into the stone, and it seemed harder than removing Excalibur, to me.



I walked up to the stone, and it cracked and fell all about me leaving the metal sword hilt nine hundred feet tall gleaming in the sun. The sword waited. Not a good thing.



“Who is this Enemy wizard, I’m supposed to kill with this sword?” I asked Dlarion the elflord.

“Some human, I think.” He said and shrugged.



I asked the same question to the air, and to the arch-mage who had enslaved me to complete a quest he had chosen for me. I’d promised him I’d kill him.



“The Enemy is fallen from the stars, and forced by the Great Ones to take a bodily form.” The wind, obeying the arch-mage’s commands answered. Great, a fallen god to fight. Now, I knew why they needed such a megapowerful sword to kill or disperse this guy.



I touched the sword, and it rang clear and pure. But nothing else happened.



Dlarion came and pointed out a series of runes painted onto the sword. The lead one said “peace”, and the sum of the runes was to make the sword unmovable.



I calculated a few things. In order to draw the sword,we would need gigatonnages in force. That was a no go.



So, I sat and thought.



“How much gold and jewels do you have. Archmage? Because, I need a lot, and I need it right now.”



He told me, and with a little help from my friends, we guessed he had about a hundred thousand man-years of wealth.



It was time to introduce the Middle Ages to the joys of Laissez-faire Capitalism. You see that I had no way of drawing the sword from the ground. The spells made it so my strength used in pulling increased the friction and strengthened the rock. It would have been roughly about as hard to move the planet telekinetically. It was beyond me.



I showed my figures to Dlarion and the Master Librarian in training. They both puzzled at them a long while, until Dlarion smiled.



“These figures assume the planet is spherical. Its not, I do not know where you got such a silly notion.”



“Hunh?”



“The planet is mostly flat with a slight curvature since the back of the turtle it rests on only really supports the planet in the middle.” Dlarion explained while the Master Librarian gave me the look reserved for uneducated barbarians who only could read in five languages.



I rubbed my face, and tried to force my thoughts back into order. They went but not without some incredulous screeching about gravity, and a bunch of other things.



“The Colonial Elf speaks truly. My father went on a trade mission to a point on the World’s End.” ‘Al’ said with condescension. Even still, I could see it hurt for him to talk to me since I was in his estimation a really annoying cockroach, or human.



I thanked them, and called the town together for a herald to make an announcement. He promised a certain amount of gold to anyone who removed a set volume of dirt or stone a mile from near the sword. Any method was allowable, just so long as no one got hurt.



We eventually had to give people claims like they were mining because people were stumbling over each other.



In the two weeks that followed, I saw a rapid improvement in digging techniques. Everyone in town got tested by this old wizard with hardly the strength to do good work. He found latent wizards, and trained them in a simple spell for evaporating stone and causing it to rain elsewhere. The Stonerain spell helped a lot. And he got a ten percent cut of what any of the dozen new wizards did. They would not have been discovered elsewise, but gold is an awful powerful motivator.



Dwarves showed up, and I told them my plan. I was making a mile deep stripmine. They set to work. The local horse barbarians showed up, and what they lacked in skill with a shovel, they made up in raw endurance, and in numbers.



Occasionally the sky grew terribly dark as the Enemy strove to get at us, and the Archmage defended this plot of land from his incursions.



At the half-mile mark down,we started using cables sold to us by the horse barbarians. The enchanted ropes made out of horsemane and moonlight and spring grass pulled at the sword of Night from all directions so that it would not topple over on us.



Another quarter-mile down, and we were well into the Industrial Revolution for some of the miners, and it grew toward night. Rain came, and I was forced to close the pit for even those who had night lights.



Then we saw another light in the sky. A ball of fire slowly drifted down toward us. It resolved into the shape of a pale, red dragon with a beard, and sharp-edged scales drab and metallic in the moonlight.



“Are you the mine foreman who is paying such and such a price for every square yard of stone or dirt removed?” Her voice was the most wondrous I had ever heard.



Still, I was not worried. Dragons are tough, but not that tough.



“And you are?”



“Terracyl the Queen, my throne is the Thorn Mountains, my front yard the Greenwood, and my pantry is the Pirate Sea.”



“So, I suppose this is your front porch, and we trespass?” I said with slight mockery that I could not help.



“Yes, tiny verser, you do. But I’m a generous sort so I don’t mind as long as you show respect.” Her voice sent chills running up and down my forearms which helped make me aware of Dlarion jabbing me, very hard, in the ribs.



Terracyl took off straight up like a missile being launched.



“Now you’ve done it, you imbecilic human. I thought I knew why a hammer was needed when you began to strip mine. I would never have thought of such a brash plan. But now, you have killed us all.”



“Surely not.” I began, and he threw his bow on the ground in disgust. It was then that I saw a shadow flicker across the moon. I looked up, and saw Terracyl race across it at several hundred miles per hour. Then she went into a vertical dive straight for the town.



“Close your eyes.” Dlarion muttered. I didn’t. Five hundred feet above the town the dragon breathed out a huge cloud of flame, no, it was plasma. It flared light so bright that you could have read by it from five miles away.



Then Terracyl flew through this cloud, and snap-turned in between buildings to fly down city streets, and out the still open gate toward me at about two hundred miles per hour.



I gulped and reconciled myself to leaving the world.



Terracyl stopped within forty feet of me at a whiplash inducing speed. I opened my eyes to see the dragon looking me dead in the face.



“I apologize, your Mightiness. Really, I’m sorry.”



“That will do.” Terracyl said, and then she hopped over me, and into the pit. The flame came again, and again. She wielded it like a cutting torch slicing out massive chunks of rock, bespelling them for lightness, and then sending a thousand ton (before the spell) rock to sail over our heads, and toward the rock piles.



In a few hours, she had finished the project. The last of the rock fell away from the sword, and it was beautiful in a “you’re scaring me out of lunch, dinner, and breakfast kind of way.”



Terracyl climbed out of the pit, and we payed her. We even added a bonus just in case she felt cheated. No one wanted the Overlord of the Continent mad at them. It was several king’s ransoms, but well worth it.



Right before, the dragon took off with her gold, she turned to me,and tapped her chest with a long claw.

“Tadeusz, to answer your unspoken curiousity. I’m not cooking with gas. I’m nuclear. A living nuclear reactor rests inside my chest.”



I bowed.



Then I took a few minutes to pray, and hiked up a cable with the use of tight-rope training until I stood on the hilt of the sword I was meant to wield.



I wondered how to activate the thing. Since, I could think of nothing sensible, I began experimenting.



“Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Come on thing, I need the help. There’s evil afoot.” Something in my second sentence helped.



I felt fine as power began to flood into me. The I felt the wind playing on my intestines. I was growing and thinning out at the same time. My friends looked at me in horror.



And still I grew, until the sword was the right proportion for me. I stood,nearly two miles tall, and less solid than a cloud.



Apparently I was out of phase with the rest of matter as well since I could step through rocks.



In the distance, I saw another figure, much like mine approaching.



The Enemy walked the plain. He stalked, and strutted, and laughed at me. He spun his wizard’s rod in intricate spins that seemed to start over there and continue elsewhere with no movement in between.



I pulled up the giant nearly mile long sword, and found that the blade faded from my sight at odd times. It refused certain slashes. The thing balked, and grew surly.



The wizard watched me fight with my own sword, and he just chuckled more.



He stood about five miles off, but it was like we were in the same room.



“Never fought with a multi-dimensional weapon before have you?” He said. I shrugged in agreement seeing as it was completely obvious.



“They are very tricky weapons. Even most lower level spirits could not properly use one. You’ve been recruited to fight me. Chained with a geas most unfairly, told that I was a bad guy, and that you needed to kill me. Why don’t you hear my side of the story?” The Enemy said most reasonably.



“Release me from the geas, and I might.” I bargained back. He made as if to do it, and then held back. I shrugged again, and started walking toward him. So he released me.



And then he told me his story of hideous abuse at the hands of Heaven’s hierachy. It was enought to make a man weep.



I asked him what he did in response. He told me he struck at the Enemy through those precious to the Enemy.



“Soft targets, eh?” I said with wry sympathy.



“Yes. Yes. That’s a good way to put it.”



My gaze turned cold, and without warning so did the air as a jet stream responded to my fury.



“Speaking as one of those ’soft targets’ in your war that you lack the guts to take to the Gates of Heaven, I’d say I’m a little, no, a lot unhappy with you.”



And then I charged him with my sword raised over my head. Nothing fancy, clever, or pretty involved. I’d never do well in that kind of fight.



The hilt always stayed solid, and so I took a smack and another from his staff before I closed. Then I brought that hilt down on top of his skull. Again and again. He hit me a lot of times with his wooden wizard’s rod. He broke ribs, and fingers and battered me. I hammered him.



Finally, he was gone.



I turned about and called out in a cackling voice around the blood in my mouth and the loose tooth, and past the ringing in my skull.



“Oh, Archmage, Archmage, where are you?”



He appeared and waved his staff. The geas brought me up short.



“Put down the sword, Tadeusz, and I’ll free you.” He said from his spot on the ground a half-mile in front of me.



The Enemy had tricked me. The geas still held. Can’t trust anyone these days, not even a fallen god of evil.



I looked at my sword, and considered. It was a massive power source. With it, I imagine you could snuff out a sun. But, I’d already proven that I hardly knew how to use it. I could just as easily crack the planet like a plate dropped on the floor.



Besides, I had access to a power that dwarfed the sword. I reached out in my mind for help, and the geas fell from me. This time, I felt the undeniable exhilaration of freedom.



The geas had been rigged to defeat my rage, and my will. But nothing could be a perfect defense against everything, and so it was a simple matter for my faith to free me. I still think even if the geas had been rigged to defeat my faith, that it might have failed. Not that I’m all that great, but my Master is.



I turned to the Archmage with a smile on my face.



He started to cast a spell to teleport himself away. Stark terror made his movements jerky. I forbad it by the power of the Night Sword.



“Remember, I promised to sheathe this sword in your heart?” I asked him. He composed himself to meet his fate.

“I told you not to enslave me. It was wrong. Just because I’m an adventurer, you thought I had no rights.”



“I, we, the whole planet needed your help. I could not be sure you would agree.” The wizard replied.



“But surely you knew sometime in my travels that I would help anyways?”



“Yes, okay, what do you want me to say, I was wrong, but I’d do it again anyways. I don’t have the courage to not do it.”



I stood and thought. In ways, he seemed a dark reflection of myself. And the Spirit reminded me that I had been shown mercy upon the asking. Mercy was not given at proof of decency or even at plans of decency, it was a gift I had been given that I had not deserved. There was the worry that in being merciful to him, I opened the door to him doing this to someone else. But I chose mercy for the sake of gratitude. And because I would not want to deny freedom like he did.



I bent down to my knees, and the sword lay in my football field sized hand between us.



“I’m going to highly reccommend you give up enslaving people. The next person may not be nearly so kind as I. Might be downright irritable, and not a sweet person like me.”



Then I put the sword down on the ground, and shrank about halfway. The sword turned solid, but I stayed phased, and a half-mile tall.



The archmage was shocked. We tried various solutions, but nothing worked. I was a ghost without food or water, and messing with the Sword had made it so my mind was frazzled enough that most of my magic was temporarily lacking even if I had anything that would help in this situation.



A week passed, and I passed out, and into another world. Hopefully, I could find a world where I could reverse this, or I might drift starving and dying of thirst from world to world as a kind of very thin fog bank.



Tadeusz