As nightmares went this was… New. He didn’t know for a
fact that it was a nightmare just yet but it had all the makings. A dusty plateau as far as he could see. Featureless. His armor was on. And an unfamiliar individual surveying from above. A nightmare wasn’t quite right. No, a
dream wasn’t right. A dreamer doesn’t know he dreamed until right before he wakes. Nightmares were worse. Inside a nightmare there is no hope, no resistance, no
will, only fear. Fear of a threat, of something you can neither fight nor escape. Clad in his armor, sword at his side, Nicomede could resist. Nico had nightmares before. In some of them he’d been armored. But the Durante crest was missing from his armor already, and that was never how that dream began.
The first bandit formed so quickly, as though from the very dust upon which he stood, but he was too rash. A heavy thrusting blade at Nicomede’s chest, enough to get through even plate if it struck just right, delivered at the greatest speed he could muster. But the knight was moving, dropping back his left foot and pivoting so the blade passed harmlessly a hand’s breadth from his chest. The man’s own momentum drove Nicomede’s dagger, drawn from his side, through his light armor up and under his sternum. Close enough for him to feel the bandit’s hot breath driven from his lungs, the gasp of a man who has died and only just begun to realize. He held him there. Waited through the last, rattling rasps of breath. When he slumped Nico let the motion pull him off of the blade, flicked it clean, and returned it to its sheath. Whatever was going merited readiness.
The familiar hilt of his blade in hand, the proper weight, was enough. Aptly timed it was, because the second apparition— if that’s what they were— came at him then and came at him smarter. An axe came whistling down at his head, a different proposition from a clumsy thrust. But not too different. Bat it aside with the shield, cut the unprotected throat. The next few were variations on a theme. Bandits and mercenaries, in ones and twos. Self equipped, self trained, no match for a competent opponent. He flowed like water, fluidly evading or deflecting the blows that came his way and returning the favor with lethal precision. No reason even to think about it. They might as well have been training dummies, a practiced routine that he had performed a thousand times for all the threat that they posed.
They left him time to think. To wonder why his observer seemed familiar, to wonder where he was and what was going on. One of his nannies— parry, riposte— when he was young had been a superstitious woman. That was what his father said, but even then it seemed narrow-minded. Everything that magic could do, that faith could do, what really was superstition? Just a belief unproven, a magic unknown. Not all of it was true. But ruling it out— lean, bash— was churlish. When he asked her where dreams came from she answered truthfully; that she didn’t know. That they could be messages from the divine. Memories of an ancestor. Or, as she believed, sometimes they were an experience imparted when the soul wandered too far from the body. When the conscious, unbound for a time from the mortal tether, roamed into planes and places that the living were not meant to go.
A soldier swung a halberd. Beyond a doubt he had the reach advantage, one Nico couldn’t easily defeat, but nothing was so simple. The ground at his feet was wet and muddy with spilled blood. He whispered a word, just one, and the fluid below bent to his whim. A severed tendon broke his guard, undermined by shock and pain, and Nico followed through.
That, she said, was why you never died in a dream. For the soul to die outside the body would leave but a husk, and even in sleep the soul recoils from such danger. Maybe it was simpler. Dreams are drawn from what is known, what is felt, no matter how strangely they’re twisted. The dreamer can never dream of death because they’ve never experienced it. However strange it was everything here was something that Nico
knew; combat, the feeling of ground disturbed by fierce fighting, the ring of steel against steel. Every last detail. Everything strange could have been imagined from there. But still that didn’t feel
right.
A knight in livery half remembered was the first to break the reverie, to disrupt the pattern; a block and a skillful strike, a blade heavier than his parting the tough leather at his hip and the skin beneath it. The flash of pain, the trickle of scarlet, brought his focus to the here and the now. But his foe had overextended for that taste of victory. A clumsy rush for a killing blow against someone too practiced to be caught. The outstretched arm pinned against the wound it made, pulled further with Nicomede’s twist; the guard around his fingers struck the knight’s breastplate dully. The weight of his armor, the disruption of his stance, he hit the mud before he knew what had happened. So too did Nicomede’s blade pierce through before he knew it, driven through a gap in his helm.
It wasn’t so easy from there.
The caliber of his opponents only climbed, and they began to come in twos and then threes. Every little cut, every little bruise, made the next fight just a bit harder. He had to lean harder on his magic to make up the difference. Eventually, in a moment too quick even truly to register, he slipped. And he dreamed of death.
It was over in the blink of an eye. A blade passed through his neck. An infinitesimal second of pain. Then it was done. But he did not wake. He did not die. He just stood where he began, on ground pure and unsullied. And it began over again. Opponent after opponent, foe after foe, from bandit to knight to monster to something in between them all. It never
ended. No matter how many he killed one more rose, again and again and again and again until something got lucky. Thought disappeared, memory faded, every conscious act took fell behind the monotonous, automatic cycle of violence. Kill and kill and kill. Die and die and die. Over and over and over, cycle after cycle, repeat after repeat, until he could no longer remember how many times he had stood anew upon this soil and began his task anew.
No stoicism, no poise, no practiced reserve survived such unending toil. Faced with immortality most macabre he become angry. No, he became wrathful; for a disciple of Mayon, a man who believed in the fluid power of water, his blood
burned. It boiled in his veins, seeped throughout the whole of his being until he began to snarl at every new foe. His voice became raw, rough, and every time he fell it was restored anew alongside his body. Not even that could remain. After a hundred resurrections or a thousand, after minutes or years, he threw down his blade and looked up to bellow from the depths of his chest the only words he had spoken aloud;
”What do you want?”“To show you something, I hope.” Nicomede hadn’t truly expected an answer, that his rage towards the heavens would earn anything but silence. But this time someone was there. A man that could only really be called beautiful, for no other word seemed to stick; the details didn’t truly matter behind the whole. His expression was compassionate, but perhaps… A gleam of challenge lurked within. “Or to remind you of something.”
“Of what?”“Well,” He laughed. “That would be telling.”
A slender blade, almost the twin of Nico’s own, whipped towards him. He parried, the way he’d been taught, and his foe caught the riposte. When Nicomede struck his foe reacted in kind. Back and forth and back and forth, no matter how intricate the pattern the balance, the momentum, never shifted away from dead center. Like fighting a man who knew every thought in his head, a mirror that knew what he would do before he did it. A dance so perfectly
familiar that it could not be mistaken.
“Is this all? I expected a little more. It’s like fighting a textbook.” The blade slipped past his guard, twisted to the side at the last moment. The flat struck his head rather than the blade, doubling Nico’s vision. “Such a creative man. What happened, Durante?”
“That’s not my name.”“No? In Mayon’s light it was given, yes? How could anyone but she take it away?”
“My father—““Stripped from you your title, yes. Your home. Even the crest that used to be right…” The tip of his blade pressed into a point in Nicomede’s armor, just below his collarbone. “Here.”
Nico batted the blade away, caught it on his shield, and stabbed his spada ahead but the other man stepped nimbly aside.
“But here you are. A knight again. Do you regret your decision?”
“No,” He took a moment to steady himself. The other man made no move to attack, content to let the pace lull, so Nicomede took that breath. Even if the question threatened to take it away again.
“Of course not. It was the right decision. It protected the most lives.”“But ruined yours.”
“One against many. Is that so different from if I had died in the fighting?”“
Ahhh, but you didn’t. You have have been ready for that. You knew that could happen. What they did was worse. They
unmade you, and you didn’t see it coming.” He did move, now, with a quick stab almost too fast for the parry. “Didn’t it make you angry? When they called you a
coward?”
The rage, dimmed for a time, roared back to life. Metal scraped against metal, pushing the opposing blade out of position. For a brief second his enemy’s guard was open, and Nicomede pressed that advantage. The blade concealed inside the lantern shield sprung out and locked into place in the same motion as he thrust it towards center mass. Florian— to see his own style performed so precisely the knight could be no one else— twisted away from it, but only just in time to catch Nicomede’s spada with his own. Florian stepped back; to maintain his balance he had to.
“
Better.” Far from concerned Florian looked pleased. “You’ve been holding that in too long, Sir Nicomede. Don’t give your anger free reign. But don’t
shun it either. You can believe your choice was right and still be angry about what it cost.”
The pause was different this time. It had the air of an… An intermission. A break between bouts. He’d been building to that, Nicomede suspected, and now he wanted to give the knight a chance to absorb the lesson. It wasn’t a comfortable one. It
had cut deeply to be cast aside. It had cut deeper still that his brother didn’t oppose the smear campaign their father embraced. But he’d contained that pain. He’d staunched the bleeding of his soul as a bulwark against despair, maintained his pride like armor. And so it never healed. That day a piece of shrapnel in his spirit, never allowing for true recovery.
“Now I want to see it,” The founding knight settled into readiness, feet planted and sword raised. “What you
really can do.”
Nicomede drew in a deep breath. He held it a moment, then let it out again slowly. He rolled his shoulders, settled the dirt beneath his feet, and readied himself in kind. Neither knight spoke. No signal passed between them but they both knew when the bout resumed. Maybe that was something about the Mirror Knight. Whatever it was they sprang at the same time; Nico caught Florian’s slash on his shield and stabbed towards his heart. The elder knight flowed around the strike, using contact with Nicomede’s own shield as the fulcrum for his spin, and struck at Nico’s face with a reversed dagger in his off hand. That became the rhythm. Both men were
fast. Blows redirected and used to fuel a riposte, strikes that hit empty air as though their target had never been. True to his name Florian was Nicomede’s equal— and opposite— in the disgraced heir’s own style. The first blow to strike true would be decisive if only they could land it.
From a back and forth of blades Nicomede added magic; jets of water met a rushing current, the force angled off course and the surface tension lost. Florian coated the ground beneath Nicomede’s feet in ice but the younger knight made cleats of the same. The patterns grew more elaborate and reckless, throwing caution— perhaps for the first time in years for Nicomede Durante— to the wind seeking the decisive edge.
Florian found it. Nicomede’s sword, parallel to his left forearm, speared forward wreathed in spiraling water. Florian dropped below it, sacrificing his own blade to nudge the strike higher. It cut his cheek; a long, shallow line just below his cheekbone. But a smaller, tighter jet around the dagger in his left hand speared through his breastplate and into his heart.
“Better, Durante,” The Mirror Knight said, as Nicomede’s consciousness began to dim. “Better. Next time you might be a proper challenge.”
He didn’t wake particularly rested. The dream lingered on his mind, the beginning— though far from the end— of accepting what had happened. Properly moving on from it.
But those thoughts would take time. For the moment he needed to work out some of this restlessness, and that meant he needed to get to the yards.
