Zach Brenner's Arc

Chapter 38 of 86

Dawn came gray through the cottage windows. Geneva led Zach to a muddy clearing behind the house. The others stayed inside, watching from the door. "Draw it," the old man said. "Then forget you are holding anything." Zach drew the blade and swung at a rotted stump. The wood barely dented. He swung again, harder. Sweat ran down his arms. His tattoos gleamed wet. "You swing like a man chopping firewood," Geneva said. He shuffled closer, cat ears twitching. "You fight the sword. It fights you back. Stop." Hour after hour Zach tried. He cut, he slashed, he strained. Nothing changed. The blade felt dead in his hands. Geneva sat on a log, humming, correcting nothing but his grip on the world. "You want to defeat Maximus," the old man said. "But you cannot even trust the steel that chose you." By the sixth hour Zach's shoulders burned. He dropped the sword in the mud and sank to his knees. "I can't," he said. "There's nothing to feel. It's just metal." Raven stepped toward the door. Geneva raised a hand to stop her. "Good," Geneva said. "Now you have stopped trying to own it. Pick it up. Do not grip it. Let it grip you." Zach lifted the blade with an open palm. He closed his eyes. He stopped counting his breath. He stopped naming the sword and himself as two things. Something shifted. Warmth ran up his arm, like a second pulse joining his own. The blade grew light. He felt the stump behind him without turning. He felt the reeds bending at the clearing's edge, a hundred feet off. He was not holding the sword. He was the sword. Zach opened his eyes and lowered his empty hand. The blade hung in the air before him, floating. He willed it forward. It shot across the clearing and split the far stump clean through. Inside the cottage, Lyra gasped. Garrok grunted in surprise. "Yes," Geneva breathed. He rose from the log, no longer loopy. "Now feel the moves it carries. Push out." Zach thrust his palm. White light burst from the hovering blade in a wave that flattened the reeds. He spun his wrist. The sword whirled into a spinning storm of edges, a tornado of steel that tore the stump to splinters. Zach called the blade back into his hand. His whole body shook, but he smiled. For the first time, the weapon answered him. Geneva nodded slowly. "That is the beginning. Nothing more. Other skills will wake in time, when you are ready. This is only the first door." Zach thought of the broken seal and the sorcerer moving north. "What about Maximus?" he asked. "He's still out there. He's almost free." Geneva turned back toward the cottage. "Let him worry about himself," he said. "You have learned to hold your own power. Now we teach you to keep it."