Breath carries memories.

It was easy, so easy, to forget that breath was a part of a man’s spirit but as Marroo stood at the top of the tower and his father’s spirit ballooned out of his old sword at the touch of Marroo’s breath, Marroo found himself carried away, down, down, down into memories that were not his own.

Pride, anger, grief, longing. The mixed passions of a human life battered at Marroo as phantom knives lashed the air around him. He clutched the handle of the blade as he pressed deeper into the fragment of his father left in the sword, a fragment so large as to be the entire man himself, minus one body and whatever spark turned the substance of both into a living thing.

The memories flashed behind Marroo’s eyes like dreams, dreams in which he was the man, now running with fear coursing through his veins, now spilling blood, now holding tight to a little boy as he carried him out of a dark tunnel into the light.

He stood in a room with windows that looked out on darkness and a yellow lamp that turned the glass of the window into a black mirrors throwing back reflections of the girl throwing things into a bag while he prowled between the two doors that led out. The two relevant doors, anyways. Rubble blocked up the door he’d come through to block the guards who pursued him after his fight, but he could feel them, not well, not with the eyes of an adept, yet, but with what sense his expanded spirit could give him through the door and what his sharpened senses told him of the world outside.

“Hurry.” He told the girl.

She scrambled through a cubby next to one of the beds in the room, one of a dozen that lay exposed to the light of the lamp now that the curtains which separated them when he’d come in lay in tatters on the floor. The beds were little more than stacked bundles of cloth but they were large, large and luxuries for this part of the pipes. The kind he’d known children and old men to kill for in shallower sections of the big dark. A motley assortment of items he couldn’t claim to understand the importance of in this woman’s life flew out of the cubby into her bag and she straightened, red faced and breathless. She pushed back her hair from her eyes as she looked around, then quickly straightened the covers of the bed next to on sheer impulse.

“We don’t have much time.” His voice lacked the gravel it would earn in two more years, but still growled through grit teeth.

The girl hesitated, then snatched a small holographic image from the windowsill in front of her and tucked it into the box next to her before she turned and hoisted the bag onto her shoulder. Silver eyes met silver eyes and he grinned, despite the circumstances.

The guards came then, as he’d known they would. They charged the door, seeming to think they could take him by surprise. They might have, if Begenya was still with them, but he’d killed Begenya first, leveling half the house in the process. These two didn’t stand a chance.

The sword he pulled from its sheath hummed with power as he brought it free and, in one fluid motion, he flicked a projection of his breath across the door.

The door blew apart where the breath hit it. Splinters shot down the corridor behind the wave of power and the two men barreling towards Darro were knocked backwards by the swipe. If he’d taken the time to focus, that projection would have copied the sharpness of the blade, instead it simply slammed into them with enough force to crack ribs and dislocate shoulders. An arquebus banged at the other end of the hall and the bullet bit chunks from what was left of the door, followed moments later by the scream of two sunflare pistols discharging beams of orange gold fire that filled their room with light.

Darro ducked aside and pulled Sikhaya to him against one wall near the door. She was flushed and excited, and there was a light in her eyes that he’d never seen before even at their most intimate.

He kissed her. Amidst the gunfire and the smoke. He heard the injured guards groaning behind the door and their comrades shouting that they’d come and get them out. When they parted her eyes danced, and not just from the light of the flames now rising around the room.

“You’re going to get us killed.” She hissed, but she was grinning, despite the danger all around them.

“Never.” He touched her chin and she smiled and leaned into his touch.

The beams stopped as the last of the gunner’s spare sunflares overheated and for a moment there was only the crackle of the rising flames and the groans of the injured guards.

“When you said you’d get me out,” she said, “I thought you’d just pay.”

The arquebus down the hall barked and the bullet bit a hole in the paneling of the wall only a foot from Darro’s shoulder.

“He wanted too much.” Darro replied without turning.

“So, you challenged a cultivator to a duel?” She smiled, and he wanted to smile back, but he moved his hand up to the bruise at the corner of one eye instead.

“Of course.”

Her smile faded as he touched her bruise and she pulled his hand down to her cheek.

“No one will ever hurt you.” He promised. “Never again.”

The world fell in two at the statement, cut, divided by his mind into the futures that could be and the futures he could not allow to become. He kissed her, quickly, before the excitement faded, and readied his sword. A beam slashed through the door and the flames behind him leapt higher with the searing heat as Sikhaya pressed her face against his shoulder to hide from it. Darro’s spirit was near exhaustion after the fight that leveled the building behind them, but he pushed at his sluggish meridians until his spirit spun within him again. He could feel the world around him through that spirit, felt the flame of Sikhaya’s breath flickering at her core, and, with a stretch, the flames of the six men beyond the door whose spirits he would soon extinguish.

“Wait here until I call.” He told her over the scream of a second sunflare bolt. “Then follow quickly.”

She met his eyes and nodded as the flames began their march across the ceiling and Darro pivoted, cut, and threw himself into the startled guards while their weapons bit holes into the walls around him.

Impressions followed, impressions of death, of many deaths, not just those of the guards. Blood glistened in the darkness of the pipes, it shone in the light reflected from his blade, and spattered his hands, his robes, his face as his will followed his blade, the will to cut.

Someone mocked him for using a sword as they stood above a half a dozen bodies strewn around a slanting room. The man wore body armor and carried a sunflare rifle almost as long as he was tall with a lens at its nose larger than most men’s fists. Darro’s meridians were fully open by then. Killing the men around them had been easier than swatting rats in the dead end tunnels he’d feared entering as a child.

He paced the past the bodies as he wiped the blood from his sword. He’d felt something as he killed the men at his feet. Something sharpt that resonated within his spirit. Something that flowed along the edge of his sword, something he would need time to meditate on during the breathing exercises that kept him powerful. He turned and met his mocker’s eyes. “Could you have cleared this room?” He asked.

Veshtu looked around at the dismembered corpses and grinned. He slapped Darro on the shoulder and said something, but he wasn’t standing over dead men anymore.

He stood above Sikhaya, his wife now, fat with their first child and weeping in a corner of the room as far from him as she could get without using the door he’d blocked when she tried to run.

“What do you want?” He asked her, again. “What do I have to do?”

She shook her head as she wept and turned her face to the wall.

His hands shook as the breath milled inside of him. “Talk to me!” He demanded. “Tell me what I’ve done!”

Her tears simply came harder and he let the anger and the fear and confusion drive his breath out in a strike that shattered the dresser next to the door. His dresser, for all that he kept next to nothing inside. It only made her sobbing worse.

He remembered the fire in her eyes when he rescued her, and the promise he’d made, the two worlds and the razor’s edge he’d found himself treading since.

“You don’t care about me.” She choked through her tears. “You never cared about me.”

Darro’s fists tightened and he looked at knuckles scarred from childhood battles. “I saved you.” He said.

“I used you!” She snapped. She whipped around to glare at him through her tears. “Don’t you get it? I used you, just like you’ve been using me since getting me out. Just like he used me. I used you to get out, but I should’ve known I’d be just as good without you!”

“What haven’t I given you?” He roared. The spirit behind his voice made the walls of their room shake. “What more can you want from me?” The wave of breath that slammed out of him with the demand wiped out the familiar that hovered near the ceiling as their only light source. It dissipated in a fuzz of golden light while she cowered away from him and new tears leaked from her eyes. He shook in the dark as he fought to pull his spirit back under control, and pressed a hand to temples that ached from the intensity of the anger spilling through him as a mask for the fear he would not allow to control him.

“What do I have to do?” He asked, quietly this time, in control.

She hugged herself and rocked quietly in the corner. “It’s dark.” She whispered through her tears. “It’s so dark. So, so dark.”

It was dark when he touched the icon for the first time as well. Pain marked the occasion, and blood. He no longer needed light to perform the killing required for their sect. With his open meridians his senses could pick out more details in the dark than any mere mortal , and his mind could interpret what little they reported amidst the tangled web of lightless tunnels until it was as good as setting his familiar to hover over his shoulder as a lantern, better, even, since his senses didn’t give him away as he approached. Where his senses failed him, his spirit served as the invisible hands he needed to guide him through lightless tunnels to his prey.

Touching the icon for the first time felt like being stabbed. It sank into him, even as his blade sank into the chest of a Blackmark sect leader who’d fled the destruction of their central compound in the Fog Cavern. Invisible blades manifested around him as he cried out at the spiritual pain, gouging lines in the wall through the force of his spirit alone as his third eye opened to the spiritual realm. In an instant he felt every sharpened object within a hundred miles and every object that could be sharpened, while other spiritual auras flickered as a faint miasma beneath his awareness of the sword.

It should have been a victory, but there were no victories anymore, at least none that he could celebrate with the same gusto that Veshtu and the rest of the Hair-Viper Sect showed when they toasted him at the barracks after his return. He was bloody from a victory that would expand their burgeoning sect’s wealth, and aching from an achievement only reached by a handful of cultivators in every generation, and yet, the silence when he returned to the home he’d built for the pregnant girl who would not speak to him or touch him sapped all but the thinnest pleasure from the cheers of his brothers in arms as they clashed mugs together and pressed liquor into his hands he would not drink.

Even when he brought her lights the merchants said would make their home seem brighter than the heavens, she only looked at him, and then turned away to absorb herself in one of the books she’d salvaged from the flesh shop he’d torn down to give her this life.