Brathik was waiting for us in the third bedroom, which was slightly larger than the others. The orc’s corpse was laid in state upon the double sized bed, still wearing the armor she had worn in life, and a hilt without a blade laid upon her breast, beneath her crossed arms. Her body looked well-preserved against decay by the effects of the magic in this temple. Around her corpse, there were a number of other treasures, suitable for a king’s burial.

  The ghost must have seen the look on my face as I took in the scene, for she simply shrugged when I turned my gaze upon her. “I had the time to do it, and none of the others noticed me enough to care, so I figured, why not? It isn’t every day you get to perform your own funeral rites.”

  “I understand completely. In my last life, I had no control over anything. This life has been better, so far, but I can certainly see myself doing something like this, if given the chance.”

  Before going to the bed, we first checked the dresser and the two chests in the room, one a simple wooden chest like the others, and the other an iron-bound chest that looked far more formidable. The dresser revealed more vestments, and the wooden chest had a pair of silver candlesticks, that would be worth some gold. The iron chest, however, two far more interesting items, a cloak, and a holy symbol of Malar, carved out of bone.

  Vestele whistled softly when I explained the cloak’s effects. “Perhaps this explains why the temple fell, despite the protections laid upon it? There was a traitor in their midst, sabotaging the defense!”

  Brathik sighed. “For a group that claims to be about the hunt, the forces of Malar seem to often resemble snakes more than hunters. It is vexing to have my death be caused by this kind of treachery.”

  I left the holy symbol where I found it, and stowed the cloak in Frostmane’s bag, before finally turning to the bed, and the treasures laid upon it. Looking over everything with a critical eye, I noted that most of the treasures were nonmagical, but that did not mean they were worthless. There was a bolt of cloth woven from strings of what looked like pure platinum, a ceramic statue of the temple we were in, and at least two dozen other objects of art, or just finely crafted items that would sell nicely in a civilized town. Just those treasures alone would be worth thirty thousand gold or more!

  But the magic items that laid upon the bed were impressive enough in their own right. Frustratingly, the two claws, the spear, and the bladeless hilt resisted my attempt to identify them, offering only their names. Their magic was more powerful than mine, clearly. Still, the other items did give up their secrets to me.

  Those were all interesting enough, and they quickly went into Frostmane’s bags. But what I was most interested in what was obviously the hilt of a katana, that my spell assured me was the artifact Soul’s Violation. The hilt that did not have a blade on it.

  Brathik laughed at my confusion. “You’re wondering where the blade is, no? Don’t worry, I thought the same thing when I first found it. The blade did not reveal its truths to me until I completed the binding. It is a thing of Shadow, you see, and not native to this plane. It requires an anchor for its true power to be brought out, a living soul to bind itself to.”

  I nodded. “I understand. What do I need to do?”

  “You’ll find some chalk in the pouch on my body’s waist. It is completely nonmagical, so I cannot touch it normally, and my skill with my telekinesis is not that precise. But I can guide you through drawing the circle, and the runes you’ll need.”

  The spirit was correct. The runes were written in Elven script with the Sylvan tongue, which made sense considering that the original wielder of the blade was a Nymph. Even if the blade was forged on the Plane of Shadow, it would have been made for her hand, after all.

  The runes themselves were simple enough, despite the fact that writing them took an hour’s work. They were runes that signified binding, a sharing of one’s life force with another entity, and a connection born in blood. A couple of the runes were clearly necromantic in origin, as well.

  When the runes were written, and Brathik had checked to see there were no mistakes, she bade me kneel in the center of the circle. As I knelt, she guided my hands so that I was holding the hilt against my stomach, such that if it had a blade, I would have impaled myself with it. Looking at the hilt, I saw that it had a small ring upon the end, to allow it to hang from a belt loop, and what looked like a blood-red gem beneath the hilt’s wrapping, just below the guard.

  Brathik’s spirit knelt just outside the circle, facing me. In a heavy voice, she said, “There is only one way to bind yourself to the blade, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now. You have to offer up your blood to the blade. If you survive the blow, then the blade will be yours. The gem is the key.”

  The moment I touched the skull with my finger, I felt more pain than I had in either of my previous lives. Well, more pain from a single strike, at least. My stomach burned where the blade pierced through me. And there was definitely a blade there.

  I felt a part of… my life force, you could say, flow from my body and into the blade. How it worked, and how I knew what it did, I had no clue. But I suddenly knew everything about the blade.

  Shaking, my fingers touched the gem again, and the blade disappeared from my gut. Pitching forward, I collapsed upon my hands and knees, coughing up blood as I did so. I had not been that close to dying in a long time.

  As I gasped for air, I heard the spirit speaking again. “And with that, my work is done, and I can move on. May the blade bear you to better fortune than it did me.” When I looked up, she was gone.

  “You damned fool! What the hell do you think you were doing, impaling yourself with a bloody magical blade?! Fuck, if that ghost was still here, I’d give it a piece of my mind, for doing something like this!”

  The next thing I knew, Vestele was by my side, unleashing charge after charge from her wand. Eventually, I felt better, or at least as good as I could. My HP had dropped permanently by binding the blade to me, and me to it, but I found myself fine with that, especially as I went over what I now knew of the blade.

  With one hand, I waved off Vestele. “I’m fine, Vestele, thanks to your healing. There’s always a price for power, and the greater the immediate gain, the greater the price always is. You should know that, given who you serve.”

  Forcing myself to my feet, I wiped the blood from my mouth with one hand, while I held Soul’s Violation in the other. Once again, it looked like just a hilt, without a blade. But when I touched the gem, a blade of inky black shadow burst into existence, in the curved shape of a katana. Despite the blade being made seemingly of nothing but energy, I could feel the weight and balance of the blade, as though it were made of steel.

  I took another breath, and deactivated the blade, for now. “Thank you for your concern, Vestele, but I think we’ve just gotten a powerful tool to use against these mangy wolves of Malar. This blade will go a long way towards bridging the gap between our strengths.”

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