memories of the darkness that had consumed him as he had killed with relish, mowing down all that stood before him as if he were the arm of destruction, he could feel her warmth beckoning him.
He could still hear the wild screams of the Tainted Ones. It had not been like the war of the gods that bound the titans to the new order of the cosmos. The monsters born into their midst, many sired by the monstrous Typhon—the bringer of calamities, lawless chaos, and the great weight of destruction—had ravaged the world until they threatened to very abodes of the gods by the lead of their sire.
He fought those vile creatures as he followed the lead of Apollo, whose venomous arrows spewed death everywhere they touched. There were few among the gods as revered as Apollo, the god whose face and limbs were black as night among the wealth of golden locks that fell along his brow, shoulders unrestrained as he destroyed the monstrous son of the Earth, the Python. By his hands, the blood of the first among monsters flowed wet over the earth. It had been before the time of Cacus, before Alcmene bore Hercules.
If the Tainted Ones were returning, uncoiling from the hidden places beneath the Earth, then the world wasn’t ready for it.
He bit back an ugly chuckle as he thought of how Diana had called trolls monsters and wondered if she could fathom what true monsters were. They weren’t people who bowed to order, even variations of it like those found among orcs and trolls and other beings who inhabited the worlds. They were true plagues, unholy nightmares possessing rapacious appetites.
He had come close to being lost in that madness in his quest to destroy them and root them out from the Eternal Forest. Those gods who loved his woodlands worked for centuries to root out the terrible stain wherever they found it and enrich the world and the fledgling humankind in the process.
Silvas dropped his hand away from the armor, his lip curling as he reflected on the history of the young race. Some days he considered them the gods’ greatest mistake. Yet when he looked upon Diana, he had to admit that not everything of the species could be so bad to have produced her.
“What now?” she asked quietly as if loath to interrupt his introspection.
He supposed that he must appear to be some sort of brute to her if she was so uneasy to speak freely.
Letting out a long sigh, he gestured to weapons displayed on racks near his armor. “You bow serves you well, but arrows run out. You will need a good blade to keep you safe.”
Diana looked at the offering skeptically. “I hate to tell you this, but I have never had to depend on a sword in my life. I was in fencing club for about five years and played around with a little bit of reenactment, but I don’t know if I would trust it in a real fight. I can make arrows on the go—I’ve become pretty good at it recently since the world went to hell, actually. Are you sure it will be necessary?”
His lips tightened. She had no idea just how dangerous the first of the perils they were to face would be. Though he had been content to leave his sword with the strix when he received word that she had found it, confident that she would hoard the blade in her roost among her collection talismans and items of magic, he also knew she would not surrender it without a deadly-earnest fight. She would attack without remorse or any sense of loyalty. She would seek the weakest points to exploit. They would both need to be well protected and armed.
“It is good to have a backup that will serve you well,” he stated as he began to strap on his armor.
“I take it that we are heading out somewhere?”
He nodded. “The Tainted Ones, true monsters of the world, cannot be killed by these weapons. They will slow them down given that, unlike the weapons of your world, they are crafted with magic. But the sword of Nocis was forged by the mighty god Vulcan himself in the furnaces of his metal-rich mountain. Few have such weapons. To possess such divine tools is a great weight, one that I could no longer bear the burden of after centuries of killing the creatures.”