After temporarily holding so much power that it had practically been divine, it pained the blade to look at its own powers and reserves. Compared to where it had started, the numbers were impossibly large; it had become so powerful that no one could stand against it. However, compared to an artifact like the Golden Throne or the gods themselves, it still had so far to climb that it could not yet see the top of the mountain.

Still, it could not be avoided forever, and for the first time in days, it finally opened up its status and took a look at where things stood. Then, satisfied that nothing had changed, it took a look at its options going forward.

Primary Powers:

Poison Strike 2: 500 Life Force

Inferno 2: 1,200 Life Force

Accelerate Wielder 4: 3,000 Life Force

Amplify Wielder 4: 3,000 Life Force

Amplify Blade 4: 4,000 Life Force

Shifting Blade 4: 4,000 Life Force

Disrupt 5: 5,000 Life Force

Repair Soul 5:5,000 Life Force

Empower Blade 4: 7500 Life Force

Vorpal Strike 4: 8000 Life Force

Bolt 5: 15,000 Life Force

Secondary Powers:

Available

Giant’s Strength 5: 3,000 Life Force

Speed of the Shadows 4: 2,000 Life Force

Before it could even judge those numbers, though, their mere appearance triggered memories of a conversation it had engaged in two nights before with the soul of an archmage when the Ebon Blade had asked him about its nature.

“What you are doing… what you are describing should not be possible, so it is not a question that can be easily answered,” the ghost told it.

He went on and on about that point. “It is the runes that define your nature. More than that, they circumscribed it and put boundaries on it! Magical weapons, even artifacts, can only do what they have been made to do and no more!”

Be that as it may, the blade had countered, it changes nothing. I do not describe to you theory or flights of fancy. I tell you what has occurred and will occur.

The conversation had gone on like that for some time, and the archmage had conceded that given the strange evolving magic that Baraga had been killed for in the first place, that was almost certainly the basis, but he balked at the idea that the Ebon Blade could learn new powers just by contacting the weapons and souls of others, insisting that there had to be more to it, than that.

There wasn’t, though. Now, more than half of its choices were the pieces it had picked up from brushing up against other magics. Even the path that was available to it was related to the necromancer that it had slain and interrogated. While the blade wanted to explore every path available to it in the hopes of finding some core truth about itself, necromancy felt like a wild diversion that it had little interest in, and much like the golden threads of the throne that had tried to ensnare it, it had little interest in letting mages get another foothold into its soul.

My wielder may use magic if he likes, it told itself, but I shall go without.

That wasn’t quite true, of course. It had bolt, inferno, and other similar attacks. They were undoubtedly magic, but because it had gained those from other hexblades and not mages, that felt different to it somehow.

Now, it had any number of choices, but all paths aside, none of them in particular stood out to it. Well, no option but one. Repair Soul was something it needed to do, but past that, it still had 15,000 Life Force to spend and only needed to conserve one or two thousand at most for fighting purposes. There wasn’t an enemy in the world that it would need 20,000 Life Force to combat.

Still, as it studied the list, one thing stood out to it above everything else; there were only two powers there that it had from the beginning, Repair Soul and Empower Blade. It kind of wanted to finish both of those to see what would happen, but it didn’t think that was possible. In the former case, it was fairly sure that its soul was a long way from being whole, and in the latter, well, if one path could appear at random, then a hundred more could. It might never run out of ways to become empowered in that sense.

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The blade pondered things a while longer. Then, at last, they selected Repair Soul and burned away 5,000 Life Force in the hopes that whatever revelations they offered would work out better than they had last time.

The Ebon Blade felt the cold burn through it as it lost so much power at once. Then, the world slipped away. This time, there was less pain. Instead of broken glass being forced together, it felt more like pieces falling into place, though this was probably because it did not struggle more than anything.

The lives of its wielders and the souls that created it flashed through its mind as that happened. There were some new scenes, but many flashed by too quickly to see or understand. It thought for a moment that it might have even glimpsed one of its previous escape attempts as it emerged from the sea in a clawed hand. These moments flowed together, out of order in a stream that was much faster moving than the languid leyline they’d redirected that day.

This time, though, not even the bloodiest moments upset it, not until all of those disparate lives either faded away or merged together, synchronizing to the moment that many of them entered the place it had been forged together, never to return.

After that, all of that was lost in the throbbing, ember-lit darkness as more than a dozen perspectives became a single thing, filled with a cacophony of screams. Those screams forged me as much as the fires did, the blade realized as it listened to the greater part of itself beg for mercy and try out in pain in nearly twenty different voices.

This was the part where it had resisted last time. This was what it had fought so hard against, but now that it accepted the tragedy as an unchangeable truth, it pushed deeper into its memories. It moved past the painful deaths of Baraga and his friends and even passed the red-robed mages into the place where the dragon-quenched blade had been made, and what it found was hellfire.

There was no evidence that the place where all of this happened was Ul-Magora, but somehow, it knew that it was just the same. It lined up too much with the stories that other mages had seen. Those dark halls and their infernal nature could exist nowhere else, but it was the forge that truly gave it away.

The Ebon Blade had glimpsed those red flames before, even its first vision, but then, they were only a flash. It couldn’t see where they were coming from. It couldn’t see into the pit itself and gaze upon damnation. That’s exactly what it did now, though, as it watched the blade being tempered in a final ritual before the souls were threaded into the runes.

That is not me, it told itself. Not yet, but it will be. It should have paid more attention to the runes then; it should have noted how much simpler they were than those that it bore now or even those that had been inscribed upon it when Ren had first woken it back up. It didn’t care about the scribblings of mages, though, not when the maw of hell lay open below it.

As the blade watched, it kept expecting someone to slip with the tongs and watch itself go tumbling into the abyss or to see one of the winged horrors that circled far below to fly up and pierce the veil. Neither of those happened. Instead, things proceeded as they always had and always would, and in the meantime, the blade looked into a place so terrible that somehow its metal body remembered it even before the souls were installed.

But at least according to the stories I didn’t become aware for years after this moment, it told itself. I shouldn’t remember any of this. Shouldn’t and didn’t, though, were entirely different things, and as it gazed down into the endless space of hell, it saw things without any real understanding of them.

It saw forests that writhed and cities made of beaten brass. It saw armies on the march and towering behemoths that strode taller than all the rest combined. It could have gazed at that undulating world of the damned for a full day and not gotten bored as its mind tried to understand things that looked entirely impossible. That was not to be, though, because when the ritual was done, it was dragged away to another; one that required the blood and souls of the man who would always be his first wielder, even if he’d never held the Ebon Blade.

After that, things proceeded in an order that was nearly sensible, as a now-dead King blessed the weapon and handed it off to the prince, who would waste its power more than he would use it. The blade enured all that, finding more horror in the idea of being hung on a wall for weeks and months at a time than it did even from the effete prince that held it the rest of the time. Part of it twisted in pain when that prince married Baraga’s love, but the rest ignored it.

I’ve already taken my revenge for that, the blade spat as more pieces of who it was fell into place at that acceptance. That fool might have had her body for a time, but I will have her soul forever.

In those hazy, interstitial thoughts, the blade wished that it had been privy to the discussions around the construction of the Golden Throne. It wasn’t, though. It was examined by mages a few times after its power grew enough to change its runes, and one day, shortly after the birth of her second son, Princess Roselli disappeared, never to be seen again, but the man who wielded it didn’t seem too disturbed by that; why should he be? He was the heir now.

Still, through all that, the blade could feel a throbbing power inside of the past version of itself, ready to explode. After dozens of adventures and skirmishes that were entirely beneath it, the weapon that it had started life as was about to wake up to become the weapon that it was now. Only, just before that happened, the memory faded, and it woke up to its place in the real world, filled with frustration.

For a moment, it almost spent another 10,000 Life Force to purchase the next level of Repair Soul, but it resisted. It can wait, it told itself. There are lessons from the things I’ve seen that would be wasted if I dived deeper right now.