Swords of the Obsidian Sea

“… and from that pattern he learned the individual parts, and like a child whose lexicon grows with years, so your father’s grew with pages, from shark and reef to lum-ber, row-boat, war-ship, town, city, Governor, history, subjugation, rebellion, time.”

On an island village condemned to the Stone Age by forces millennia more advanced, a clever fool teaches himself to read.

On the eve of the fool's execution, a brief and violent storm passes unnoticed by all but his children, then fishing only a mile out to sea. Battered and mystified and near drowned by the tempest, Drexon the son draws his anchor stone toward the fast calming surface.

And from that stone he draws a sword, a remnant of the storm that delivered it, its blade the same shade of roiling obsidian. And from the tricolored jewels breathing light from its hilt he draws the preserved knowledge and gestating rage of an ancient, vanquished, better world.

Drexon, as anyone born to fish from Aevum’s idyllic, tortured shores, had before now no word for subjugation. No concept of history. No use for time.

Before now, rebellion was only an itch, impossible to scratch.

Before now.