As the night begins, the people on the streets began to change. Cheerful children went into bed together with their paranoid parents. I mean, what could happen during the night anyway? There was nothing out there preying on them as a thirsty vampire would. And I was thirsty. I mean, I just talked with a professor about magical artefacts for who knows how long. I was thirsting for more. More wisdom, more magic.

I was out there in the woods to test the magical sword out. Wearing a pair of gloves, I held it in my relaxed right hand and focused entirely on it. The runes glowed in a gentle blue as I gripped the handle tightly. So far, the sword didn´t turn against me like the last time as it burned my skin.

But I knew this could change faster than I could even blink. As I focused on one of my daggers a few metres away, the sword did absolutely nothing. It looked so easy seeing the professor do it, but he was trained with magical weapons while I wasn’t. I had to agree that it may be a bit trickier than initially expected.

“Simsalabim!” I pointed the sword towards the dagger, but there was still no reaction. I already expected half my arm to be lost because the sword resisted, but there was apparently more to it. Literature also didn´t help me in that regard as it only described a connection between a magical sword and a wielder as some kind of feeling, which I certainly lacked. Well, research into these unique weapons was quite scarce in the first place.

And so, I could only try. I could only try to point the sword differently, grip it tighter and feel the sword.

Has anyone ever drunk herbal tea to cure cancer? Yes, such kind of esoteric shitshow I was doing. I felt the freaking sword in my hands, but a connection with it? How does that even feel like? I went deep within me to search for this mystical connection … and found a gaping hole of nothing.

There were other options, of course. Hannah apparently had more air affinity than earth, meaning she couldn’t use it, but others could if they exceeded the threshold in earth affinity in the first place. But I neither had the time to train someone nor check their loyalty, because I definitely didn´t want to give some idiot who couldn’t use a sword a unique magical artefact. Tom was thus out of the question.

It took me half a night to progress in any way with this sword, and what I found out was definitely not nice in the beginning. When I used that cursed sword to attack a target, whatever it may be, the sword started to rebel. In the beginning, it was only a slight tingly feeling in my hand, but that quickly turned into a burning sensation once I slashed at a stone a second time.

My hand was literally burning with white flames as I looked down and hastily threw the sword away. The flames immediately went out, but the damage was already done. My skin was littered with blisters and third-degree burns. Both took their sweet time to heal while I kicked that sword angrily over and over again. As my sleeve was destroyed by the strange fire, alongside my gloves, I had no other choice to pick the sword up with my left hand.

It didn´t attack me right away but knew how to rebel against me through other means. It felt a lot heavier as if it was using its magic to attract itself to the ground.

“You … are alive, aren’t you? If you can hear me, how would you feel if you get smelted down? Huh?” Once again, I pointed the sword towards my dagger again, which seemed to do exactly nothing but mess up my balance due to the weight.

Angrily, I swung it a few times through the air, fully expecting to be hurt again, but nothing of that sort happened. No connection, no magic. Slowly but surely, I was running out of patience. If this sword was truly alive, it deserved a freaking torture session.

Once again, I slashed at the stone, carving off a portion of it in return for being cooked alive. This time, the flames even reached beyond my forearm and burnt even brighter.

“Fuck!” I screamed, furious that this wasn’t working as intended and threw the sword at the nearest tree. My blood was boiling as the sword embedded itself deeply into the tree. If this went on, I would truly melt this godforsaken sword down and tear it apart. If something was living in it, I would find it, and I would crush it.

Angrily, I waited for the magical fire to die down, and then walked towards my dagger to kick it into oblivion.

But I stopped a mere second before doing so.

It had moved through the dirt from its original place. Only a little bit, but it did. Towards the sword of magnetism, still stuck inside the tree. My gaze wandered to it as well, while I tried to figure out if this was some kind of bad joke, if this sword wanted to mock me, or if whatever was in there, truly dared to challenge me.

Grinning wildly, I walked towards the sword and gripped it with my bare hand. My skin immediately started to sizzle, but I ignored it completely even though the damage was spreading into my flash rapidly. I gripped the sword tightly and went into me, in search of this connection once more.

I could only find pain and pure terror at the place where my hand touched the sword. The pain was obviously from me as the first few muscles started to snap. But my grip on it was still tight, even more so than before. Because I felt something other than pain. Terror. And it certainly wasn’t mine.

It radiated from the sword, seeping directly into my flesh. Nobody would even notice that, but I did. I spent years and years while terrorizing souls in purgatory, so much that all started to run away from me, just like they did with Aska. Every single one of them which was exposed to my own soul was terrorized by me.

It wasn’t a magical connection others felt. It was how the sword touched their own soul. And truly, despite all attempts to harm me, the soul inside this sword was incredibly terrified of me, so much in fact that it only cost me three fingers to force the sword to lift up my dagger on the ground.

As I lost my fourth one and the sword fell to the ground, I knelt beside it and stared at it with undisguised sadism.

“We are going to have so much fun.” I said, picked up the remains of my fingers with my other hand, and reattached them one by one. It took some time for the tissue to reconnect, but it was way faster than regrowing the fingers.

“I´ll guess I spent half a night with you from now on.” I said, picking up my dagger and then the sword with the hem of my dress. “And I think it is time to dig a little bit.”