Something they don’t tell you about swords is that they’re heavy. It’s easy to imagine yourself swashling and buckling, wisecracking while you match wits and swords with your opponent. Most children have, at some point, picked up a stick and swished it around like a saber, sometimes making swoosh-noises with their mouth, imagining themselves some noble knight or princess (or both) that will save the day by clashing swords with the villain. In reality, swinging a sword for five minutes will leave your arms sore for the rest of the day, and any kind of fight -- sword or otherwise -- will often see you way too out of breath to crack wise. It’s a fun fantasy to have, and with training, you can probably throw out a pun or two while waving around a slab of iron that weighs as much as a baby taped to a stick, but even then you’ll have to really concentrate, because you’re often also trying to avoid getting hit over the head with an equally oversized shaving implement by someone who is most likely much more focused on your footwork than your verbal sparring. 

All that said, the Hero was tired. His back hurt. His ears were ringing. It was hard to see out of his left eye and he was pretty sure one of his ears had just up and left at some point. Not that he could really feel much on that side of his head anymore; not that it mattered. His arms were heavy. His sword was heavier, the tip almost-but-not-quite dragging across the snowy ground. He stood outside the castle, and approached the Demon Queen, standing at the edge of the mountaintop. She looked as bad as he felt, although she still managed a smile. 

“So,” she said. 

“So,” he responded. There was more to say, of course, but quipping gets harder and harder when you have a concussion and your head has been treated like a particularly popular percussive instrument. He looked behind him. There were chunks missing from the castle. Somewhere in there was the young woman, unconscious but alive. He was pretty sure, at least. He couldn’t exactly go and check, so with a sigh he resigned himself to probably never finding out, and turned back to the Demon Queen. 

“You really don’t want to try the whole ‘joining me’ thing?” she asked weakly. “Maybe surrendering. I promise I’ll be gentle.” He grimaced, and then found his expression softening into a smile. 

“No,” he said, “I don’t think I do. What about you? Do you want to renounce your demonic heritage and stand trial before the House of Lords?” He took the time to stretch his back and realized what a bad idea that was. For one, the calm was giving him time to realize just how much pain he was actually in. There was also the possibility that she was charging up for another attack, although she didn’t look like it. But she could always be deceiving him. 

“Hah!” she said. “No, I don’t think that would change things very much. I would prefer to end things here one way or another than to be publicly executed.” She raised a hand, but no magic flame, no dark surge of power came out. Somewhere in the fight, she had been disarmed, but that had made her no less dangerous. She’d flung spell after spell at him, and he’d barely been able to dodge most of them. 

Most people think fighting a wizard is like fighting someone with a bow and arrow, that it’s a matter of deflecting or avoiding fireballs, zaps of purple energy or easily-reflected beams of deadly light. In reality, most people would not survive a fight with a magician, wizard, enchantress or similar. After all, an arrow can only put a hole in you. Sure, a painful and possibly lethal one, but that is the whole of it. A demon witch can turn your blood into soup, or your brain into a clump of cutlery (presumably spoons, for the soup), and contrary to popular belief, magic doesn’t have to go in a straight line, or in a line at all. It was only because the Hero had been wearing several layers of clothing with various magical protections that he hadn’t been turned into several confused ferrets or, less charmingly, inside out. Sure, he’d lost both his gloves -- they’d scurried off, dooking furiously at him -- but that had been an acceptable loss in a fight like this. 

“You don’t seem to be doing too well, Fiend,” he said. He didn’t know why he’d called her a fiend. It seemed to be the thing to do. She was an Evil Demon Dragon Queen, ostensibly The Evil Demon Dragon Queen, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be a little courteous, at least. He wasn’t wrong, though. The reason she hadn’t raised both her hands was because one arm hung limply by her side, and she was bleeding a deep purple from a multitude of small and not-so-small cuts. She was also breathing heavily.

“Well… first of all, that’s not a very nice thing to say to a lady,” she replied.

“You did try to kill me several times,” he said. 

“You started it,” she pointed out. 

“A fair point,” he conceded.

“Second,” she said, and took a deep breath. It looked like it hurt. She winced, and he mirrored the expression out of sheer sympathy. “Neither do you.” He couldn’t help but feel like she was probably right. He’d taken a serious beating and one of her more explosive attacks had missed him by that much. If he survived this, his armor would be worth less than scrap, and he himself wouldn’t be doing much hero-ing anymore. He briefly wondered how he was going to get down the mountain. Maybe there was some kind of magic inside that would make things easier? He shook his head. The time for things like that was on the other side of the foggy bank of the unknown future. 

“Do you think you still have enough in you to kill me?” he asked. It was a taunt, sure, but it was, he would have to admit, an honest question, too. He was on his last legs, at the end of his rope and possibly knocking at A Door -- if not Death’s, then at least Fate’s. The Demon Queen again sidestepped the script a little by shrugging. 

“I don’t know,” she said, and then that little smile appeared on her face again. “I think I might have enough juice left for one more deathly curse. What about you? That sword isn’t too heavy for you yet?”

He shook his head. “I think I can manage another charge,” he said. “You can still give up.” 

“Thanks,” she said. “You too.” They stood opposite each other for a moment, and it started to snow. It was a perfectly dramatic moment, not ruined by noise, by sound of any kind. Even the wind had died down enough for them to have this quiet conversation on a snowy mountain at the edge of the world. The Hero, having been a hero for some time now, of course knew what this meant. While he wasn’t the most learned or the most well-spoken, he knew his narrative contrivances, the rules of the story. This was the end. The end of the world, the end of the Demon Queen (he hoped), and most definitely the end of the story. His story, maybe. But definitely the end of a story. It was all too too perfect for it not to be. The universe might not have a sense of humour, but it’s definitely a drama queen when it wants to be. He raised his sword, for possibly the last time. 

“Any last words?” he asked. Maybe she’d say something profound, and he’d pass it on. He’d asked the question before and nine times out of ten, the other person ended up shouting expletives at him. But it was always worth a shot. People at the end of their rope -- or their life -- definitely often had something worthwhile to say. It’s just that they usually didn’t. She seemed to mull the question over for a bit. 

The Demon Queen looked behind her for a moment and was probably more than a little uncomfortable with how close to the edge she’d gotten. Well, that was on her. She turned back to him. “I’ll let her go,” she finally said, nodding a little. He shot her a questioning look. “You know,” she continued. “If I win. I’ll let her go. Your companion.” 

That was unexpected. He’d expected another thinly veiled threat, maybe an innuendo or an old-school ‘You can’t beat me!’-kind of boast. He wasn’t sure if he could trust her, of course, but she had no real reason to lie about that. Whether they were her last words or just the last ones of hers he’d hear, they were still pretty good words. “Thanks,” he said with hesitation. “That’s… very nice of you.” Immediately, the Demon Queen recoiled. 

“What? Ew. What?” Her expression was one of disgust, like she’d just been offered to kiss a latrine. 

“You’re right, I apologize,” he said, “I don’t know why I said that. It’s kind of you.”

“Better,” she said. He couldn’t blame her revulsion. Neither of them were nice. Nice was something for other people, for teachers with glacial patience and old ladies with hard candy. But him and the Demon Queen, occasionally they could be kind. Kind, he felt, was not nice. “Still not correct, though,” she added. “It’s… courtesy. Respect, maybe.”  The Demon Queen looked at the castle. 

The Hero smiled, one of those cheeky smiles. “Nice,” he said. The Demon Queen grinned at him.

“You bastard,” she said and raised her hand a little bit. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Something about that movement had broken the spell between them, the unspoken truce that had been hanging in the air between the snowflakes and the winter wind. He gripped the handle of his sword tight, and charged. 

The Demon Queen’s height had, surprisingly, not really been a problem so far. Sure, she was almost eleven feet tall (with horns), and she was strong, but so was he, and he was a lot more agile than her because of his shorter stature. As he’d fought her, he’d been reminded of a saying of an old teacher of his, that prodigious size alone has no intrinsic merit -- unless you’re looking for more surface area to bleed out of -- and he’d always taken that to heart. But now, now that he was performing what might be his final attack, he really hoped he’d be able to reach up that high. She was some ten paces away, and he was rapidly closing the distance. He saw her try to follow his slightly ziggy-zag movements with her hand. Whatever spell she had saved up, it clearly required some precision. Good. 

Three more paces and he put everything -- and more specifically, his knees -- to the test. A jump, unreasonably high, launched him upwards and he felt her curse hit. It was a wave of something different. There was no fire or lightning, no thunderclap and no turning into frogs or sweaters. Only the certainty that he would die. But that was okay, he thought as he slammed sword-first into the Demon Queen and they both went over the edge. He had expected this as a possible outcome, of course. What he hadn’t really considered was what happens when you fall off the tallest cliff-face in the world. The two of them were falling, wind whipping past them so loud it would be impossible to understand what they were saying. If you had been able to understand what they were saying, this is what you would have heard.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he said.

“That was dramatic,” she said. “Happy with that outcome?”

He shrugged. “Could have been worse. Saved the world again.”

“Bully for you. I didn’t even do anything yet.”

“You set a house on fire.”

“He was very rude. Discriminatory to people with horns.”

“You flew over a town as a dragon. There was panic for days.”

“Not my fault people are dracophobic. Besides, I was just sightseeing.”

“You were going to take over the world.”

“But I didn’t.”

They looked at each other in silence for a moment as they tumbled down the mountain. While it wasn’t impossible for the wind to slam them into the mountainside, and for them to sort of slinky-bounce their way down, it seemed like both the wind and the mountainside appreciated the drama of the moment and just let them be. 

“So what was that you hit me with?” he asked. 

“Really bad curse,” she said. “I can’t use it much, but you looked so determined, I figured it was all or nothing, and I really didn’t want you to find a way to fly away from this fight alive after killing me.”

“Speaking of,” he said, “why don’t you fly away? You have wings, right? Can turn into a dragon?”

“Ah,” she said, “that. I don’t have the energy for turning into a big lizard, I’m afraid.”

“And the wings?”

“Yeah,” she said, “the wings. 

“The wings.”

“All I have to do is concentrate, you know. Poof!”

“Poof,” he repeated. 

“Yeah,” she said. “Big pair of wings out of nowhere. It’s really quite something.”

“So why don’t you?”

“You see, there seems to be a sword stuck in my spine.”

“Ah,” he said, feeling strangely guilty.

“Yeah.”

“That’ll do it.”

“Yup.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. It was a good fight.” She looked around for a moment, the wind whipping her hair around. Her little crown was a distant memory. “Hey, we’ve been falling for a while n--”

 

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