# THE RIGHTEOUS BLADE
Ironhollows rotted in silence, like a corpse forgotten in the back room of a slaughterhouse.
Rusted bridges hung like flayed sinew over the collapsed districts, creaking with every whisper of wind. The blood-mist—thick as afterbirth and reeking of copper—choked the narrow alleys where even rats dared not venture. Somewhere in the distance, a choir of boneflies sang their ravenous hymn inside the corpse of a cathedral, their larvae burrowing through what remained of the faithful. And in the blackened gutters of the Meat District, where the sewage ran thick with things no man should name, Jonathan found truth in the shape of betrayal.
He'd tracked the order for weeks—hunched figures in plague-slick robes and crow masks that weren't masks at all, but fused to their flesh after years of devotion. They whispered sermons to the dying, feeding false hope like maggots in sugar, watching as the desperate swallowed their lies and smiled. They called themselves the Truth Order. Preachers of revelation. Lovers of memory. But Jonathan, a Mind-Warden stripped of rank and mercy, knew filth when he smelled it. And they stank of it.
The night air felt like wet velvet against his skin as he watched them from the shadows. Their movements were jerky, spasmodic—like puppets with half their strings cut. Three of them huddled around a child no older than eight, his skin translucent from hunger, bones pushing against flesh that had already begun to surrender.
"Shhh, little one," the tallest cultist crooned, voice like gravel dragged across broken glass. "The truth comes to those who open themselves." His fingers—impossibly long and jointed in too many places—stroked the boy's hollow cheek. "Will you accept our gift? Will you remember for us?"
The child nodded, eyes glazed with fever and desperation.
"Good... good..." Another cultist produced a syringe from beneath their robes. The needle wasn't metal—it squirmed, alive with some parasitic hunger. The liquid inside pulsed with sickly blue light. "This won't hurt. Nothing hurts once you remember."
Jonathan didn't speak. He let his presence say everything.
He stepped from the shadows like a phantom of rot. His black lab coat—salvaged from the days before the Fall—flapped like burnt scripture around his gaunt frame. His skin, dark and cracked with chemical burns that never healed, gleamed under the dead streetlamps like oil on water. His dreads hung heavy with soot and memory, clinking softly with the data-hooks woven into each strand. One arm was no longer flesh—it was a rusted lattice of rotted gears and fungus-crawling bone, grafted to his shoulder after the Purge of Saints took his real one. On his head sat a machinery top hat, old as empire, humming with forgotten software that sometimes screamed in the night. His belt bore an archive core, its blue light pulsing like a dying star gasping its last breath.
When he moved, the world felt it—a ripple through the sickness that had become reality.
"The Mind-Warden," hissed the smallest cultist, voice thick with phlegm and fear. "The betrayer walks among us!"
The tallest one turned, crow-mask tilting unnaturally. "Brother Jonathan. You've come to witness our communion?" The voice oozed false welcome, but the hands—those horrible hands—tightened on the boy's shoulders until blood welled beneath the talons.
"Let him go," Jonathan said, his voice like stones grinding against each other. "You're not giving him truth. You're stealing what little he has left."
The cultist laughed—a sound like meat slapping against wet tile. "And what would you know of truth, betrayer? You who turned your back on the Righteous Blade? On the cause?"
Jonathan's mechanical arm whirred to life, joints creaking as forgotten machinery remembered its purpose. The cultists didn't resist. Not when his arm hummed with that particular frequency—the one that made bowels loosen and nightmares surface.
Not forged, not sharpened—willed into existence. A weapon shaped by memory, time, and determination. When Jonathan raised it, the air rippled like heat over a grave. The rot receded, time skipped like broken frames in an ancient film. The shadows blinked.
And the cult fell to their knees, crow-masks cracking as their faith wavered.
"I know what you're feeding him," Jonathan growled, advancing. The child had gone still, eyes rolled back to show only whites. "I know what's in that needle. Memory crystals. Distilled from others. Stolen moments that don't belong to him."
"Everything belongs to the Righteous Blade," the tall one sputtered, but his conviction had cracked like thin ice underfoot. "We only harvest what He needs. What He deserves."
Jonathan's mechanical hand closed around the cultist's throat, lifting him as easily as a child's doll. "Then why feed it to the boy?" he asked, voice terribly gentle now. "Why not take it straight to your master?"
The cultist's feet kicked weakly, inches above the filth-crusted ground. "He... he comes for it himself. When the vessel is ready. When the memories have taken root and flowered into truth."
"Flowered?" Jonathan squeezed tighter, feeling things crack beneath his grip. "Is that what you call it when their brains leak from their ears? When they chew off their own tongues to stop screaming?"
The other cultists whimpered, backing away but unable to flee—pinned by the same unseen force that had dropped them to their knees.
"He promised us salvation," one whispered, words bubbling through the cracked beak of their mask. "He promised we would be remembered when all others were forgotten."
Jonathan released the tall one, who crumpled to the ground with a wet thud. He knelt beside the child, checking for a pulse. Still alive, but barely. The injection site was already festering, veins around it turning that telltale blue-black that meant the crystals had begun their work.
"He's too far gone," the fallen cultist wheezed from the ground, a horrible grin spreading across what was visible of his face. "The memories will consume him by dawn. And the Righteous Blade will come to claim what is His."
Jonathan stood slowly, shadows clinging to him like mourners. "Then I'll be waiting for Him."
He reached down and seized something from the dying preacher's jaw—plucking it from behind yellowed teeth with mechanical precision. A pill, no larger than a tooth, still warm with blood and laced with scripture etched into its surface in microscopic text. They called it the Memory Pill. Truth condensed into a single, searing capsule. The source of all their power.
"No!" The cultist lunged forward, suddenly frantic. "It's not for you! It's not yours to swallow! It belongs to Him—to the Righteous Blade!"
The other cultists began to wail, a sound like orphans drowning. "He'll come for you now," one sobbed. "He'll hollow you out and wear your skin as a glove."
Jonathan only smiled—a broken thing that never reached his eyes.
"Then let's see what He remembers when He gets here."
He swallowed the pill in one motion, feeling it burn a path down his throat like acid. The cultists' screams faded as the world began to blur at the edges.
"You don't know what you've done," the tall one moaned, black tears seeping from beneath his mask. "The memories... they're His memories. They'll eat you alive from inside."
Jonathan's vision started to splinter, reality fracturing like glass struck by a hammer. "Better me than the boy," he managed, before the first wave of agony hit.
---
The pill burned. Not his throat. Not his stomach. His mind.
He collapsed in the ash of an alley half a mile from where he'd confronted the cultists, his body moving on animal instinct to find shelter before the full effect took hold. Now he writhed in filth, clawing at his skull until ribbons of skin peeled beneath his fingernails. The mechanical arm flickered beside him like a screaming truth made manifest, phasing in and out of reality as the memory crystals rewrote his perception.
"Fuck... FUCK..." he gasped, spine arching as another wave crashed through him. It felt like hornets nesting behind his eyes, like worms burrowing through the soft tissue of his brain. "What did I... what did I..."
The pill hadn't dissolved in his gut—it had cracked open in his timeline, splintering his sense of now and then into a thousand bleeding fragments.
And then the visions came, brutal as birth.
---
Ironhollows was never alive. Not truly. It breathed rot through its sewers and pumped rust through its pipes. Flesh melted into steel; gears chewed through ribs. The streets were veins, clogged with the refuse of a civilization that had forgotten how to die properly. Buildings leaned against each other like drunks sharing a final secret before collapse. The sky—what little could be seen through the perpetual haze of factory smoke and bone dust—hung low and heavy, pregnant with unborn storms.
And above all that decay, in the cathedral of drowned bells where the spires pierced the belly of heaven like rusted needles, he sat—what remained of a man, wrapped in prayers inked on flayed skin and crowned with barbed wire that leaked old memories instead of blood.
They called him many things in whispers that fogged the air. The Butcher-Saint. The Copper Inquisitor. The Last Noble of the Screaming Line. But those who still remembered the days before the Fall simply whispered: The Righteous Blade.
He was not born. Not in any human way that implied mothers and warmth and first breaths. He was conjured—not by spells or incantations, but by faith so deep it curdled into violence. A fallen noble, risen again through the cracked teeth of belief and desperation. They had stitched him together in the dead hours, using the muttered last rites of dead soldiers and the marrow of traitors who'd outlived their usefulness. His body was a monument of bronze rot and bleeding scripture, jointed in places no anatomy book would recognize. His face? Just two smoking holes where eyes should have been, eternally weeping something that hissed when it touched air, and a jaw bolted shut with confession nails hammered through the bone.
He ruled no land in the traditional sense. He had no living court, no subjects who drew breath without pain. But armies still bent the knee before his twisted throne. Not out of fear—though fear was there, thick as plague—but because they wanted to believe in something pure before the rust took them too. Something righteous in a world where righteousness had been butchered and left to rot.
And they followed his one doctrine, chiseled into the flesh-wall above his throne in letters that sometimes rearranged themselves when no one was looking:
> "The strength of an army lies not in its numbers, but in the righteousness of its cause."
They marched into the meat grinders of war chanting his name, smiling like saints with eyes already dead. They burned for the illusion of meaning, their skin crackling like paper as they carried his standards into battles that could never be won. They bled into crystals, their memories and energies harvested until they forgot who they were. And still, they smiled as they died.
They died for a cause. Even if it wasn't real. Even if it was just another lie in a world built on them.
"It's the dying that matters," the Righteous Blade would whisper to his generals—men and women with more metal than flesh, their loyalty ensured by the worms that had replaced their brains. "Not the victory. Victory is temporary. Death for righteousness? That's eternal."
And they nodded, drooling slightly as the worms shifted behind their eyes.
---
Far below the cathedral, in the mildew-soaked basement of Ironhollows where even cockroaches died of despair, two souls remained unshackled. They lived in a crooked chamber beneath the Hall of Forgotten Bells—a place where the blood-red moons never reached through the cracked foundations. The room was silent except for the distant coughing of machines and the creak of skin being peeled from bone by rust that never slept.
The two sat across a rotted table that might once have been mahogany before the world decided wood was too innocent to exist. One was known as the Dreamer, the other, the Archivist. They had no faces—only waxen imitations that sagged with time and guilt, features half-formed like abandoned sculptures. Their spines were broken long ago in the same ceremony, and they moved only when the ill-crystals pulsed in the walls, sending spasms through what remained of their nervous systems.
Between them sat two glasses, untouched for what might have been centuries.
One brimmed with a fluid darker than pitch, thick and slow, like it had been wept by a dying god with too many eyes. It hissed when it touched air, tiny bubbles forming and popping with sounds like distant screams. The smell was guilt, old and sour. The kind that keeps you awake not because it's strong, but because it's familiar.
The other glass glowed—pale gold, but wrong, alive in ways liquid shouldn't be. When you reached toward it, it screamed inside your head. Not in words. In memories that weren't yours. Births you never witnessed. Deaths you never mourned. Loves you never felt.
Beside them lay a book.
Its pages were stitched from child-skin, harvested during the Orphan Tithe of the third cycle. Its spine was bound in chain-teeth that sometimes gnashed when certain names were spoken aloud. The cover bore the sigil of the fallen noble—the Righteous Blade's mark: a circle of teeth around a single screaming eye that followed you when you weren't looking directly at it.
Within the book were names—thousands upon thousands. Each a soldier, each now faceless, their minds consumed by the hue-crystals that powered the memory engines. Each had believed. Each had died smiling. Each had been forgotten by everyone except the two who couldn't forget.
The Dreamer stared at the glasses, their not-face twitching as phantom pains shot through nerve endings that should have rotted away years ago.
"One fears death," they whispered, voice like wind through a graveyard. "The other fears life."
The Archivist didn't respond at first. Only shifted in their chair, bones creaking like rusted hinges that hadn't been oiled since the last true rain fell. Then:
"And yet here we sit. Drinking nothing. Just... remembering." A bitter laugh escaped them, sounding more like something being strangled. "That's our punishment, isn't it? To remember when everyone else gets to forget?"
"Not punishment," the Dreamer murmured. "Purpose. We remember so He can forget. We carry the weight so He can float above it all, wrapped in righteous certainty."
The Archivist's hands—more bone than flesh, with too many joints and nails that grew inward instead of out—trembled as they reached for the book but stopped short of touching it. "Do you ever wonder if He remembers who He was? Before the Fall? Before we made Him?"
"Made Him?" The Dreamer's voice sharpened like a blade suddenly drawn. "We didn't make Him. We found Him. We saved Him when the old world died."
"Is that what we did?" The Archivist's laugh was wetter this time, something breaking loose inside lungs that shouldn't work. "Is that the story we're telling ourselves now?"
"It's the only story left."
That was their curse. Remembrance. The only two left who hadn't forgotten his lies. The only two minds untouched by the forgetful kiss of the crystals. But memory was a wound. And in Ironhollows, wounds don't scab. They don't heal. They rot, weeping pus that sometimes whispers your name when you're almost asleep.
The walls wept blood that smelled of old iron and broken promises. The glasses pulsed like infected hearts. The book breathed in shallow gasps, pages rustling though no wind moved in that buried chamber.
And still, they sat. As they had for longer than either could recall.
Until the night of the Blood Eclipse, when the moons turned fully red and the sky screamed like a woman giving birth to something with too many teeth. On that night, he came.
Not walking. Not crawling. Just there, where moments before had been empty space.
The Righteous Blade.
He didn't enter the room. He didn't need to. He existed like guilt does—sudden, total, inescapable. The air buckled around him, reality itself offended by his presence. The rats that had made homes in the corners froze mid-scream, their tiny hearts bursting in their chests. The meager light from the crystal lamps died, replaced by a sickly glow that emanated from the cracks in his bronze flesh.
He stood at the edge of the table. Bronze bones weeping oil that sizzled when it hit the floor. Skin carved with commandments in languages that hurt to look at. His empty eye sockets were black holes, pulling at something inside you. His presence was wrong—an equation that couldn't be solved, a song that made your teeth vibrate until they shattered.
His voice cracked through the room like coffins splitting open, like children crying in walls:
"You must choose."
He gestured at the glasses with a hand that had too many fingers, each ending in a point that shouldn't have been able to bend.
"One holds death. Quick. Almost merciful." The darker liquid rippled at his words. "The other, eternal service. Purpose. Meaning." The glowing liquid surged upward, as if reaching for his approval.
"Drink."
The Dreamer sobbed but said nothing. Their tears ran black and smelled like iron. Their shoulders shook with the force of grief too large for their broken body.
The Archivist trembled. Their tongue was a coil of ill-wires and half-formed truths. They asked:
"What happens if we choose neither?"
The Righteous Blade smiled.
Not a human smile. No warmth. No mockery. Just... inevitability. His jaw didn't move—it couldn't, nailed shut as it was—but somehow, the smile was there, cutting across reality like a wound.
"Then I choose for you."
He raised his weapon.
It was no ordinary blade. It was them—thousands of them. Melted faces—mothers who gave their sons, orphans who begged for meaning, lovers who believed too much. Their screams echoed as he lifted it, a symphony of agony that made the air curdle. And when it fell, it didn't cut—it erased.
Not death. Not pain.
Just gone.
Like they had never been.
Now the chamber is silent.
The blood on the floor still twitches occasionally, forming shapes that almost make sense before collapsing again. The book is closed, sealed by sinew that flexes like it's trying to escape. One glass lies shattered, its poison soaked into the stone, leaving a stain in the shape of a mouth forever screaming. The other glass? Empty.
And in the center of the room, where the table once stood, a throne grows—made of bone, rust, and shadow. It grows like a tumor, feeding on the memories that saturate the air. A punishment. A reward.
Someone sits on it now.
Not the Blade. Not yet.
Someone who drank. Someone who feared life but chose not to die. Someone who forgot everything, even their name—but not the cause. Never the cause.
Their eyes are gone. Their body is wrong—joints bending backwards, spine pushing through skin in places. But their mouth still whispers the truth they can't forget, even as everything else fades:
> "One fears death. The other fears life."
And in the silence that follows:
> "And He? He fears nothing. Because we remember for Him."
---
Jonathan awoke screaming, throat raw as if he'd been screaming for hours.
He lay in filth, the alley around him swimming in and out of focus. The mechanical arm sparked and twitched, circuits overloaded by whatever had just happened to his mind. His organic hand clutched something—tight enough that blood welled between his fingers.
When he forced his fingers open, an exquisite dagger pulsed there. Not metal. Not stone. Something alive, forged from memory itself. It hummed with recognition, vibrating against his palm like it had found its home after centuries of searching.
The Righteous Blade's knife. His badge of office.
"No," Jonathan whispered, trying to drop it, but his fingers wouldn't obey. "No, I'm not—I don't—"
But the memories burned bright behind his eyes. The war. The fall. The endless parade of believers marching to their deaths with his name on their lips.
"I'm not Him," he insisted to no one, voice cracking. "I'm Jonathan. Mind-Warden. I hunt the cult, I don't—"
*You've always been Me,* whispered a voice like grave dirt falling on a coffin lid. *You've just been... waiting to remember.*
And though he didn't remember the war, or the names, or even the face of the fallen noble who became the Righteous Blade...
He remembered why they fought.
To believe in nothing.
And to die for it anyway.
Jonathan struggled to his feet, legs trembling beneath him. The dagger—the badge—pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Calling him home. To the cathedral. To the throne.
"No," he said again, but weaker. The word blurred at the edges, like a dream half-forgotten upon waking.
*Yes,* the voice replied, and this time it came from his own throat. *The cycle continues. As it must.*
In the distance, a bell began to toll—not in the cathedral, but in the minds of every citizen of Ironhollows. A bell that only the faithful could hear. Calling them to witness the return of their savior.
The Righteous Blade walked out of the alley, back straight despite the agony still coursing through his veins. His mechanical arm no longer sparked—it glowed with forbidden light. His lab coat had transformed, becoming a cloak of memory-cloth that shifted and flowed around him, showing glimpses of battles never fought and victories never claimed.
And as he walked, people fell to their knees in the filth. Not out of fear.
But because they wanted to believe in something pure before the rust took them too.