An old man wandered out of the Gezackt Mountains armed with nothing but a sturdy stick and the kind of bad attitude only people who have lived longer than they hoped or wanted, are capable of. Behind him, on the far side of the mountain range lay madness. Millions of years of trapped decay—fish in a stagnating pond, feeding off the foul sludge of decay, rutting and giving birth, and changing nothing—followed in his footsteps. He’d always been a little mad. Mad enough to hunt impossible goals and dare impossible feats. Mad enough to face impossible odds, and mad enough to win each and every time.
Mad enough to be great.
Madness was a thing of the past, the armpit stain of a town he walked through on his way home.
He remembered meeting the oldest god face to face, looking into those ravenous lunatic eyes. He saw its weakness and laughed.
And then he killed it.
Or had he? He wasn’t sure. Some things don’t die.
The old man walked into an unnamed mining community several weeks north of whatever was left of Auseinander. Had that been this life? He couldn’t remember. Maybe the city was there, maybe it was gone. Maybe these Gezackt Mountains weren’t his Gezackt Mountains and everything here was different. He’d seen that before.
Spotting a tavern, little more than a lean-to with a couple of overturned boxes for a bar, the old man squared broad shoulders unbent by age and approached. With no real door to enter, he strode up to the bar and dropped his walking stick upon it. Four rough men sat about a fifth, much prettier man sporting a pair of matched swords. They waited on his words like he was an elder god returned to save humanity from the unending shite of life. A Swordsman and his coterie of witless followers. The old man knew the type.
“Ale,” he told the cripple behind the bar, ignoring the men. They noticed him but couldn’t fit him into their pecking order. His tattered clothes, shredded from his passage over the mountains and unwashed in months, said he wasn’t important. Something else said he was.
The cripple shifted in his chair and shook his head. “Kartoffel,” he said.
“Kart awful?” The long scar running from the old man’s right ear, across his lips, and ending on the left side of his chin tightened his words, giving them a strange accent.
“Potato mash,” said the cripple.
“Fine.”
The cripple poured liberal splashes of something milky yellow with black flecks floating in it into two steel mugs. He shot one back himself before sliding the other in front of the old man. Then he closed his eyes and looked like he was about to be ill.
The old man raised the cup and thought of even older friends. Were they dead, long dead, or ancient history?
The pretty man joined the old man at the bar. His hips were slim, his shoulders wide, and he moved like a cat. “You look older than those mountains,” he said, nodding toward the peaks to the north. “But you still move well.”
“Piss off,” said the old man.
“A feisty old fart,” joked the Swordsman.
“Piss off,” repeated the old man. “Or die here in this nameless armpit.”
The Swordsman raised a perfect eyebrow and struck a perfect pose. Sunlight, red and gold, lit him like he glowed from within with holy light. “I am the Greatest Swordsman in all the World. I came to this…armpit, to kill a man. He fled before I arrived,” he said, conversationally, “and I’m a little—”
The old man made a wet fart with scarred lips.
“I warn you old man—”
“Begone.”
“I’m already in a foul mood—”
Eyes of hammered iron turned on the Swordsman. “Me and my stick against you and your pretty swords.”
“Hardly a fair fight. You wouldn’t last—”
“Fine. Piss off.”
Twin swords hissed from their scabbards and glinted cold. “You,” said the Swordsman, “are a dead man.”
The old man lifted the steel cup with his left hand—the one missing the last two fingers—and drained it in one gulp. Collecting his walking stick and holding it like a sword, he turned. “Ready?” he asked.
When the Swordsman lunged, the old man disarmed him, shattered his wrists. The young man collapsed to his knees, eyes streaming tears, staring confused at the ruin of his life’s work.
“I am the Greatest Swordsman in the World,” said the old man, huffing in old man annoyance. Spinning his walking stick in nimble fingers, his flat grey eyes grew distant, lost in endless seas of time. “In this reality,” he said. “In the one across the mountains. In the one on the far side of the Salzwasser Ocean. In the reality on the far side of the Basamortuan. I am the Greatest Swordsman in all the Worlds.”
“Who?” begged the Swordsman.
“I am—”