The boy and the spear walked the familiar, winding path away from Shout End Hill and toward the nameless village. The air between them, once filled with terrifying psychic noise and tentative questions, now hummed with a quiet, steady promise. Their bond, that golden chain forged in a moment of accidental recognition, felt less like a tether and more like a shared pulse—a new, comforting rhythm in Kaelen's chest and a point of warm focus for the spear's scattered consciousness. The mood was lifted, lightened by the simple, profound agreement: they would go together.
Kaelen led the way, his small hand firmly wrapped around the spear's warm shaft, using its length to part the thick ferns and late-summer grass that encroached on the trail. The morning sun, now fully ascended, dappled the forest floor through the canopy of oak and ironwood. It was a known path, one he'd taken to forage for berries or chase rabbits, but today every detail seemed amplified, worthy of notice. He found himself noticing the way the light caught the dewy spiderwebs, the chatter of distant squirrels, the rich, loamy smell of the forest floor. He was seeing it for himself, and also, he realized, for the silent presence in his hand.
As they walked, his mind circled back to their earlier conversation. The spear had a consciousness, a soul, a purpose... but it had no name. It felt wrong. Every person, every dog, every tool in his father's shed had a name. A name made a thing real in the world of people.
"So," Kaelen began, his voice cutting through the peaceful birdsong. "We need to figure out what to call you. I can't just keep thinking 'the spear' in my head. It's rude." He glanced down at the weapon, its runes pulsing softly as if in agreement.
the spear mused, its thought-voice curious.
Kaelen puffed out his chest, drawing on the most impressive words he knew from the elders' stories by the fire. "How about... Vanquisher?" he said, trying to sound heroic. "Or... Demolisher! That sounds powerful. Like you could smash through a castle gate!"
The spear's presence in his mind conveyed a distinct sense of polite bewilderment, like a scholar presented with a poorly drawn map.
Kaelen's shoulders slumped slightly, but he wasn't deterred. "Okay, okay. So not scary names. We'll think of something else." He was about to suggest "Moss-wood" or "Old Iron" when a sudden, violent rustling erupted from a dense thicket of blackberry bushes just ten paces to their right.
The conversation died instantly. Every muscle in Kaelen's body locked. His breath hitched. The peaceful forest sounds were swallowed by the loud, thrashing noise of something large moving through dry brush without caution. His imagination, fueled by a lifetime of cautionary tales about the northern wilds, conjured nightmares in an instant: a furred demon with too many teeth, a wolf the size of a horse, a vengeful forest spirit with claws of splintered bone.
He stood frozen, a rabbit caught in a sudden shadow. The spear's warning, a sharp, clear
It was not a demon. It was a boar.
But it was a boar such as Kaelen had never seen, nor even conceived of. It was a mountain of matted, coarse black hair and gristle. Five meters from snout to rump, it stood as tall as a plow horse at the shoulder, its back a ridged plateau of muscle. Small, intelligent eyes, gleaming with a disconcerting curiosity rather than mindless rage, scanned the clearing. Yellowed tusks, each as long as Kaelen's forearm, curved wickedly from its lower jaw. It sniffed the air, its wet snout twitching, and its gaze landed directly on the petrified boy.
Terror turned Kaelen's limbs to stone. The spear's frantic mental pushes—
Inside the spear, processes faster than human thought ignited. Tactical assessments from a hundred soldier-echoes flashed: terrain unfavorable, wielder incapacitated, hostiles superior in mass and momentum. Fighting was impossible. Flight was currently impossible. The boy's mind was a citadel of sheer panic, its gates barred from the inside.
There was one bridge, one connection that bypassed the paralyzed mind and went straight to the operating flesh: the soul-bond.
The spear had never contemplated this act. It had no memory, no echo, that spoke of such a violation. But survival was a deeper, more primal echo than ethics. With a desperate, focused will, it used the golden chain that connected their spirits not as a communication line, but as a conduit. It pushed its own consciousness—a vast, swirling entity of ancient memories and newborn intent—down that link and into the vessel of Kaelen's body.
The intention was pure: seize control, move the limbs, find safety.
The reality was an abomination.
As the spear's essence flowed into Kaelen's physical form, a wave of psychic revulsion, immediate and absolute, assaulted it. It was a disgust so profound it was metaphysical, a violation of natural law that screamed against the spear's very being. This was not like examining a soul-light. This was an invasion. It felt wrong in a way that transcended mere mistake or sin; it felt like unraveling the fundamental stitch that separated one consciousness from another. It was a corruption of selfhood, an evil that offended not morality, but existence itself. The spear's soul recoiled, wanting nothing more than to flee back into its own wood and metal.
But below that soul-deep revulsion was the sight of the advancing boar, the feel of Kaelen's terror, and the ironclad promise:
The spear held on. It endured the torment of its own disgust. With a grinding effort of will, it forced a signal through the unfamiliar nervous system.
Kaelen's body jerked.
It was not a graceful movement. It was a spastic, sideways lurch, as if his strings had been yanked by a clumsy puppeteer. His legs, previously rooted, stumbled back two awkward steps. The sudden, uncoordinated motion broke the boar's cautious advance. It stopped, head tilting, its curious grunt echoing in the clearing. The boy it had seen frozen was now moving in a strange, jerky parody of life.
The boar, its curiosity now intensely piqued by this bizarre behavior, let out a low huff. It began to follow, not with a charge, but with a steady, stalking pace, matching Kaelen's clumsy retreat step for step. It herded them, cutting off angles of escape, its intelligence plainly visible in its tactics. This was no mindless beast; it was a hunter playing with perplexing prey.
Inside the shared body, a desperate duality raged. Kaelen's consciousness had retreated into a small, terrified corner, utterly surrendering control to the overwhelming presence that had invaded him. He was a passenger, screaming silently in a body that was no longer his. The spear, meanwhile, fought a war on two fronts: against the closing beast, and against the soul-sickness of its own possession. It silently swore an oath to the cosmos, to the echoes within it, to itself:
Pushed against a gnarled tree trunk with no further retreat, the spear made its choice. Waiting for an opening was a luxury for a functional warrior, not for a horrified spirit puppeteering a child's body.
It acted.
It surged Kaelen's body forward in one explosive, desperate lunge. It commanded the right arm—his arm, the one that clutched the spear's own physical shaft—to thrust with all the strength the young muscles could muster. The movement was technically poor, born of panic, but it carried the frantic energy of absolute necessity.
As the wooden shaft thrust forward, something within the spear's core, triggered by the combination of mortal peril, bonded will, and raw, channeled fear, answered.
A crescent of energy, thick and violent as fresh blood, erupted from the spear's tip. It wasn't the clean gold or silver of its birth. It was a deep, shocking crimson. It screamed forward with a sound like tearing cloth.
The curious boar had no time to react. The crimson energy took it in the left eye, punching through the orb and burrowing deep into the socket with a sickening, wet crunch. The eye was not just damaged; it was utterly obliterated.
A sound of pure, animal agony shattered the forest calm— a high-pitched, screaming squeal that tore at the ears. Blinded in one side and mad with pain, the boar reacted not with flight, but with a berserk, thrashing counterattack. Its head swung in a devastating, tusked arc.
The spear, still in control, tried to pull Kaelen's body back and wrench its own physical form free from the ruined eye socket. It succeeded in the first, yanking them backward.
It failed in the second.
The boar's wild swing connected. A tusk, sharp as a woodsman's axe and powered by several tons of enraged muscle, did not simply slash Kaelen's outstretched left arm.
It sheared through it.
There was a brief, terrible pressure, a sound like a wet branch snapping, and then Kaelen's arm—from the shoulder down—was simply gone. Severed. The world dissolved into a white-hot supernova of pain.
That pain was a firestorm that burned away the spear's tenuous control. The invasion was violently expelled by the body's ultimate distress signal. The spear's consciousness was flung back down the bond and into its own weapon-form, reeling from the aftershock of possession and the shared, echoing scream of the injury.
Kaelen fell to his right, hitting the mossy ground with a thud. For a second, there was silence. Then a raw, ragged scream tore from his throat, a sound of such pure, unimaginable agony that it silenced the birds for a league around. He curled around the horrific, bleeding void where his arm had been, his right hand clutching blindly at the mangled shoulder, his eyes wide with shock and a pain too vast for tears.
The boar, its own pain immense and its curiosity brutally answered, wanted no more of this strange, screaming thing that could fight back with light and pain. With a final pained squeal, it turned and crashed away into the forest, leaving devastation in its wake.
Kaelen's screams, hoarse and desperate, did not go unheard. In the village fields a half-mile downwind, Old Man Brewer paused, his hoe in hand. "You hear that?" he asked his son. It came again, weaker this time, a child's cry of utter extremity. Without another word, a handful of villagers dropped their tools and ran toward the sound, their hearts cold with dread.
They found him minutes later, pale as death in a spreading pool of crimson, his breath coming in shallow, shocky gasps between whimpers. There was no time for questions. They acted with the grim efficiency of people acquainted with hardship. A tourniquet was fashioned from a belt and a stick, yanked tight above the gruesome wound to stem the pulsing flow of blood. A cloak was wrapped around his shivering form. They lifted him gently, urgently, and began the frantic jog back to the village and the healer's hut.
In the chaos, the terror, and the singular focus on saving a boy's life, the spear was forgotten. It lay in the trampled grass and blood-soaked moss where it had fallen, its warm wood now cool, its glowing runes dimmed. The forest quiet returned, broken only by flies. It was just an old spear again, discarded in the aftermath of violence. It waited, its consciousness a silent storm of guilt, revulsion, and unwavering resolve, for its bonded partner to return.