Kukri

We know of the dance of blades.

It’s a tradition our clan carries to tell the story of the siblings. The rise, battle, and inevitable fall of two of the most beautifully brutal individuals to claim this territory. There is always a gap of time between those picked. Sometimes months. Sometimes decades or even centuries. But they always return. Their souls call for their blades, and then each other. And then the dance begins.

Training never hinders them. The twins bow in greeting before exchanging blades in a pirouette of strikes and throws so fluid you’d never know they were strangers. And when the two fall, blood flowing into the stage of their performance, they bow again. From then on they are a duet, never parting ways until their last dying breath. But that’s not the story everyone knows.

What history has taught is what follows this masterful execution. Of the senseless battles the two wage between entire clans. The wars they start for no reason other than to see more violent dances in hopes they find one to match their own. The blood painting the battlefield and soaking the soil in beautiful crimson. They are swift and brutal and senseless to those they meet.

But to us. To the clan who has watched the dance unfold, we see the beauty in their slaughter. Each battlefield is a new stage. A new contest filled with rivals fighting for their place as the lead of the performance. Each body is an elimination, each kill a testament. They fight on, counting performances and victories over the competition until they meet their match and are overrun. They do not die meaningless deaths like those historians would like you to believe.

So remember. That senseless violence they leave behind? The brutality of the corpses left in their wake? The ‘madness’ you see in their eyes? It’s all a show to them.

And the show must go on.

“Statement ends,” the archivist flipped off the device once more as he concluded his reading, once again saving additional notes for later when he found time.

This particular statement, or rather an open note to the institute, was a peculiar one. An assistant had dug it up for him when he asked about looking into a pair of twin daggers mentioned in statements prior. Unlike all other documentation on the subject, the subject was not on the blades and the uncontrolled violence forced upon anyone who wielded them. Yet it was organized as if it had belonged with all the others.

However, it marked another dead end. The daggers had last been seen nearly fifty years ago, and their current whereabouts were unknown. One had been stolen and the other lost when the wielder killed almost everyone present and ran off with the weapon. Wherever they were, the Pearlcatcher believed there was only one way they’d reemerge. And that reason was far from good.

If the note was right, only the siblings would bring them back. And with them came a tide of nigh unstoppable violence and death.