/daemon
A Novel by C. Bradford Miller
A Few Words About Swords
Swords kick ass. This is an undeniable universal fact. Where would He-Man be without his sword? Just some dipshit with a lame ass haircut. Throw a sword in his hand, and kablam, there’s one kickass dude who doesn’t take shit about his pageboy. Same with Arthur Pendragon. He wasn’t shit until he pulled that sword from a stone. Roland would have been just some dude if he hadn’t been given a second hand angel sword, and everyone would have to take the long way to Spain. It comes down to swords being an artifact of will to a certain degree. When there is a sword in your hand, it is undeniably your turn to do shit. You get to skip the line. This is attractive to your average consumer of media. They typically have to wait in line and follow other arbitrary clauses in the social contract. There is a cutting in line joke somewhere in there, but I am not working on my tight five here, this is a foreword. On to the meat of the matter. I feel that narratively speaking, swords are underrepresented in legend.
There is a long history of magical weapons in the human mythos. This is because the idea kicks ass. Arthur kicks ass, so does Roland, Joan of Arc kicked a lot of ass, even Jesus dabbled in the whole kicking ass with a sword thing in revelations, but that’s future Jesus so I don’t know if it counts or not. In creating a magical sword, it seems pretty important to imbue it with a soul or some other artifact of agency. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I would trade this cozy life of mine to live out my days stuck in some rock or at the bottom of a lake waiting for the sword distribution system to get around to me. The whole thing stinks of somebody getting screwed. Maybe they were naughty and deserved to be soul bound to a weapon of great import, but the fact remains that they would probably be rather salty about the whole situation. Just think of it, all of your desires and dreams bottled up into a sword just so you can be a plot device? A completely kickass plot device for sure, but still, what a raw deal.
This story explores the practical realities of being soulbound to a sword. There is a bunch of other stuff in there of course, if it were possible to cover it all in a couple of paragraphs, I would have done that right here. Instead, I chose to ramble on for about five hundred pages or so about videogames and open source software. I’m sure that sounds unbearably boring, and to some people it will be, but there is a sword in there somewhere and that kind of kicks ass. I hope you enjoy my story, I had a lot of fun bringing it to life. Below you will find links to the e-book, a half assed attempt at an audiobook with AI narration, and an equally half assed attempt at a video game.
Ebook
Play the video game!
