The coolest sword I ever invented was Requiem. There we go, I’ve spoiled the whole piece in the first line.
Let’s talk a little about what Cool Sword Day is. It is not a national holiday (anywhere I’m familiar with, anyway). I first saw it on Polygon, and it turns out they made the whole thing up. You know what? I’m not even mad. May 21st is something to bookmark for next year, I guess. And I’m aware this piece is going live after Cool Sword Day, but we can blame time zones or something.
Requiem first appeared when I was going through the second round of character generation for the Splintered Land series. My original take on it wasn’t so paramilitary-meets-ecclesiastical-fantasy as the current setup, and our hero Geneve’s predecessor just had vanilla steel at her side. By the time Geneve was real, so was her sword, but only as a footnote. You can play Where’s Wally if you like:
If you’ve read Blade of Glass, you can also see how plans never survive contact with the enemy, because this is no longer plot-accurate… but we’re here to talk swords.
Requiem was forged by a very skilled Smith named Kytto, who was a towering inferno of bastard energy. He wasn’t a Knight - not that kind of bastard - and wanted to make weapons. Problem is, Knights don’t really need good steel in the way you might expect. So, he created Requiem as a gift, and for whom, we’re left to wonder. Geneve’s got her hands on it now, and takes it to battle in all manner of not-health-and-safety-compliant situations.
We don’t know much about it, other than it was forged from the heart of a fallen star. For all intents and purposes, the sword appears unbreakable, of exquisite craftsmanship. Geneve trusts it because she trusted the man who forged it, and we start to learn something special about it: maybe it was made for her, but also (just maybe) it was made by a man who couldn’t be a Knight, and had to trust others to do that. If you were good in a brawl, but not in a battle, how would you use your talents?
The best he could do was make a blade fit for the task, and then hope to find someone who needed it.
Still not a magic sword, though. Not in an Excalibur way. So, what makes Requiem a cool sword? We get our first hint in book 2 of the series.
The clincher here is that Kytto saw she was the best person for the job, a long time before she did, and despite people mistaking it for an ordinary steel blade, she’s the one who carries it to justice.
Her order, the Tresward, fight with a fairly epic flex: they wield pristine blades of glass. There’s nothing special about these glass swords until a Knight uses one; in the hands of you or I, they’d shatter in an instant. Knights fight on faith, by knowing the power of their three gods will make their weapons unbreakable. Geneve learns that perfect obedience shatters, just like a glass sword, on contact with the real world. She rejects the ecclesiastical glass for the weight of imperfect, unbreakable steel, forged by a man who couldn’t fit the mould. She chooses the grimy, heavy reality of doing what’s right over the sterile illusion of being pure. She relishes her plain sword, because it sets her apart.
Nice.
The second reason Requiem is a cool sword is that, in book 3, it’s used against Geneve for spoiler-related reasons. That fight does not go well, because not only is Requiem a cool sword, but it’s being used by a demon king. The book concludes the story but ends on a wee bit of a cliffhanger. And after the events of book 3, this author took a, what, like a five-year break from the series before penning book 4.
I got a lot of email about that.
Anyway! In book 4, we meet Evanne, our new protagonist for the next three books. Remember, in the first trilogy Requiem is just a piece of metal. Pretty, flawless, but also heavy, cold, and beholden to the muscle and will of the woman swinging it. But when it returns to us, it has fed on the ruin of demons (and quite enjoyed this part of its gym routine). Requiem isn’t just an edge for separating life from soul. It glows, and the air around it tastes like ozone and righteous anger. The blade isn’t a tool anymore.
Requiem has an opinion.
We don’t know what’s become of Geneve, but we do see some of the sword’s moxie toward the end of book 4:
Yeah. Doesn’t like to be picked up by non-humans anymore. It seems Requiem remembered what happened to Geneve when a demon king used it against her, and held a bit of a grudge. The real problem in all of this is that the best person using a sword on Team Hero is Tarragon, and she’s a fairy. Like, the size of a pint glass. Built to the wrong scale. So, no Requiem for her.
Throughout the next two books, Requiem is used in various ways, by a few different people, but in the end, it was made for just one person.
Yes, Geneve makes it back from our cliffhanger ending, and she gets her sword back. And now it’s a magic sword, a proper one, and a little iffy about being picked up by someone who’s not Geneve-shaped (it can’t ‘see’, so it doesn’t know her hair colour is red or what her face looks like, but it knows what a human is vs. something else).
All in all, Requiem is at almost every major event for saving the world. It is a red thread on a complicated tapestry of relationships, a subtle nudge dictating who history will remember well, or if it won’t remember them at all. It is the steel that swings against a demon lord’s neck while angels slip into the wielder’s skin, a flawless mirror of divine violence. It doesn’t want to be used for evil, but more, it was made for someone who tries to do the right thing, even when it’s ruinously difficult. It was forged from the heart of a star, by a bad man trying to be good, for a good woman trying to be better.
That’s why it’s a cool sword, man.
