I remember seeing the blood. I was painted red from head to toe. My clothes so wet it was as if every thread was bleeding. The blood clinging to the hem made my shirt plaster itself to my jeans. I could feel my pants drizzling blood into my shoes, slowly filling them.

My head was spinning, “He sacrificed his life to save mine... after all I did...”, I managed to utter under my breath. The thought brought tears to my eyes and put a quiver in my voice. Anything else caught in my throat as it convulsed in response to the tears.

It almost felt like a warm shower. That is if the pipes had rusted beyond repair. The tang of iron hung so heavy in the air I could taste the iron with every breath as if it was a goodbye kiss. Thinking back on it, that could have been the blood on my lips too. I didn’t care though, my mind snapped to a single thought, death. It was time to add to the blood dripping off me.

As if on cue a drop of blood fell from my eyebrow into my eye. I didn’t feel it though my vision went red before it could touch my eye. It was like watching it drop into an endless red sea. As that imaginary ripple expanded I could feel the shadows crystallize in my hands forming familiar blades.

The leftover shadows lapped at my hands like eager puppies.

The blades themselves where nothing impressive, only about six inches, a handle as flat as the double edged blade. The most impressive thing, they were so black they seemed like a hole punched in the world. You couldn’t tell the blade from the handle if it was not for the point on the blade. The whole knife was only about an inch wide.

They flew from my hands as if they minds of their own and buried themselves deep into their targets. Before the knives met their targets, the shadows crystallized again in my hands with a cascading cloud of black. In my hand formed a perfectly cylindrical handle about an inch wide that continued for about nine inches. Where the handle met the blade was almost indistinguishable, unless you turned it ninety degrees and the blade abruptly disappears. The smaller blades dissolved into the wounds instantly, the impossible black passing into their skin covering them completely. Then the black shifted into two identical silhouettes that converged onto my eight and six as I approached the first of the six men left standing. The sword went through the first man like whipped cream. I lost count of how many times my sword swung. The man fell into a pile of fist sized chunks and puddles before he could scream. I turned to the fourth closest man as the silhouettes tore their finger now shaped into points through the man two and three as they screamed.

Man four had just enough time to tear his eyes away from the sight and pivot, that is when the shadows curled around his ankle.

I held my sword with my left hand as if I was about to stab the ground in front of me and angled the blade slightly so as to deflect anything coming at it around me. Then I yanked the shadows in my right hand sending man four flying to me. He was cleaved in half around me. The first silhouette finished with man 2, blood seeming to be dripping out of the universe around it as it flung itself at man five and took off his head while he was trying to sprint away. I threw my sword at the back of man six. The dirt few up around his feet as he desperately tried to scramble away. The sword hit home at the base of his neck, sinking to the hilt and into the ground pinning him as he choked and finally fell silent.

They should not have missed their mark with that spell that turned my husband into a pool of blood above me as I watched.

He was the only who knew who I was, what I had done and he still shoved me out of the way.

He met me as Tam Collins, but he came to love me as my true self. Awaen, god of the shadows and compliment to the light, the god of death.