A Devil's Dictionary

It is raining. That’s the first thing I notice, the first thing that tells me I am no longer in the cockpit. The second is that I’m bleeding—bleeding from the leg, which is making it difficult to press the attack. The third is that I’m dying—as is my opponent—dying beneath a blood red sky.

“It is finished,” he says, stumbling forward and back—his blood flowing freely, his hair matted in sweat. “Look at you! Your broadsword is shattered. Your armor is compromised. Why is it you continue?”

But I do not know why I continue—only that I was a Crash Diver once and will be so again, and so must face the vision, endure its consequences. Endure them so that future generations may bridge the gulf of galaxies!

At last I say: “Are you better off? We die together, Sir Aglovere. Surely you—”But I am baffled by my own voice, so familiar and yet strange, and by my own words, which have materialized from nowhere.

And then he is charging, hacking at me wildly, and I am forced back along the hedgerow: until I lose my footing over a protruding root and topple headlong into the mud and bramble—whereupon my opponent falls on what’s left of my sword and is promptly run through, his entrails unspooling like loops of linked sausage and his eyes turning to empty glass.

At length he says, “We kill ourselves,” and laughs, even as I push him off me.

And then we just lay there, staring at the sky, neither of us saying anything, as our blood pools together and spirals down the slope. As the clouds continue to rumble—pouring rain into our dying eyes.