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Oops! All Swords

by Jessie Roy

 

Blackness, and a ringing in your ears, and the smell of ozone, frankincense, woodsmoke. Something’s happened. An accident. A magical accident.

But you’re conscious, and your heart’s beating. You’re alive, probably. That’s a start.

Vision returns in sparkles, resolving into blinding lines of glitter. You squinch your eyes almost shut as the image clears. It’s your master’s workshop, sort of. Bookshelves and scroll racks, salt-crusted alembics, a human skull perched on the mantelpiece above the motionless flames. Your master in the doorway, caught in the moment of hanging up his pointed hat. But through the haze of your lashes, swords gleam from every surface. Huge zweihanders pierce the countertops; miniature bodkins velvet the floor. Scimitars cross the door, trapping your master in a cage so tight you can see a few white beard hairs at his feet.

Nothing moves. You draw a breath.

“Hey, kiddo,” the skull screeches. “Welcome to the plane of shit got real! You’re fucked.”

You shriek, step back. Something sharp — a sword, it’s a sword and you’re an idiot — slices into your back: hot, cold, wet, black. Nothing.

---

Dry laughter filters in, along with ozone, frankincense, woodsmoke, blood. Your blood. This time when your vision clears there’s an addition to the workshop: your own corpse, like a grisly wall hanging, your chest stylishly ornamented with a bloodstained sword.

“That was great,” the skull says. “Wow. I really got you.”

“Shut up,” you say. You can’t look away from the corpse; your mouth’s running on its own. “What happened? Where are we? You said the plane of shit got real? That’s not a thing, where are we really? How come you can talk now? Am I dead? I don’t feel dead.”

“You blew your soul to ethereal little bits is what happened!” The skull seems to relish the idea. “Now you’re stuck here with me. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to cheat?”

The word cheat jerks terror from your gut. “Cheat? Cheat at what? At cards? On my girlfriend?”

The skull cackles. “Wow, I guess the brains must have gone to some other bit! You cheated at magic, dumbass. You fucked with the cards.”

Slowly it comes back to you: the tarot cards, the Word, the draw — two of swords, five of swords, ten of swords — and your instinctive swap, looking away from the cards to misdirect, letting your hand reverse the ten to reverse its meaning. Survival, not ruin; hope, not failure. Stupid, stupid. An ingrained habit from your old life: rolling dice, moving shells, telling fortunes. Picking pockets, sometimes, when there weren’t enough suckers to go around. But you can’t sucker the universe.

Your master’s told you that too. Don’t cut corners, you’re cheating no one but yourself. He stopped giving you real spells a while ago: his way of forcing you to follow his rules. If he’d taught you like he was supposed to, like he agreed to, you wouldn’t be sneaking around like this.

“Yeah,” you say. “All right. I’m a dumbass. But I’m an alive dumbass, so unlike you I’ve got a chance. How do I get out of here?”

“You could try stabbing yourself again,” the skull suggests.

“Fine, don’t be helpful.” You scan the room. It’s hard to see past the pointy metal forest, but otherwise the room seems basically like usual . . .?

Something white catches your eye. Paper on the floor: a card. You tiptoe over, the tiniest swords pricking through your slippers and socks, and catch it up.

It’s not a tarot card. It’s a weird hybrid: the ace of spades melded with the ace of swords. There are more cards around the room, and gingerly you pick them up, wiping your bloody fingers on your pants to keep the cards clean, until you’ve got them all: a deck of fifty-two playing cards, each card ordinary except for the divinatory tarot image replacing its center pips. Ace of spades and swords, three of hearts and — wait.

Slowly, you flick through the deck, spreading the cards between your fingers. Three of hearts and swords, nine of clubs and swords, queen of diamonds and swords. No wands, no cups, no coins. Fifty-two swords.

That’s . . . not right. That’s weird. That’s wrong.

“What did I say, kiddo,” the skull says. “Fucked! Super fucked.”

---

Against the backdrop of the skull’s mockery, you manage to pad a stool with your corpse’s tattered shirt and sit without perforating your buttocks. You lay the hybrid cards on the workbench’s sharkskin surface between a basket-hilted rapier and a bronze gladius. One card catches on the roughened surface, and a point pricks through the cardstock. Something stings your thigh. You suck in your breath, shift your weight. The skull snickers.

Unfortunately the cards don’t bring any ideas to mind. You’ve got nothing: just swords upon swords, a deck of weird cards, three months’ magical tutelage from your increasingly reluctant master . . . and the skull. You clear your throat.

“So, Skully — can I call you Skully?”

“Fuck, no.”

You stamp down the petty urge to say, Great, thanks, Skully. “Do you have a name?”

“Ha. Trying to play nice? I did, once. Don’t remember it now.”

“That sounds hard,” you hazard.

“Shut up, you don’t know shit about it. Just tell me what you want.”

“I was going to offer, do you want to get out of the, uh. Out of the plane of shit got real? Because if you want to get out and I want to get out, maybe we can work together?”

The skull’s silent. Then, “You can’t resurrect me. Even he can’t resurrect me.”

Okay, maybe you do feel a little bad for the skull. You pour on the sincerity. “Maybe I can at least fix it so you can talk in the real world? It’s got to be lonely here all by yourself.”

“I guess. Not like being a talking skull is all that great on the mortal plane, either.” It sounds sulky. After a moment it adds, “Sure. I’m in. And you can call me Skully if it keeps your fleshy brain from overheating.”

Sucker. Aloud you offer, “I’m Beekin.”

“Did I fucking ask?” But there’s a lightness in its voice; the edge is gone. “Anyway. I’m not a wizard, but you probably need to do card shit to get out. Since you did card shit to get in.”

So helpful. But it’s a thought. You shuffle to charge the deck with divinatory energy, and pinch the top card from the deck. You can almost hear your master’s voice: no cheating. It’s fine. It’s not like it can get worse, right? Maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe you’ll draw the six of swords: a card of transition, of escape . . .

You speak the Word, turn over the three of hearts and swords. A punch to the chest: your breath huffs out. You look down.

Three swordpoints greet you, red and shining. Three bloodstains merge and swell, soaking your shirt. You try to speak, but your mouth moves soundlessly, and your vision fades.

---

Ozone, frankincense, woodsmoke, blood, and your corpse slumped over the workbench, three hilts blooming from its back. You lift your own lolling head by its curly hair and gather up the cards, wiping off flecks of pink froth. The three of hearts and swords has a new tiny slit down its center; you prod it with your thumbnail before straightening the deck.

“So that didn’t work,” you say. Your arm itches; you scratch it.

“It’s even worse now,” Skully says. “Take a look at the old fart!”

You glance at your master — and stare. The swords obscure his face now. A tuft of white hair rests at his feet. An inch-long tear in his starry robe gapes like a blank eye, exposing the undershirt beneath.

The swords grow when you die.

It makes sense, in retrospect. You don’t know much about magic, but you know it hates structure. Your master cut the hems off a handkerchief to demonstrate what happens to an unfinished working, twisting the fabric until the woven chevrons sagged and the edge frayed. That’s what the swords are: the first signs of that chaos, magic’s preferred state.

This place was an accident, and now it’s changing. Decaying.

That means you’re fucked.

“You’re bleeding,” Skully observes. “Right there — no, don’t look at me, you think I can point to things? Your arm.”

Your left sleeve’s dripping on the cards. You shove them in your pocket, roll up your sleeve, and there it is: a two-inch slit in your forearm, welling bright blood. It doesn’t hurt at all.

“Uh,” you say.

“Why are you just standing around? Fix it!” Skully yells, and you scramble for a bandage.

---

Here’s the thing: you don’t actually like your master. Not that he’s a bad man. Most people would say the opposite. Only a compassionate man would have taken you as an apprentice, and kept you in food and clothing and pocket money for nothing but chores and odd jobs. Only a compassionate man would have looked at you, in your holey clothes, with your cards in your pocket and your dice in your hand, and said, well, you can read, and you’ve got initiative. We’ll give it a try.

Most people think your master’s wise and kind. You know he’s just a sucker.

But he’s got the upper hand after all. You came to learn magic, and he stopped teaching you. That’s why you had to steal his cards, rifle through his books to learn the words of power, practice while he was out. But it was fine. You had it under control. Everything he said about magic — you listened. You knew better than to break that rule. You just . . . did it anyway. It’s what you do. And now you’re here in the plane of shit got real, with no one but a skull to talk to, a bleeding gash in your arm, and someone who helped you in danger. Your fault.

“You sure are quiet,” Skully says. “Thinking? Careful not to hurt yourself.”

“Shut up,” you say. You tear the bloody shirt from your second corpse and wrap it around your tattered slippers. Even so, the floor pricks your soles as you creep up to your master.

“Hey,” you say. You poke him hard in the chest. “If this is a test, you win, okay? I won’t cheat anymore.”

Nothing. You examine the swords around him and the open door. There isn’t a gap wide enough for your hand: no way out.

“It’s just us in here, kiddo,” Skully says. “Nobody can see us. Nobody’s coming.”

You don’t have to care about your master. You could let the swords slice him into meat. He’s a grouchy old fart, and he’s trying to teach you some kind of bullshit lesson about honesty or morality or something, and that pisses you off.

But he hasn’t been bad to you.

The top few cards are soft with your blood, and starting to dry. When you peel them apart, damp pulp sloughs from their edges. The back of your neck itches.

“Wait,” Skully says. “Kid — Beekin. Stop. Your neck.”

You rub your neck. It feels sunburned. “What’s wrong?”

“Some kind of rash. Did you do something? Just now?”

“Not yet? I was unsticking these cards, that’s . . . all . . .” You trail off as you realize. The peeling cards, and your sunburned skin. The slit in the card, and the slit in your arm.

“Try ripping a card,” Skully says. “Just a little bit. One corner.”

You pull out the queen of diamonds and swords. She’s fine. A little bloodstained. You pinch the card’s corner, and twist until paper fibers fray. Something sears your calf, and you pull up your pant leg. Skully squawks — turn around, I can’t see shit — but you don’t move.

A drop of blood seeps from a ragged break in your skin.

---

“I take back everything I said about your soggy flesh brain,” Skully says while you freak out. “I’m impressed! You blew your soul right out of your body and into a deck of cards. No wonder they look so fucked up! They’re half tarot and half you.”

“I’m not a deck of playing cards!”

“Sure you are. It makes perfect sense.”

It kind of does, and you hate that. What a mess. You always knew the universe had it in for you, but this is something else.

“Look on the bright side,” Skully says. “This’ll make it easy to escape! You just have to get your soul unstuck. Chop up the cards and zoom, right back to your body.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Why not? It makes sense to me.”

“You’re just trying to get me killed again,” you accuse.

“It is pretty funny when you die,” Skully concedes. “But I’m trying to help. Really. If it doesn’t work, you can take me off this shelf and smash me, all right?”

You choke on a laugh. “You dumbass. How am I going to do that if I’m dead?”

“Hey, don’t call me a dumbass. I don’t even have an ass.”

“All right, numbskull, is that better?”

Skully cackles. It’s almost friendly. The tiny flare of warmth in your chest gives you another idea.

“Hey,” you say. “Skully. You know how I got into this by cardsharping? What if I just . . . fix it? Stack the deck, do the same draw again.”

“You’d rather take another dozen swords to the face than cut up some cards?”

“This place isn’t a punishment.” Your voice hardly shakes at all. “I thought it was, but it’s not. Magic doesn’t care about honesty. It cares about doing the ritual right.”

A long pause, and a rasping sigh. “Sure. It’s your funeral.”

---

There’s a corpse napping on the workbench, so you squat on the floor to lay out the fortune. First the shuffle, cards flicking through your hands. It’s trivial to keep a few aside, bracing them between thumb and fingers. Then you speak the divinatory Word, and lay out the fortune that got you into this mess. Two of swords, five of swords. It’s a weird deck, so you lay out all four variants of each, heart and spade, diamond and club, setting the twos in a column and the fives beside them. You draw the tens, reversed. The image on the card makes you pause.

“Go on, kiddo,” Skully says into the silence. “You can do it. You’re tough.”

This is really, really going to hurt. But you tear your gaze from the tiny figure impaled on ten even tinier swords and lick your lips. As you lay the stack on the floor, you turn it about, drag your palm down to spread the cards, and brace for impact.

The floor’s teeth pierce the cards and slice into your palm. Stabbing pain flares along both your arms — and then the swords come, in twos and fives and tens, crashing into your back and belly, your thighs and arms, your throat and mouth, your eyes.

In the instant before you die, Skully says a quiet, “Holy fuck.”

---

Blood, ozone, frankincense, woodsmoke. Sparkles fade to swords. But a bright rectangle catches your eye. You turn and find the door empty. Futilely the swords pierce the air where your master stood. If he were there he’d be just as much a pincushion as your latest corpse. But he’s not. You did it.

You turn to Skully, jubilant. “You were right! It worked!”

Skully doesn’t say anything. You wait long heartbeats and then realize: it worked.

It worked for everyone but you.

---

You try everything to get out, as the workshop goes to swords around you. You shuffle, stack the deck, deal from the bottom and the top. Three-card draw, four-card draw, horseshoe, cross. The stink of iron and bronze and blood and meat grows, overpowering ozone and frankincense. The corpses proliferate, and so do the swords. They’re everywhere now, a three-dimensional maze. You crouch low over a leaking torso, a blade shaving the back of your neck.

You just have to get your soul unstuck, Skully said. Chop up the cards.

There’s nothing for it. You pick out a dense nest of swords, curl your fingers around the deck’s edges, lift your hand . . . and stop. First rule of card tricks: commit. But you can’t. What if Skully tricked you? What if you’re the sucker? You don’t know what’s going on. If you get this wrong, you’ll die.

You’d rather take another dozen swords to the face than trust me?

If it doesn’t work, you can take me off this shelf and smash me.

“I’ll hold you to that,” you mutter, and bring your hand down as hard as you can.

The swords are as sharp as magic can make them. The cards shred, your palm shreds, and your body shreds right along with them, blood and tissue spattering onto paper confetti and blades dense as crabgrass, your limbs going slack, your life spooling out and out and out into endless nothing.

---

You can’t see. But smells drift to you: ozone and frankincense at first, and then fresh air, green grass, spring. Your heart beats; a door creaks. You open your eyes.

Your master hangs his hat on the wall and stamps dust from his boots. He shuts the door and comes into the workshop’s sudden dimness. The fire dances in the hearth. Above it, on the mantelpiece, rests a silent human skull. Your legs fold, dumping you on the floor.

You’re alive.

You’re home.

Your master’s rough voice shakes you from your trance. “Beekin! You look terrified. I hope you weren’t doing something you shouldn’t.”

You can’t speak. Your master squints at you. Magic flashes gold across his brown eyes. His bushy white eyebrows furrow, and then slacken.

“Well,” he says. “Perhaps it’s nothing. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

He turns to go. You’d let him, if it weren’t for the skull beyond his shoulder.

“Wait,” you say. Your tongue feels wooden. “Skully. I mean, the skull over there. I promised . . . I mean, I had an accident and Skully helped me out, and I said I’d get it out of the plane of, uh, the afterlife or something? Only it didn’t work . . . I should tell you the whole story.”

It doesn’t take long. He listens, and at the end raises his hand. You flinch, but he only rests it on your shoulder, heavy and warm.

“Thank you for being honest with me,” he says. “Of course I’ll help you keep your promise to your skull friend. Go get your spellbook.”

He heads upstairs, and you look at his retreating back, unmarred and unharmed. You’re unharmed too, or your body is. You can still remember the crash of swords, the dizziness as you bled out, your terror as you threw your life away. The smell of ozone and frankincense.

Even after all that, it was still hard to open up to your master.

But you did it. Shit got real, but you kept your promise, and you’re still here. You can’t sucker the universe. But maybe, with friends you can trust, you don’t have to.

---

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Oops! All Swords” by Jessie Roy, and I think that might count as a professional debut, looking at her site? Her only other publication was in the Journal of Mythic Arts in 2007, 18 whole years ago, so frankly I’ve no idea what rates they paid and whether that would have been pro-paying at the time but hey! After 18 years I think that, if nothing else, we can call that a Second Wind Professional Debut, right? In which case thank you, Jessie, for trusting us with it, and we hope we did you proud, and I’m delighted we got to be a part of it cos the story was a delight. I trust and frankly assume there will be more soon at her website, jessieroy.com, and probably the best way of finding out when there is more there is to follow her on Bluesky at @‌jessieroywrites.bsky.social, as I just did.

If you hadn’t picked up the hint already, then, I’ll say it straight: I fucking adored this. I am a man who greatly admires the tactical deployment of profanity as linguistic spice, and this story nailed it, and nailed the character voice as a result. Maybe that’s why it worked so well for me, that it was a second-person narration that by strange happenstance aligned perfectly to my own inner potty mouth and so felt completely natural and compelling. And maybe it’s also a little bit that Skully reminds me of the iconic Murray the Demonic Talking Skull from Monkey Island 3, which for the record I thought was great, even though it’s not held in the same esteem as the first two, but whatever, I loved it, and am still—thanks to the slightly ropey water-damaged discount copy I got from PC World back in the day—pulled straight back to it every time I smell that fusty smell of books gone damp.

You’ll also not be surprised to hear that I am 100% on board with its theme of “just fucking talk to people for help, you dolt, no-one is meant to do this on their fucking own”. If we were meant to be solitary creatures then we’d live on fucking mountains like pandas, only hanging out together when we needed to get our end away, but we don’t! We have always lived in groups! The oldest cave art we’ve found so far, at least fifty-one-thousand two-hundred years old in Sulawesi, Indonesia, is of a wild pig… and three humans. If I say “cave painting” I guarantee that the mental image you have right now is either of a group of humans hunting a mammoth or other megafauna, or layers of handprints all over each other. The first records we ever left of ourselves for those that came after were expressing community, and working together.

And yet and yet and yet, somehow we are in a fucked-up cultural moment wherein we celebrate and lionise the grift and the grind in pursuit of the meritocratic lie, the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ethic—and we’ve really stopped noticing how that phrase was conceived as ridicule, as an absurd metaphor, because you literally cannot do that, so how the fuck is one meant to do it metaphorically you utter buffoons, and have you also noticed how it’s almost exclusively deployed by people who pretend this is how they got started but when you dig into it, it was actually a five million dollar loan from daddy and not some bootstrap-pulling gymnastic nonsense.

But this LinkedIn zero-sum hyper-competitive bullshit infests our timeline like sewer water soaking into our crop fields, and drives people to not only see themselves as separate and competing, but to pre-emptively and pro-actively attack and take advantage of others around and beneath them in some sort of economic survival-of-the-fittest bullshit, shoot-first-cos-they’re-lining-up-to-shoot-you-too fuckery.

And, of course, godsdamned stupid fucking insipid treacherous toxic masculinity, uuuuugggghhh. Men bottling up their emotions and ignoring physical symptoms and injuring themselves doing shit on their own instead of asking for help cos of some nonsense fucking ideas about being stoic and independent and self-dependent, built on the ever-present and largely unquestioned cultural notion from Thomas Carlyle that “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men”, which—being espoused by a man of the 19th century—naturally ignores all the people around any proposed “Great Man” doing all the actual fucking labour, cos I bet you ten actual pounds that Thomas Carlyle did not do his own fucking laundry while he was writing his book, did he.

Cos you can’t do everything! No-one can! Maybe ten thousand years ago, I dunno, but especially now everything is so big and connected and overwhelming that no single fucking person can farm and cook and clean and educate and build and repair and fucking everything necessary for a modern life, which is why we each specialise and work together and have this person teach our kids as a trained professional and that person build our roads cos shit, you wouldn’t want to drive on anything I put together.

And no-one can do any of it alone, and that’s why we have language, people, because can communicate very fucking swiftly becomes need to communicate, because if we can’t do the practical stuff on our own, the things we can see and touch with our own hands, how in the fuck are we meant to do the ephemeral, ethereal stuff like am I being a good person in this world and what will happen to me when I die and what am I meant to be doing with this brief flicker of existence that would mean something?

So please, darlings, do not try; do not beat yourself up that you cannot do this alone; do not believe their lies that you ought to be able to, because anyone who tells you that is trying to sell you a service or product to fill the void they convinced you to create in the first place. We are all in it together, we always have been, and as long as we’re recognisably human we always will be, so fucking dive in.