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They know him. He knows them. Bronze reforged white-hot under War’s hand, remade as flesh-copper-tin-bone becomes the leash pulled taut enough to choke a dog that tried to pull against its master’s whims, teeth white and glistening wet in the firelight.
The Blades know him, the moment his hands are placed on their hilts. Left, used to a shield, for Arriktos; right, used to a dory, for Thero. They have known him from the day they were pulled blistering from the magma of Tartarus by War’s own calloused hands, gleaming like fire themselves in the light. He has known them from the day his hands first wrapped around a stick and played at it being a sword, chasing his brother in the dust and midday heat. They have known each other from the moment flesh was forged with bronze, melting, blistering, scorching in a heat comparable only to that of the sun itself.
They look at each other like they were born to see, to know, to be one whole mass bolted together like a ship’s planks grown warped to fit the shape of the keel. Born like yeast and flour for the oven, like jewels and gold in the jeweller’s workshop, like copper and tin seeing each other before the blacksmith places them in the forge.
But they do not know each other.
The strong arms and the chains they are bound in are unfamiliar to each other, and yet they are the same: bronze as an extension of flesh, flesh as an extension of godhood. What is a soldier to his god, that a sword is not to a soldier? A new weapon to score flesh from bone is the same, no matter who wields it, be they divine or mortal or mechanism.
There is much to learn, and they have always been quick learners. How to sharpen from tools to bronze weapons glinting in the Achaean sun, how to wash the rust-red remains of their inferiors from their skins; how to dance as one unholy derecho of bronze and flesh, strips of bloodied metal and skin alike dripping scarlet in the breeze, uncaring of the shouts of the dead and dying underfoot and under razor edge.
He has no need for a shield or even a spear as long as they remain bound to his arms: they will protect him. Together, man and metal and the between like ink in water can become something more than mortal, undying, blazing eternal in the words of men who will speak their names in reverence a thousand years from now.
One spirit, three souls bound to mortal blood and divine metal. The wielder of the swords, the one who holds the bridle bound to their own wrists; they are equals in that way, all three bound to Ares in tripartite form. There is no chosen general without the Blades of Chaos, and there would have been no wielder for the Blades without him, therefore they cannot be without one another. As one cannot divide Hecate into equal thirds, as one cannot divide a two-headed snake into two living halves: there is no separation between unbreaking, strength and savagery.
They learn him as he learns them. Metal, divine, flesh, mortal, learning him better than even a god could have: his daughter runs her hands along their gleaming hides and they do not bite at her tender skin, not even a playful nip, too gentle to draw blood. Lysandra helps polish them and they go without complaint, because if their master, her husband trusts her to bring them back than so should they. Ares’ chosen loves his wife and child, and as such so do they. Arriktos and Thero love each other, and as such so does he. No more conflict than two hands on one body.
And as such they do not question when they bite into the flesh of those two once-beloved, trusting for once perhaps too much in their moving third as he drives skin-warmed steel into shattering hearts, spilling scarlet on ashen mud-brick and bronze alike. When he falls to his knees, arms still wrapped in the embrace of their chains, they fall as well, and only as the blood of their kin starts to rust their edges they begin to understand why.
Their old master’s (the soldier and his weapons cannot be taken apart; if one leaves, so do they all) other followers bind them in the depths of the darkest prison they have. No sunlight reaches them in their impromptu grave; no sound, no light, no memory, only pain and stubbornness in the face of it to carry them through the endless sea before they tear free of their shackles and their captors alike. Unbreakable, strong, savage; they tear free of imprisonment and of oath, no matter what or who it takes. Grudging, avenging, unceasing, unstoppable, uncaring of whose flesh needs to be split to break free.
No… no, maybe not truly. Orkos did not deserve to die. Orkos could only be granted the freedom they never could be.
It is only memory returned and the desperation to scour it back out that carries them onwards. Their mortal third cannot bear the visions that scour at him day at night alike, and perhaps that is the beginning of the end: mortal flesh has forgotten how to be wrought steel, adamas, unbreakable, and that is where the crack between wielder and wielded begins. He bows to new gods, new masters in the hope of release from his pain, and they bow with him because they cannot do differently.
His new masters set him against his old one. They die. They rise again. They are forged anew in the evils of the world once contained and tear bloody furrows into divine flesh that had forgotten it could break, and for one final time they are one soldier, one sword, tripartite, whole before they are torn apart once more.
War reminds them all that men can be broken. He fishes up memories fresh from the mud of their mind, memories of familiar blood on their skin and screams that they wish they had never heard (strong hands that could not stand before them, loving hearts that were torn apart under their teeth). They fight until even War cannot bring more force against them, but this is not them. The swords that their mortal third wields are not them. Shadows bearing their weight and strength, clenched in his ashen hands as he tears through mere visions to defend a tattered memory, and War reminds them with a click of his fingers who their real master is.
Arriktos and Thero’s heads perk up, hunting dogs hearing their names in a familiar voice, loyalty rising in them like the fire of a volcano beneath its molten surface as they tear free of their bindings (of their mortality’s flesh) with a howl like they have taken far more than skin, wheeling free and happy, the three headed snake before it realises they have only a third of a dying body each. Their master calls; they follow their orders and shred cloth under their teeth until all four of them are gone.
They awaken on a beach. Useless. Alone. Their master, their mortality is nowhere to be seen beyond the blood the ocean is slowly washing from their chains.
And so all they can do is follow him.