A Field of Blades

"I remember the day vividly.
The planet had another name then. The people that had taken it from their original inhabitants had some name that conjured images of fear and death. A name which alone could subjugate entire peoples. I am grateful I have forgotten that name.
The wanderer had arrived under the cover of night. He arrived at my house and offered condoleances. How he knew my daughter was gone is a mystery. Even I did not know where she had been over the decade since she had left home. She could not handle our inaction and had sworn to find someone, a power, which would save us. We'd all believed her then.
Over a decade later, the skinless wanderer talked to me in a solemn but not patronizing manner. A strange warmth coming from the clicking of his teeth.
He dropped a very heavy clanking bag onto my floor. He handed me a letter. The handwriting was unmistakenable. After I finished picking myself up off the ground, the man was still stood in the doorway. He had been quietly waiting for me to grieve, before asking if he could see where she lived.
I'd let a number of people stay in her room over the years. Homeless, recently evicted, refugees. The urgency of their situations would often trump how much I missed her. I could never find the time to keep it as pristine as she used to keep it. It did not seem to trouble the man. With a nod, he walked back out of the room.
I followed him, trying to muster the courage to ask about her. What happened? Where did she go? Was she still smiling, when the end came?
I did not have the strength to ask.
He found a large field outside the city. From there, we could see the massive ship of the occupying troops hovering over our old Town Hall. Satisfied, he opened the enormous baggage he had been carrying. Blades.
He put a surprisingly gentle hand on my shoulder and asked me to go ring whatever alarm system we had. As I made my way home, before I lost sight of him, I saw him toss blades accross the field. They planted in place, like victory flags.
When I finally reached the Town Hall, the grim faces of the guards condescendingly ignored me until I described the wanderer. In the decades of occupation, I had never seen fear on any of their faces.
Soon I was shoved aside by the complete occupying force. Hundreds of them, more than I had seen since the war, descended upon the village, marching through the streets towards the field I had left the skinless man in. They stopped me from following them. I watched as they all poured out of the village and into the field. By then, many of us were also in the streets, wondering what was happening. The Occupier barked at us to go back indoors, and so we did.
The gunfire started soon after. It lasted an hour, no more, no less. I know, for I counted every minute. As the sunset fell upon the town, everything had been quiet for what seemed like eons. Some of us had begun to risk going out into the streets. The quiet was deafening. There was a strange smell on the air, one that in my long years I had come to recognize as the smell of death. However, it was never this strong.
While everyone else wandered the streets aimlessly, I knew to go to the field. There, smoke and ash hung in the air over a sea of bodies. When I was done retching, I finally saw him. He was picking up his blades from the ground one by one. He treated them with a ceremony I had never seen from men with weapons. I am not so sure he was man at all. I watched him ritually clean every blade before wrapping them in strips of leather and placing them back into the large bag he had arrived with. When he finished, he came back with me to the village. People had gathered onto the plaza of the Town Hall. The crowds offered him money, land, glorious songs in exchange for what he had done. He only asked for directions.
I left him at the foot of the Mountains, something I had done many times before with my daughter. She loved those trails. From there, we could see that the ship that had once threatened our people was taking off, disappearing into the darkness of space where it came from. The wandered paid it no mind. He asked me about the colour of the trees up in the mountains. I told him I remembered their flowers pink and vibrant. He said it would do nicely. There were many warnings one would usually give someone who attempted the trail up the Mountains, but if was clear that none of them would apply to him. I watched him disappear into the snowy paths.
I did not see him again for decades. During that time, men and women from all sorts of strange peoples and species landed next to our village and asked to see the field. There, one blade still stands planted in the ground, a reminder. The sight of this lone blade would turn these lone adventurers into excited children. Soon, they would attempt to climb the snowy trails too. The ones we saw come back down would be changed men, standing straighter, with a true sense of purpose in their eyes.
I look up at The Lost Mountains sometimes and wonder if he found what he was looking for, under the sakurai blossoms."

Jeremiah Stone, Terrax IV,199.990