The rebellion had been brewing for months in whispers and shadows. We called ourselves the Unnamed—those who’d been erased from the census rolls, pushed beyond the city walls, forgotten by history even as we still drew breath.

I’d tracked Commander Veylin for three days through the burnt districts. He was alone, separated from his patrol during our ambush at the grain depot. Now we faced each other in the ruins of what had once been the Temple of Witnesses, its marble columns blackened by fire.

“You think this ends with me?” he said, raising his ceremonial blade. Polished steel, ancient, said to have been carried by the first lords of the city. “Strike me down and ten more will take my place.”

“Then we’ll face those ten too,” I replied, though my hands trembled on my own crude weapon—a farm scythe I’d sharpened against stone.

He moved first. His training was evident in every step—decades of martial discipline against my desperate months of preparation. I parried once, twice, felt the shock of metal on metal rattling my bones. Then his sword came down, and I saw the face of my people in his blade.

Not literally. Not some mystical vision. But in that perfect polish—maintained by servants while we starved—I saw my reflection twisted and distorted. I saw my sister’s hollow eyes the winter she died. My father’s bent back from years in the quarries. The children who would never learn their own names.

The blade stopped an inch from my skull. Veylin was staring too.

“You’re weeping,” he said, and there was something almost like confusion in his voice.

“So are you.”

His sword arm wavered. In that moment, I understood that he’d seen something too—perhaps his own reflection, perhaps the weight of what that polished steel represented. All the suffering required to keep it bright.

I didn’t kill him. I should have. By every rule of war and survival, I should have driven my scythe through his throat while he hesitated.

Instead, I lowered my weapon. “Go back,” I told him. “Tell them what you saw.”

He left, stumbling through the rubble like a man who’d witnessed something that broke him. Whether he would carry that message or simply return with reinforcements, I didn’t know.

But I’d learned something in that moment of reflection. The blade shows us who we really are—both the one who wields it and the one who faces it. And sometimes, that recognition is sharper than any edge.