The Blades of Avalon
The king looked, and lo, beheld a vast host assembled against him. He turned to his senechal and asked if he had a solution to their problem. Even with his armies magics and weapons their enemy numbered far greater than they could stand against. His senechal said he could, and turned to the kings loyal knights and bayed them come forth, where he presented each with weapons beyond anything any had seen before. An armory of magical weapons that would have turned any one man into an army. Yet even so, the host before them would overwhelm them, and so he instructed each to prove their worthiness with their new arms in a lateral fashion. Their skill in personal combat was beyond reproach, after all. Each tried their best. The Knight of the Glaive lopped the point off of a nearby mountain, sending it tumbling to crush the host. Their mages could not stop it and it stuck home, but still the host advanced. The Knight of the Great Axe struck the ground, causing a fissure large enough to swallow a man to open beneath the army and do just that to many. Still the host advanced, undetered. Many knights with many weapons tried, but it was the Knight of the Bow that truly proved herself. When the time came for her attempt, she was the last that would get the chance. Their enemy was almost to the hill the King and the Knights stood upon at the mouth of the valley, and they would soon need to leave or be destroyed when the armies met. She spent hours firing arrows ino the sky. Some came down again and great magical blasts tore craters in the ground where they landed. Others seemingly disappeared amongst the clouds. The other Knights, then the King himself, began to beg her to leave with them while the Senechal looked on with muted curiosity. She ignored them all, loosing one final arrow into the sky. It dissapeared into the clowds with all the rest. A moment passed. Everyone looked around, waiting for some effect to happen. The sky darkened. The wind became a roar, and sheets of rain came folllowing after. The Knight of the Bow had crafted the largest storm they had ever seen, so large that it threatened to carry the King and his retinue away, but still she stood resolute on the hill and the others remained in fear-defying curiosity. The valley below became mired in mud, so quick and deep that the enemy became to thrash and grab for each other, unable to lift their feet free from the mud. Already the valley was starting to flood as water ran into it from both mouths. It got much worse when the purposed of the arrows that came back down was revealed. She had expertly created channels into the valley, only seperated by thin walls of stone that broke as each crater filled. Now the rainwater flowed in from ever direction. From the top of cliffs, the mouth of the valley, and every other crack of stone. When it was done, the whole of the enemy host had been washed away. The only sign they were ever there were the water-logged banners sticking out from the mud like gravemarkers.
-Histoir du roi dal Avalon
The 'Blades of Avalon' are a catch-all term for a series of mythological weapons that take many different forms. Spears, Halberds, swords, axes, etc. They can even be bows and crossbows, though more modern inventions are omited from the list. These weapons are legendary for both their historical status, that being their place in popular myth, as well as their measurable magical power. According to legend, the number of Blades was enough to completely arm the the Knights of King Avalon each with a unique weapon. Which, in theory, would tell us how many weapons there are if the number of Knights did not change from source to source and story to story. As it stands, there is an unknowable number to the Blades, and many of them that are located are debated if they even are true Blades or simply some qadvanced weapon from the time of the Dracanomachi.
Blades hold a strange middle ground of their physical description, somewhere between Aetherform Weapons and a standard-forged blade. The blades are physical, of a sorts, unlike true Aetherform, but the blade isn't metal either. Common observations state that the blade almost seems ceramic of a sort. Perfectly smooth and without the tell-tale waves of well forged steel. It still rings like metal when struck, however, and has the same physical properties otherwise. The hilts and hafts are made of many different, equally unique, materials that are just as hard to identify as the pointed ends of these weapons, but they don't seem to be integrally tied into the weapons function. The most unique part about these weapons are the theorized sentience, or at least semi-sentience, that these weapons hold. You see, when someone picks up a Blade of Avalon there's a peculiar sensation that has been reported. Like a mental handshake. If it feels as if this 'greeting' has gone poorly, the weapon will still act as a fairly heavily enchanted sword. If it feels like it has gone well, then the true abilities of the weapon can be accessed by the user. Such a reaction is marked by the blade begining a tranformation from it's unidentified metal form to something more akin to the energy blades of Aetherform, though there is a marked difference. This process takes a not-insignificant amount of time, and seems to only occur when the weapon and it's 'bonded' user are in direct combat against a challenging foe. When examined during the transformation, it reportedly looks like burning paper; with the paper being the metal and the burned away sections revealing the energy-form blade. When the process has been completed, with the whole of the metal having dissapeared, the blade will look similar to an Aetherform weapon as stated earlier, but far more compact. Aetherform tends to 'leak' Aether when they are activated, and simply condense a large enough amout of Aether so that they maintain a sort of moving equalibrium. The Blades of Avalon do something that is not possible, and seemingly wasn't possible during the era of the Old Empire either. The blade is completely stable, seemingly infinitely. The blade does not need to condense Aether after it initially creates itself, it seems. This doesn't seem to provide any functional benefit other than it being an example of of a technique found almost nowhere else.
Item type
Weapon, Other
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