Sotiria.

So-tir-i-a.

Someone had shouted that near the end of her memory…vision…whatever it was. All Rowan could say for certain was that it was a name, though she couldn’t guess precisely whose it was. It wasn’t hers in any meaningful way. It felt more like a cruel jab shouted in anger and intended to cut her to the quick. Part of her suspected that it must have belonged to some elder Tempesti in the voiceless past. There was something about whoever Sotiria was, whatever she represented, that made the name feel like a needle in the backs of her eyes, a cold hand clutching her throat. Sleep had eluded her every night since her ill-fated trip to her homeworld and her head pounded with each blink. She’d never had a hangover, but she believed that this had to be a similar feeling. She still dragged herself to school and work every day, but by the time she got home she felt as though she had nothing left.

Rowan pressed her lips together firmly, closed her eyes, and tried to draw breath past the knot that cinched her lungs. The inhale caught halfway down her chest and she dropped her face into her hands. She suspected that her sleep wouldn’t be any less disturbed until she worked out at least a few of the knots in her head. With a sigh she forced herself to her feet, reluctantly leaving behind the warmth of her favorite chair for the uncertainty that seethed on her bookcase. She knew she needed to try to address this. Even if the sword itself wasn’t the source of the vision that had lanced through her mind something about it had drawn the memories to the surface, and even if she couldn’t figure out the meaning of that stupid bloody name, she might be able to learn more about the tangible object that was seemingly determined to make her uncomfortable. Grasping it with the napkin, she gingerly picked up the weapon and carried it back to her desk. With a soft click, her desktop lamp cast an interrogative light across the bundle. She gently unfolded the cloth that wrapped the artifact, carefully brushing aside the sand that stubbornly continued to sneak out of the loose areas of the handle’s leather binding.

The gilding on the hilt, while discolored, had held up far better than the metal of the blade. She got the sense that it had been significantly longer before salt spray and sand had carried off so much of its body. Though she knew that rust itself didn’t cause tetanus, she had no idea if the bacteria that did lived on Tempesti. She snorted softly, well aware of the absurdity of fretting over the possibility of needing a tetanus shot due to poor handling of a souvenir from her trip to an alien world. Still, a horrific bacterial infection would do very little to solve her current problem. Keeping this in mind she opted for a somewhat more cautious approach, despite her ever present impulse to the contrary.

In the brighter light, and without the distraction of primal terror streaking across oceans of time, she was able to more closely examine the weapon. The complexity of what remained of the hilt’s design was startling; this was clearly not something intended for combat unless the wielder had no intention of surviving the battle. (She didn’t yet know enough about Tempestine culture to eliminate that possibility entirely) Though most of the adornment consisted of the whimsically abstract musings of a long dead goldsmith, she could still make out the slightly disfigured contours of a woman’s head glowering from between a pair of feathered wings.