Maxim and Petka's Friendship

Maxim and Petka were childhood friends, bound by the kind of intense, unspoken loyalty that only boys can share. They played at knights in battle during one short summer, whittling wooden swords and daggers, pretending to fight with all their might while being careful enough not to draw blood. The game was brief—they had plenty of other ways to amuse themselves—but it left a permanent mark on Maxim's life. Petka was a bit younger, and Maxim felt slightly embarrassed by the adoring way his friend gazed at him and trailed after him, as if he were in love. Yet the friendship was real, and it was the only close friendship Maxim ever had.

The Gift of the Dagger

In one of their mock battles, Maxim knocked Petka's wooden sword out of his hands—Petka had hardly even tried to resist—and cried, "You're my prisoner!" Instead of accepting defeat, Petka handed Maxim a wooden dagger and declared that the valiant knight must take his life with this dagger rather than humiliate him by taking him prisoner. It was only a game, but Maxim shuddered inside when he pretended to strike with the wooden blade. For one brief, agonizing moment, Petka looked at Maxim's hand holding the dagger just short of his grubby white T-shirt, then glanced into his eyes. Then he blurted out, "Keep it, you can have it as a trophy." Maxim accepted the dagger happily, as a trophy and as a present, but he never used it in the game again. He kept it at home, trying to forget about it, as if he felt ashamed of the unexpected gift and his own sentimentality. Yet he never, ever forgot about it—not even when he grew up, got married, and had his own first child. The toy weapon always lay in the drawer with the albums of children's photographs, the envelopes with locks of hair, and all the other sentimental nonsense.

The Dagger Becomes a Weapon

Years passed, and Maxim and Petka grew apart. A year is a big difference for children, but for teenagers it is a massive gulf, and then life separated them entirely. They still smiled at each other whenever they met and shook hands, even enjoyed a drink together a few times and reminisced about their childhood. Then Maxim got married and moved away, and they almost completely lost contact. But one winter, Maxim learned of Petka's death purely by chance, from his mother during a regular evening phone call. She said, "Do you remember Petya? You were such good friends when you were children, quite inseparable." Maxim remembered immediately, and he knew where an introduction like that was leading. Petka had fallen to his death from the roof of some high rise, though God only knew what he had been doing up there in the middle of the night. The doctors said he was sober. Maxim told his mother sternly that Petka was probably high on drugs, and she didn't argue. But that evening, Maxim got drunk and killed a woman he had been trying to track down for two weeks—an old witch whose Dark power forced men to leave the women they loved. It was as if the wooden dagger had summoned him, and it proved to be a genuine weapon, pitiless, merciless, invincible. Petka was gone, but Maxim still had the dagger Petka had given him, and he believed there must have been some special reason for that awkward childhood friendship.

The Burden of Solitude

Maxim often wondered why he was so alone, why he didn't have a friend beside him to lift at least part of the burden off his shoulders. There was so much Darkness all around, and so little Light. He toyed with the wooden dagger, rolling it from one hand to the other, and recalled the last thing his wife, Elena, had shouted at him as he was leaving: "I wish you'd love us, not just take care of us." Maxim mentally parried the thrust, thinking, "But isn't that the same thing?" Yet he knew it probably wasn't. But what was a man to do when his love was a battle fought against Evil, not for Good? Against the Darkness, not for the Light. He told himself he was the guardian and the judge, and he must not hesitate. The wooden dagger was a luminous blade driving out the darkness, and if he lost even a part of his faith, the next magician would reduce it to ashes with his magic fire. The guardian and the judge—or the executioner? What difference did it make? He was serving the Light.