Highlander

Nemo me impune lacessit, said the sign.

The wanderer smiled at the moon. The walnut muscles in his hands twisted artfully but incompetently in sheet steel and starlight. Metal ripped. Signpost became lonely stake, sign became necklace of glinting barb and point.

This is my emblem, he thought. This is what I am.

Further along the road, he saw the fallen cross. A corpse was draped upon it, rosewood blooming in the darkness. Climbing spikes had hung a victim spreadeagled there. He was cold, serene, bloody. The victim seemed a solid thing, a being of fact, not myth. The wanderer sniffed at him.

There was the taste of iron and a flash of copper. And the wanderer knew why he had been so clumsy. Panting a little, he lowered his horn and galloped off down the road for his appointment with the lion.