Damien's shadows closed around him like a clenched fist.
They rose from the grass in dark coils and wrapped his legs, his chest, his shoulders, and they hardened into armor as they went, plate over plate, smoke made solid. The torn pieces from the first blow knit themselves back together. A helm of black glass slid down over his brow. Black fire flared along both daggers, rimmed in white, and the grass beneath his boots simply ceased to be.
Across twenty paces of burned plain, Epimetheus drew a sword.
It was an ordinary blade. Long, straight, plain-hilted, the sort of weapon a mercenary might carry. There was no gleam to it, no glory. He held it in one hand with a loose, easy grip that suggested a thousand years of practice, and he did not raise it.
"Come, then," he said gently. "Let us see what you are."
Damien went.
He crossed the distance in a single burst, shadows trailing behind him like torn silk, and brought both daggers down in a cross. Epimetheus lifted his sword and met them. The three blades struck together with a sound like a bell cracking, and a shockwave rolled out across the field and flattened the grass in a ring.
Damien felt the blow in his bones.
It was not the strength of it. It was the weight. The man behind that sword was not stronger than a Monarch, and he was not faster. But he stood against the blow like a thing that had stood against the end of the world and kept its balance. Damien pressed down with everything he had and the sword did not give an inch.
"Good," Epimetheus murmured. "Very good. Now. Burn it."
Damien did.
Black fire roared along both daggers and poured down the length of the crossed blades, rimmed in white, hungry. It had erased Poseidon's sea. It had unmade Zeus's lightning. It had eaten the sun. It struck the plain steel of Epimetheus's sword, and then it did something it had never done before.
It stopped.
A line of red light ran along the edge of the blade. It began as a thread, thin as a hair, and spread outward in a sheet. Then fire, real fire, red as the heart of a forge and bright as the inside of a wound, burst out along the whole length of the sword and met the black flame head on.
The two fires pressed against each other, and neither one gave way.
Damien stared.
He knew that fire. He had never seen it, and he knew it in the same way a man knows the sound of his own breath. It was the kind of flame that lived in the bones of the dungeon, the kind that glowed under the deepest floors. It was close to his own. It was so close it made his skin crawl. Not a cousin, not a neighbor. A mother, perhaps, to the fire in his hands.
"You recognize it," Epimetheus said.
His face was calm. The amber eyes looked tired and kind, and a little sorry.
"What you carry is a copy. A beautiful one. Ashborn made it, long ago, by scraping what he could from the edge of the true thing and shaping it into a weapon. He bound it to his will, and bound it to his shadow, and handed it down to you." The red flame crept another inch along Damien's blades. "It is the fire of hell, as it is called. A copy of a copy of a memory."
"And that," Damien said.
"This is the original."
The sword in his hand burned, and the whole plain trembled around it.
"The Primordial Fire of Chaos," Epimetheus said quietly. "The flame that burned through the walls between this world and every other. The flame that was here before the Nine Realms had names."
...
The two fires broke apart with a sound like glass dragged across stone, and the fight began in earnest.
Damien understood its shape within ten seconds.
Epimetheus was fast, but he was not faster. He was strong, but he was not stronger. When Damien drove both daggers at his ribs and the plain blade swept them aside, Damien felt the weight of the parry and did the arithmetic without meaning to. It was close. It was close enough to be insulting. If a hair's breadth lay anywhere between them, it leaned in Damien's favor.
I am not weaker than this man.
He had the speed, by a little. He had the range, by a lot. Shadow poured off his body in blades, in hooks, in walls, in a hundred small hands that snatched at wrists and ankles. He raised pillars of black stone under the man's chin and tore the grass into spikes. He grew wings and shed them and grew them again. Epimetheus had a sword, a body, and a fire, and nothing else.
The fire was enough. Red flame ran along the plain steel, and wherever it met the shadows it ate them. A wall as thick as a tower went up in a single pass and left a smell like scorched iron. Damien felt each loss as a pinch behind the ribs, a small draining, like blood from a pricked finger.
It did not matter. It was only shadow, and he had more of it than he could spend in a year. He wrapped himself in new armor as the old burned away and he came on, and he allowed himself a small, grim smile.
Equal. Fine. Let me make it better than equal.
He dropped under a flat slash, came up inside the guard, and opened a long cut across Epimetheus's forearm. The man grunted. He answered with the pommel, which cracked against Damien's helm and filled his ears with bells. Damien spun with the blow, flung a dagger at the man's knee, and took the red sword along his thigh for it. They broke apart, breathing. Both of them were bleeding. Neither of them was winning.
Epimetheus lowered his sword half an inch.
"Very good," he said.
Damien looked at him, at the amber eyes and the blue hair and the dark, tired, unforgettable face. He drew a breath.
A gout of burning shadow collapsed between them, the last of a wall the fire had chewed through, and for the span of one blink the smoke hid the man's body.
Damien blinked.
He was standing in the middle of a field.
The sun was bright. The grass was burned black at his feet in a wide, ragged ring. Both of his daggers were in his hands, wreathed in black fire, held high, and his whole body was thrown forward into a lunge so hard that his shoulder ached from it.
There was nothing in front of him.
He stared at the empty air at the tip of his blade. His breath was ragged. His heart pounded as if he had been running for an hour. Shadow armor clung to his chest and arms, cracked in a dozen places, and he had no idea why he was wearing it. Why am I here? What was I doing? The question was reasonable and strange at once, like finding yourself in a room with no memory of walking in. Behind him, a long way off, the walls of a city roared with celebration. He knew the city. He knew its name. Orario. Home.
He did not know who he was fighting.
Something struck him across the back.
Red fire. A line of it, bright and hungry, from shoulder to hip. The pain was enormous and it was also somehow wrong, not the pain of a cut but of a thing being unwritten. He cried out, spun, and slashed backward on pure instinct, and the blade rang against a plain sword. A man stood in front of him. Tall, blue-haired, amber-eyed, one forearm bleeding.
All of it came back at once, like surfacing from deep water. The plain. The Legion. The name. Epimetheus. He had been fighting him for a full minute. For a full minute, he had been swinging at nothing.
"There," Epimetheus said, gently. "You see?"
Damien flung him back with a wall of shadow and stood there with his chest heaving.
That was one blink. One.
Twenty paces away, Epimetheus straightened from where the shadow had thrown him, shook the dust from his coat, and lowered his sword. He did not press the attack. He only watched, with the patience of a man who had been through this many times and knew exactly how long it took the other side to understand.
Damien understood now.
The man in front of him was not hiding. There was no trick of speed or illusion to see through, no seam to cut. The world simply let go of him whenever Damien's eyes slipped, and Damien's own mind, helpful and cruel, smoothed over the gap and called it nothing.
He tightened his grip on both daggers, and for the first time that morning, a thin cold thread of fear ran down his spine.
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