It happened again, and again.
He learned its terms the way a man learns the rules of a cursed house. The moment Epimetheus left his sight, he left Damien's mind. Not hidden, not half remembered. Gone, as if he had never been in the world at all. And the mind that remained, left with no enemy to hold, filled the gap with a blurred, ordinary sense of purpose. 'Why am I standing here with my daggers out? Why am I so tired?' Each time he came back to himself with a blade already in him, or on its way.
He tried to solve it.
He spread shadow across the whole battlefield, a net of fine black threads that rippled over the grass and the smoke and the burning stumps, listening through them for any weight that moved. The net found something. It tingled with a small, careful pressure, and he turned toward it, and then the pressure slipped out of his mind and the net was just a net. It felt something. It did not know what.
He knotted a tendril around Epimetheus's ankle while the man was still in view, a thick black rope that would pull taut whenever he moved. For six seconds it worked. Then Epimetheus stepped behind a pillar of smoke, and Damien looked down at a line of shadow in his own hand running off into the dark, and had no idea what it was holding. He hauled it in. It came back empty. The rope had been cut so cleanly that the end was still smoking.
He stopped blinking. He held his eyes open until they streamed, until the red glare of the sword left blue ghosts burned across his sight, until his eyelids shook of their own accord. It bought him twenty seconds. It cost him every one of them in pain.
He carved the name into the hilt of his left dagger with the edge of the right, in big, jagged, ugly letters. EPIMETHEUS. When he lost him next, he glanced down at the knife in his hand and saw the carving and read it slowly, three times, and the word meant nothing at all. It was a row of marks. It could have been a curse. It could have been a grocery list.
The sword came out of nowhere and took him under the ribs.
The fire went in.
That was worse than anything. The strikes themselves he could bear, the long gashes and bruised plates and bleeding seams. But when the red fire touched his actual body, his flesh and meat, the damage did not feel like injury. It felt like erasure. It gnawed. It crept inward from the wound like frost across a pane, taking something from him with every inch. Not blood. Not life, exactly. Some thin, essential thread of Damien that held him in the world and said that he was here, that he had always been here, that he was a man and not a rumor.
It pierced him twice. Three times. Each time he sealed the hole with shadow, and each time what lay beneath the seal felt lighter, thinner, a little less there, like a house with the furniture being carried out one piece at a time.
'I cannot win this'
The thought arrived without drama, and he hated it more for that. He had fought Monarchs. He had killed a god of the sun with his bare hand. He had never in his life met an enemy he could not at least measure, and this one he could not even keep in his head. Every plan he built fell apart the moment he forgot he was building it.
He fought anyway. He clashed and clashed and clashed, blade against blade, fire against fire, shadow against the thing that ate shadow, while the sun climbed and the plain turned to glass and cinders around them. And somewhere inside the roar of it, a small, steady voice kept saying the same thing. There is no answer here. You are going to lose.
Epimetheus did not gloat. That was the worst part. He fought with a kind of grave courtesy, almost sorrowful, as if each exchange cost him something too.
"You are very good," he said once, when their blades locked. His amber eyes were very close. "Better than I expected."
"Shut up," Damien snarled, and shoved him back.
The end came at midday, and it came quietly.
Damien had Epimetheus pinned against a wall of his own black stone. He had both daggers raised, fire roaring along them, and for the first time in the whole fight he thought he had him. The man's sword was out of line. His arm was bleeding badly. His face had gone pale beneath the tan.
Damien struck.
The wall was empty.
A thin plume of ash drifted where the man had stood. Damien stopped mid-swing, daggers hanging in the air, and looked at it.
It was a lovely day.
That was the odd thing he noticed first. The sky was clear and the wind was warm. The grass around him was black and silent, and a tall wall of stone stood in front of him for no reason. He was holding two daggers. They were wet.
He thought of Ais.
He did not know why. He thought of her in the morning, hair loose across the pillow, half asleep and cross about it, and the way she held on to his arm whenever he tried to get up. He thought of Hestia's kitchen. Of Loki laughing. A soft, warm, ordinary happiness settled over him, and in the middle of it, with perfect clarity, he thought, 'I should go home'
The sword went through his heart.
It came from the front. It slid between two ribs with hardly any resistance, clean as a needle through silk, and the plain steel burst out of his back in a spray of red. He looked down at it. The hilt rested against his sternum. A hand he did not recognize was wrapped around it.
Then the fire woke.
It roared out of the blade and into his chest like a living thing, a red tide that filled the wound in an instant and poured outward along every vein. Light burst from his mouth, his eyes, the seams of his armor. Every part of him that the flame touched went numb, then quiet, then simply stopped being there. The shadows around him shrieked and tore loose. His helm cracked down the middle.
Epimetheus drew the sword out.
Damien fell.
The ground rushed up and took him on his back. He lay in a spreading pool of his own blood, staring at a sky that had gone very wide and very pale. His hands would not close. His daggers lay somewhere beside him. He felt the red fire burning inside his chest like a second heart, and underneath it, fainter, something else, something that was him, going out one thread at a time.
'My Family'
He wanted to say it. He could not find the breath.
A shadow fell across his face.
Epimetheus knelt beside him with the bloody sword across his knees. He looked down for a long moment, and there was no triumph in his face. There was only a deep, quiet weariness, the look of a man who had done this many times and never gotten used to it. He laid the sword on the grass beside Damien, gently, point turned away.
"You are strong," he said. "I want you to know that. Other than Father, not even Antares could defeat me, and you made me work for this. You made me bleed."
Damien said nothing. His eyes stayed on the sky.
"But your goal was my father." Epimetheus's voice was low, not unkind. "And if this is all the Shadow Monarch has achieved, it will not work. I fought Ashborn, you know. He was strong. Far stronger than this. He did not win, of course, or I would not be here. But if this is all it takes to defeat you, then you are nowhere near him yet."
He looked away across the burned plain, toward the roaring walls.
"Soon Father will be released. It will not be long. Just accept his vision. He loves you still, and he loves the world he wants to build. It is not so bad. Nobody hungry. Nobody afraid. Nobody lost." His amber eyes came back to Damien's face. "So tell me. Why fight?"
Damien did not answer.
He lay in his blood with the fire eating at his core, and he said nothing at all. The wind moved through the black grass. Far away, someone on the wall was cheering. The sound seemed to come from another life.
Epimetheus waited a moment longer. Then he nodded once, as if some small question had been settled, and rose to his feet. He picked up his sword, turned his back, and began to walk away across the cinders.
A hand closed around his ankle.
He stopped.
Damien had rolled onto his side. He had no idea how. There was no strength in his body to do it, and yet he had done it, and his fingers were clamped around the man's boot with a grip like a vise. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. His face was gray.
Epimetheus looked down.
Shadows were crawling over Damien's chest.
They were thin and quiet, hardly more than threads, and they wound around the ragged hole in his heart like roots around a stone. They coiled tight. Black fire woke inside them, rimmed in white, small and steady, and it did not burn his flesh. It burned the red. The Primordial Fire that had been gnawing at him from the inside hissed and sputtered, and for the first time, it flinched.
Fire against fire, inside a dying man.
Epimetheus said nothing. His grip tightened on his sword.
"Do it again," Damien rasped.
"What?"
He pulled himself upright on that one hand. It took everything he had. His knees shook. His other arm hung limp, and the ruin of his chest bled freely down his stomach, but he stood. He stood with his fingers locked around the ankle of the man who had killed him, and he looked up into those amber eyes.
He could feel him. Every thread of him. The weight, the heat, the pulse beating under the boot. In his grip the man had a shape and a name and a face that did not slide.
"Use that power again," Damien said. "Do it again."
Epimetheus stared at him.
"Why?" he asked at last, and for the first time his voice was not calm. "Why do all this? You are dying. You have been beaten. Why fight so hard against a world that would be better than this one?"
The shadows tightened. The red fire sputtered. Somewhere deep inside the wreck of his body, Damien felt something stir, something older than the pain, something that sounded like a voice saying be better than I was.
"Because I will fix it," he said. "All of it. With my own two hands."
He lifted his chin. His eyes were black from edge to edge, and they did not waver.
"Without erasing anyone's memory. Without deleting a single page of history. I will be a god who does not fail these people." His grip clamped down harder. "Their only God."
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