Twelve feet of earth lay between us. There were no rings here, no platforms of ice or stone, no Inker and no audience. There was only the white chamber, the black pillars, and the Hero standing across from me with her hands open at her sides.
Sol waddled along the base of the nearest pillar, three steps to the left, she paused, then waddled three steps to the right. She paused at the end of her circuit, looked at me, and let out a small chirp. I felt the boredom through the bond. She had concluded that whatever we meant to do here was beneath her, and she had concluded it some time ago.
I smirked. A moment later, Ash smirked too. Neither of us had agreed on a signal. I knew we would both move forward at the same time regardless. Sol let out a chirp and I moved.
Ash's arm cut through the air. I darted aside before the line could finish, and felt Parting press flat against the space where I had just stood. I did not turn to look at it. I charged. Her arm swept again, and this time I ducked, and the cut passed a finger's width above my collarbone. I felt the air snap, and knew my body would have fared no better.
I struck out with Ruin. Black fire poured from my right hand and crossed the gap between us, and it died before it reached her. I cursed under my breath. The distance was still too short, as I had guessed. I had not seen Ash use Parting often, but I had seen it enough to know its reach was at least twice that of my Ruin.
I ducked behind the nearest pillar as her arm came up again. The great column began to come apart above me, splitting on a diagonal without a sound, and I was already moving before the top of it fell. The pillar crashed behind me with a boom that shook the floor. I did not slow. The collapse had bought me the only thing I needed, which was distance closed.
I threw a gout of Ruin. Ash darted left, away from the flame, and then she darted forward. I had not expected that. I raised my hand to block a blow aimed at my face. The blow came for my stomach instead. The air left me. I stepped into her rather than away, and Ash twisted and threw out a kick. I sent a line of Ruin at her midsection. She bent low -lower than should have been possible- beneath it mid-turn, and her leg swept mine out from under me.
Ash grinned. It was not a Hero's grin. She pointed her arm down at me where I lay sprawled. “Do you surre-”
I stretched forward with my legs, caught her neck between them, and pulled.
Ash came down. I locked her there and squeezed -not hard enough to harm, never that- but hard enough that she would understand the matter was decided. I reached for her with my right hand, black twirling at my fingertips.
“Do you surrender, Ash?” I asked. I was smiling.
Her face had gone very red. This was odd. I was not even choking her. At least, I was fairly certain I was not. Perhaps the Essence I was using to move in this place gave me more strength than I had expected. That must have been it.
Ash let out a croaking “yes.”
I released her. She pushed herself up, and I was already reaching for her with my left hand, searching for any wound the lock might have left. The Cradle found nothing. What it found instead was an impression. The impression was strange. Of a long and patient wanting, shaped almost like that strange gesture Ren sometimes made with her hands. I pulled my hand back, and it trembled, just faintly.
“What,” Ash said, rubbing the side of her neck, “was that? I've never seen anyone do that.”
“It was one of the [Hundred Submission Techniques]. They are not very practical, as they require one to make strength from weakness, and I have rarely ever been in a position of weakness.”
Ash looked puzzled. “That’s…I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of those before.”
“You would not have.” I rose to my feet. “I learned it a very long time ago, from a place past the edge of the world, or rather, far past the edge of Enreth, past Ashia. A place that-” I paused. “A place that likely no longer exists.” The words came out with more weight than I had meant to give them.
Ash was quiet, but her eyes had their way of saying things that her mouth did not. I had learned to read them now, and they made me look away.
“Combat with my limbs alone never interested me, though I have taken the time to learn much,” I went on. “I always considered it… brutish. There is nothing in it of the majesty of a spell cast just right, at the right time.” I looked at my own hands. “But I will concede the techniques of that place had an elegance to them. I never found much occasion to use them.”
Ash watched me for a moment and said nothing. I watched Sol. The baby phoenix had resumed her patrol of the pillars, vanishing behind one and emerging from the far side with the bearing of a general inspecting her foundations. I checked the bond, and warmth came back to meet me. She paused, found my eyes, chirped once, and marched on. I wondered, not for the first time, how she bore this place at all. Even now I spent a surprising amount of Essence simply moving my limbs against the weight of the chamber's mana, and Sol weighed nothing and surely had nothing to spend. It was not so strange, I supposed. She was my familiar. She would manage what others could not.
“Why didn't you use that in our spar?” Ash asked.
“That was out of the question. I would not use this there.”
“Why?”
“It is…odd, in terms of appearance, to use most of them in front of a crowd.” Ash's face took on that same color again, and she nodded slowly as if I had explained a great deal.
“So…round two Lys?” she said.
I rolled my shoulders. “I thought the Hero had lost her nerve.”
Ash had the nerve to snort.
What followed, I could not have measured in any honest unit of time. The chamber had no windows, and its light did not change, and I stopped counting the bouts somewhere past the point where counting them mattered.
In one, I grew tired of watching Ruin die in the air between us. “You'll never hit me that way,” Ash called out, and she was right. The distance was just one limitation. Single bursts of Ruin were simply too obvious to strike a fighter as skilled as Ash, no matter the distance and no matter how fast I fired them.
So I hid behind a pillar I knew she would sever, and while I waited for it, I did something I had not yet tried. I forced the Ruin through all five fingers at once, as five threads, each as thick as the fingers. I had done a similar thing before, but never in combat. Never in front of a Hero who could cut me in half with a single gesture.
The pillar split above me. I leapt before it could crush me and sent one tendril at her as I rose. Ash was close enough that she had to jump above it. I sent three more. Two to tag her in the air, one waiting where she would land. Ash avoided all three. She twisted in the air, changed her trajectory and her landing. She landed, left hand already half raising. She had landed on the last tendril of Ruin, the one I had hidden in between projecting the others. It caught her at the knee, and black bloomed across her leg, and she crumpled with a pained cry.
I did not have time to feel the satisfaction of it. What I had just done was difficult, it had pulled my concentration in several places at once. It had worked. It was useful. It didn’t matter. I was already moving, the Cradle white at my left hand before she had finished falling, and I poured Bloom into the rot until the black receded and the leg was whole.
In another, we went hand to hand, and I took the [Haunting Giant]. It is the most brutish of stances, beneath me thrice over, built on wide movements and the boxing-in of a smaller foe for a single devastating grab. It was the stance Zarvok always defaulted to, whenever he’d been disarmed of his warhammer.
Ash threw a fist. I ignored it entirely, reached past it, caught her about the waist, and raised her into the air. She let out a yelp and I slammed her down. She struck the floor hard enough to crack a small crater into the stone. With the Essence running through her, I knew she could take an impact like this with little injury.
She tried to raise her left hand. I seized the arm and pinned it. She wasted no time in trying to strike with the right. I blocked it with my leg and pinned that arm beneath my thigh. She channelled Essence, and I swayed, but I did not topple. I leaned down and smirked. “It seems this is another victory in my fav-”
Her head rocked up and slammed into mine.
The world went white and I came off her and sat in the dirt clutching my skull. “Ow,” I said, with great dignity. Ash was clutching her own head, an arm's length away.
“That was dirty,” I told her. “Beneath a Hero.”
Ash lips almost quivered into a grin, before she grimaced instead. “Yes, it was. And it really damn hurt too.” She winced. “Ronan was right, after all.”
I took a deep breath. “Right about what?” I reached for her head with my left hand.
“He always said a headbutt hurts the one giving it as much as the one getting it.” She said it almost wistfully. I let Bloom into her skull and found little there to mend, but not nothing. My own head was still pounding. I did not know how hard the fool had struck me, only that I would be calling this one a draw.
Eventually, almost reluctantly, Ash began to use her Veil. Her Cypher had a petty power at Spark, no more than the flimsiest illusion, which I saw through almost immediately. In battle, that was enough. Her left side appeared briefly still, even as she swiped. Her weight shifted in a direction I did not see at first. Once, Ash used it on one of the great pillars. I did not know when. I only realized it when I used the pillar for cover, only to find it had already been Severed. The Hero was doing much with even that meager power, even as I was getting more adept at seeing the true shape of it.
In another, it was Ash who chose to stop. She had me, truly. She’d drawn a line through the air and I had leapt to the side. She hadn’t used Parting. She’d pivoted and sliced the air again, and this time she did use parting, with more Essence than I had ever felt from her before. I tried to rise, but my left leg slid cleanly before I even managed to rise.
The pain came a second after the leg fell, and it was considerable. Blood spurted from the wound, and I almost fell on my face. Ash was by my side in an instant, her eyes wide and horrified.
I had put the leg back with Bloom, but for four of our duels after, Ash held herself back. She held herself back despite my every insistence. And so, after I had pinned her again, I decayed her own leg with Ruin. Ash winced, but she did not scream as I had.
“Now…now we are even.” I said, forcing Bloom through her leg. The color came back slowly, but it did return. Ash did not hold back again after that.
I kept a tally, at first. I pulled ahead. Then Ash pulled ahead. Then I pulled ahead again, and somewhere in there I lost the count and did not go looking for it. It simply stopped mattering which of us was the stronger or which of us led and which followed.
Even the purpose behind it -to advance in three days time- stopped mattering. It was simply enjoyable to strike one who could take it, and could strike back twice as hard in turn. Well, as much as our marks allowed.
Our clashes did not end by our choosing. Ash severed a great pillar as I dodged clear of her cut. I heard the chirp behind me before I understood it. I turned, and the pillar was falling, and Sol was beneath it.
I wrenched forward every drop of Essence I had left. A sea of black fire poured from my hand and the pillar began to dissolve where it met the flame.
It was not dissolving fast enough. The Ember Core screamed, a thousand small teeth turned inward all at once, and the pain of it stole the Essence from my hands before I could finish. My body shook. The Ruin guttered and died. I could not hold it. For the first time, I reached for my own power and my own power would not come. The Essence left my limbs, and I was forced to kneel under the weight of this room.
Ash moved past me. She slid beneath the falling pillar, gathered Sol into her cupped hands, and was clear. The boom came an instant later and I could not see through it. Dust and debris covered the air.
I reached for the bond and found Sol. She was indignant, furious even. Still, she was whole.
Ash came out of the dust with the phoenix cradled against her chest. “Hey careful now, Sol. I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there. ” she said, gently.
The phoenix let out an angry squawk. As if offended that the Hero had used not seeing as an excuse.
I took a deep breath and forced Essence back into my limbs. I rose and met them. “Are you well?” I asked her. Sol let out a chirp loud enough to be heard outside the chamber. I took her from Ash's hands and held her, and ran my thumb along one ruffled wing until the chirps softened.
“Are you okay?” Ash asked.
I looked at her. The Core was still grinding in me, as it always did, but it was settling back toward its normal hum. It seemed I had not hidden that last spasm nearly as well as I had hoped. “I am fine,” I said.
“It seemed very much like you were not fine, Lys.”
I was quiet. I groomed one of Sol's black wings, and she gave me a string of soft chirps. I had sworn to come to her before I did something that would hurt me. Surely this did not count, as I had only just discovered it myself. No, I had only just confirmed it now.
“It seems my core has a limitation I did not know,” I said. The words came slowly. “When I pour the Requiem out without restraint the Core turns on me. The more I take, the more it tears. There is a ceiling to what I can spend at once, and it is lower than I believed.” I paused. “I must simply pace myself, that is all.” It was a flimsy solution. I heard it in my own voice as much as I saw it on the Hero’s face. The Cradle hummed warmth, as if in answer.
Ash was quiet for a time. Her gaze went to her left arm, to the fake red Line of her Sever. She seemed to consider something. “Let's take a small break, then,” Ash said. “Any more fighting and I won’t even have strength left to move.”
It tasted like a lie. “That is not nece-”
“Lys.”
I sighed and surveyed the chamber instead of arguing. Many of the pillars stood broken, half of them fallen or split, and craters pocked the floor where the two of us had fought too hard. There were clean lines cut across the floor as far as the eye could see. The white light that had filled the room when Ren and Corin left us seemed dimmer now. I had not noticed before, but the mana was distinctly thinner than it had been. Enough that the Essence left to me could still carry me in this place.
I thought of the last thing Ash had said before we began, about leaving this place in a better state than the last. We had not managed it. We had not come close. The great door groaned open.
Ash and I both turned. I expected Ren or Corin trailing behind her with our meals. I expected, perhaps, an Inker arrived to complain about the ruin we had made of a chamber meant for Sigils. They must have some way to monitor the state of this place from the outside.
I did not expect the figure that stood at the threshold with her arms folded and her chin already raised. Alisa took in the broken pillars, the craters, the dust still settling, the two of us standing in the middle of it with a phoenix cradled in my arms. Her gaze lingered on Sol for a time, and then it fixed on me, and her chin climbed another fraction it had no business climbing.
“So this is where you've been hiding,” she declared, and her declaration bounced off the walls. Her finger came up and pointed straight at me. “If you think a simple door can keep you from me, then you are very wrong, Lysanthia!” Her arm lowered, and something in her bearing shifted. She nodded towards Ash, in a gesture that was far more polite.
I found, against all reason, that I was not displeased to see her.