Blue power poured out from the girl in a rush. It was Essence and it burst outward in a wave that threw the dust from the stone.
I raised both arms and set my weight against it, and still it drove me back. My heels carved two lines through the stone of the ring. The pressure pushed at me like a hand splayed across my whole body. Then it stopped and I lowered my arms.
Lena Eckhart stood at the center of the ring, staring at her own hands. She turned them over. She closed them into fists and opened them again, as though she had only just been given them. "This," she said, and the word was almost too quiet to hear. "This is what I should have done from the start." She was smiling, and it was an ugly smile.
I saw the black then. It ran through the blue Essence still pouring from her skin in thin threads, there and gone, there and gone, like veins glimpsed beneath a wrist in shifting light. I knew that black. I had seen it in the wings of a phoenix that begged for an ending. I had seen it in a Great Elk that had once been divine. I had seen it, most recently of all, crawling across the shoulder of a general who should have been dust for a thousand years.
"Fool girl," I said. "What have you done?"
Lena looked up. The smile widened, and now it was for the crowd, and her voice went out over all of them, carried on Essence. "What's the matter, half-demon? Scared?" I did not answer her. The smile faltered just for a moment, and then she forced it wider to cover the falter. "You should be."
Lightning came off her mark and sheathed her whole body. It ran from her ankles to her shoulders, blue-white and crackling. The air near her bent with the heat of it. Her Tenet. I had just fought against it. Had just managed to outlast it. I thought I knew the shape of it now. I did not know the shape of what the girl wore now. Because the black was in it. I saw one thread of it, coiling up through the blue like a vein of rot in living wood.
The girl rushed me, and she was faster than she had been from just moments before. I had suspected she would be. I did not know by how much.
I saw the blow start and I was already too slow to answer it. It caught me across the side and turned me half around, and before I could set my feet a second blow found my stomach and drove every breath I had out through my teeth. I folded around it. The world went white at the edges.
I threw myself back and loosed Ruin as I went, black fire pouring from my right hand into the space between us. She came through the flame without slowing and her shoulder took me in the chest and put me on the ground.
I reached for the Cradle before I had finished falling. White fire poured from my left hand and I pressed it to the burn smoking across my stomach, and the skin knit, and I was already rolling because she was already coming again.
I blocked. I twisted beneath a strike that would have snapped my neck. I leapt over a sweep that would have taken my legs. The girl moved faster than my eyes could follow, and so I stopped trying to follow her with my eyes and answered her on instinct alone. A blow slipped past me and caught my hip. Another grazed my jaw. I gave ground, and the Ember Core hummed beneath my ribs worse than it usually did.
I had been careful with it. Since the duel began I had rationed the Requiem, spent it in measured amounts, because I had suspected what would happen when I poured it out without restraint. The core started to turn on me now.
A kick took me under the ribs and launched me. I went up, and when I came down one of my legs was bent in a direction legs are not meant to bend. I did not scream, but only just. I forced the Cradle into the joint and felt it grind back into its socket, and the pain of that was almost enough to unclench my gritted teeth.
Why is no one stopping this?
The thought arrived unbidden, and I disliked it the moment it did. The girl had done something to herself. Something that went beyond a simple duel. Anyone with eyes could see it. Someone should have ended this. That no one had was an offense. That I had waited for it at all was a greater one. I crushed the thought and rose.
I found the answer at the ring's edge. The Archon stood closer to the stone than last I’d seen him. His right hand was half-raised toward the ring, and on his forearm the Rune -that collapsing sphere- was spinning. He slowly set his hand down, and shook his head.
The vow we had taken. Perhaps it was a thing that bound us to this contest against each other from the moment we had taken it, and did not only come into effect when a victor was declared. Just the two of us, without any interference from the outside. It seemed whatever the girl had done to herself did not count.
I understood this all in a single heartbeat. I did not have time for more. The girl was coming again.
I counted, between the blows. I had fought Ren's Tenet several times in the Sigil resonance chamber, and I knew its price. It ate through the Essence reserves of the one who used it. A minute, perhaps two, and even Ren was spent. I had outlasted this Lena’s Tenet once before, and I planned to again.
I counted, and the count went past a minute, and past two. Her lightning did not run out. I looked at the girl's face beneath the crawling light. It had gone grey, in the way of all those in the old world who had been completely drained of their mana. This Essence must work the same. The color had drained from Lena’s skin entirely, and yet she still moved. Her Tenet still crackled across her skin.
I suspected the answer. I suspected it even as that grey skin turned into something thinner still, almost sickly. This thing she was doing was feeding on something that went past mere Essence. I could not count on outlasting a flame that ate its own bearer for fuel, especially with the grinding. I had had a single plan, and now it was useless.
The black spread. It took more of the lightning, and then it began to climb the body itself. I saw the tendrils of it climb up her throat. Along the line of her jaw, thin dark lines spread across almost white skin. Her voice, when it came, came twisted. "Still standing?" she said, and there was less of Lena in it than there had been. "Why won't you just-" The words came apart in her mouth. I barely understood them at all.
But the girl’s stance held. Everything else in her was guttering out like a candle at the end of its wick, and still her feet found the same positions, still her weight moved the way it had at the start. This teaching was the last thing in her to go.
Strangled screams and hushed murmurs began in the stands. Even the most shortsighted of humans could not be blind to this.
Lena came at me and I met her. I put my full weight and Essence into a blow to her face, through the lightning. Bone gave under my knuckles. I felt it break, even as my knuckles themselves cracked.
I just barely flinched from the pain of it. Lena did not, as if the broken thing in her face meant nothing to her at all. She hit me back, harder than before, and I staggered back under the weight of it before I went down to one knee. I sent Ruin through the broken hand, even as I healed it with my left. Where the Ruin met her Tenet, an impression came.
I saw a body, broad and tall and warm. I saw a back turned, walking away into an endless expanse of white. A hand reached out towards it, even knowing the reaching would do nothing.
I shook my head. I did not ask to see that. I did not know whose it was, and I did not want to. I looked up at the girl. One side of her face was caved in from my blow, and yet she still walked forward. I had fought to win. To thoroughly shatter the girl’s pride, such that she would never stand against me again. There was nothing left to shatter now.
Words came to me then, unwanted. Malcis fell to the void today. Zera had to slay him herself. She struck clean. It was a mercy to him.
I had given the phoenix that same mercy. The only mercy I, the last Demon Queen, could give anyone. Every road I knew ended in the same place.
The girl grabbed me. She spun, and the arena spun with her, and she flung me into the dirt at the ring's edge. I pushed myself up on my arms and coughed, and blood splattered on the stone. I healed, and the Cradle came slower now, and the core ground harder for the asking.
I looked at her eyes. There was nothing behind them that I recognized. I was not fighting the girl named Lena anymore. I had not been for some time. She walked closer. Slowly and deliberately. Her Tenet granted speed, and she moved slow.
Then she froze mid-step. The Tenet guttered around her, blue and black sputtering together, and the girl's whole body locked rigid. The black surged. It flooded up over her collarbone, over her throat, took half her face in a single spreading instant and Lena screamed.
It was a girl's scream. It cut through the roar of the stands and up into the high dark of the ceiling. Her body was bare and broken. There was no Tenet to guard her now. I saw my chance. I raised my right hand and began to gather the Ruin, more of it than I had allowed myself all fight, enough to end this-
The Ember core cracked. Something inside the thing I had made split, and the pain of it dropped me to my knees before I understood I was falling. The grinding pain I knew too well, and this was not that. This was new, and it whited out the world. Blood came up out of me and the Ruin died in my open hand.
When I lifted my head, the screaming had stopped. The black had finished its work. It covered her now, almost all of her. And when the Tenet came back the lightning was no longer a blue-white. It was black, wreathing her. She took a step toward me. Then another.
I found Ash in the stands. My gaze found her at once, though I had lost track of the map of seats some time ago. She had both hands on the railing in front of her. She had risen from her seat and set her hands on the barrier and half-lifted herself over it, Sol clutched screaming against her chest with the other arm. The fool Hero was a heartbeat away from throwing herself down into the ring.
I met her eyes across all of it and shook my head. She had made me promise to talk to her first, if I ever planned to hurt myself. I could not talk now. This would have to serve. Her jaw set and her foot came down. The railing in front of her cracked and shattered under her hands.
The girl clad in black lightning staggered closer.
I reached for my power one last time, and my power came wrapped in pain. The Ember core tore itself apart to give it to me, and in the tearing something finally came loose.
The power of my Ruin, of the Requiem could not defeat this. There would always be more of the Tenet beneath, and I could not have outlasted this girl before, let alone now. The Cradle could not touch her either. Ending and Beginning, my two weapons, had both failed me. But I had another. One that lived in the space between the two.
I cupped my right hand and my left together. The way I had once cupped an egg. And I fired Ruin and Bloom into each other, black into white, at the very boundary of my own palms. The world went quiet.
The arena was still there and the thousand voices still roared. The quiet was inside me. The grinding stopped. For the first time since I had knelt in a chamber of crystal and forced a third thing to catch, the Ember Core did not grind, did not tear, did not hum, did not do anything at all. There was only stillness. Something small inside me wanted to weep for it.
Time slowed, or I slowed, or the moment simply opened wide enough to walk around inside. The dust hung motionless in the air. The black lightning crawled across Lena’s body lethargically.
I looked out at the stands, or perhaps I only felt them in a moment stretched to infinity. Ash, on her feet at the rail, Sol a blur of gold and black struggling against her.
Ren, risen half out of her seat, mouth open around a word she had not finished. Edda and Corin, side by side, their faces the same slack astonishment. Alisa, who for once, finally had her chin down.
My gaze drifted to another section. To Malachor, whose twin heads both bore the same open mouthed expression. It drifted downwards, to the Archon, his eyes gone wide. It finally rose again, and settled on the western tiers, to a red skinned half-demon who had leaned forward. And in her gaze I felt a hunger I had only known in myself, for something else.
I turned back to my own hands. To the Ruin and Bloom that poured from them. And where the black fire met the white, I saw it.
It was not a color. Or it was every color, every shade I had ever seen in either of my lives. It was the crimson red sky I knew well, cut at the edge with a blue sky I was only starting to know. It was an egg, gold and black warring across its surface. It was a Hero, who stood tall in front of my throne and wept over a body in the dark. There were colors I had only seen once before, from a Hero who had burned all of herself and more to slay me. I saw all of them at once, pouring out of the seam where Ending met Beginning. Ruin ate Bloom. Bloom ate Ruin. And in the space between the eating there was a single held instant that belonged to neither. A Becoming.
And in that moment, when the world felt very slow and very beautiful and very alive all at once, I thought: Throughout Heaven and Earth I alone am-
I stopped. The railing had cracked under a Hero's hands for my sake. Alone was no longer the correct word. I smiled.
The blast left my hands. One moment it was all those colors, blooming outward across the ring. The next it was the air itself cracking, splintering like struck glass and then mending in the same breath. It crossed the ring, and it found her.
The world came back all at once, with the deed already done. The black lightning turned. It ended as one thing and began as another in the same instant. A moment later, it became only light, falling and breaking apart into a thousand petals of pale blue-white that drifted down through the whole arena.
Lena took one step forward. She blinked. For a single heartbeat, the black receded from her face. Then she fell backward, and struck the stone, and did not rise. The grinding returned.
Of course it did. I had known it would. Even as I had hoped it would not. Still, the humming was back to the way it had been, before the duel. It was manageable. It was beneath a Queen.
The noise of the world crashed back over me. Those thousand shouts. And then, as I began to move, it fell away again, and this time it was because the arena had gone silent, row by row, as I crossed the ring toward the girl. The only sound left was the chirping. And it was proud.
I reached her. Lena lay twitching on her back. Half her face was crisscrossed in fine black lines, spreading and receding, spreading and receding. I had seen this once before. Morrigan had worn a face like this.
I raised my right hand and ignored the pain that came with it. I gathered the Ruin, and it grew in my palm, black fire coiling into a sphere, and I let it grow until it was large enough to swallow the girl whole and leave nothing at all behind.
Zera had struck her lover clean. I had given the phoenix a clean ending. Both were mercies. I could give one more. It was a familiar road. A single tear ran down the girl's right eye.
She spasmed. Her mouth opened, and a thin line of blood ran down over her lower lip. "Please," Lena whispered. "End it." There was more of her in the words than there had been before.
A trickle of Ruin slipped from my fingers and down into her, the barest thread of it. The impression came. The impression of a body on white sheets. Of closed eyes that would never open again. Of a tall man who had gone down, and would not stand again.
I shook the impressions away. I looked down at the girl who had goaded me, who had tested me. Who had earned my ire as none had in this new life. I made my choice. "This will hurt, girl," I said. The Ruin burned in my open hand, and its light lay black across her broken face. "For what you have done, you deserve worse."