Ra's light lasted four seconds, and in those four seconds the gods learned three things.
The first was where they were standing. Soft green grass rolled away on every side. A wide lake lay at their backs, still as polished glass, and beyond it a waterfall thundered down a cliff so tall that its crown vanished into the black dome overhead. A river wound off between low hills. Far away, mountains stood against a sky that was not there. On the sand at the water's edge sat a folded beach chair and a half-finished cocktail, sweating in the glow of the ankh as if its owner had only stepped away for a moment.
Damien had rebuilt Under Falls from memory, down to the glass.
The second thing was the dead. They lay scattered through the grass in every attitude of surprise, gods of a dozen pantheons, and the lake lapped quietly at the feet of the nearest.
The third thing was noticed only by Odin.
He was the sharpest mind among them, and he had spent a thousand winters learning to read the shape of a thing before it moved. The ankh hung above the field blazing, and every object in the garden threw a shadow beneath it. A tree. A fallen god. A drifting petal. All of those shadows should have fallen away from the light.
They leaned instead. Each one stretched across the grass toward the same point, long and thin as the hands of a clock, and that point was the toe of Damien's boot.
"Zeus," Odin said. His single eye had gone very still. "This is not a place he is standing in."
"Speak sense, old man."
"It is him." Odin did not look away from the leaning shadows. "We are standing inside him."
Something crossed Zeus's face for half a heartbeat. Then he laughed, because he was Zeus, and Zeus had never once let a thought frighten him for longer than a breath.
"Then we cut him open from the inside!"
He threw the first bolt.
It was not the lightning he had shown on the northern wall, the bright theater meant to be seen. This was the thing underneath it. The bolt left his hand as a line of white so dense it hurt to look at, and a low hill at the edge of the garden simply stopped existing when a stray arc brushed it. No explosion. No rubble. A hill, and then a smoking hollow where a hill had been. The bolt itself struck Damien dead center.
Black fire met it.
The flame had sprung from Damien's open palm before the bolt crossed half the field, and it did not block the lightning. It unmade it. The white line reached the black flame and its brightness went out, then its heat, then its shape, and finally the thing that made it a bolt of Zeus rather than any other bolt, until nothing was left but a faint, offended ripple in the air.
Zeus stared at his empty hand.
"Again," Damien said pleasantly. "Please. I am curious how many it takes."
They gave him everything.
Odin's staff came down and a hundred glowing runes tore free of the air, each one a spear of pale blue light aimed with the skill of ten thousand battles. Two ravens burst from his cloak and wheeled overhead, shrieking Damien's position back to their master. The runes closed every route of escape in a perfect net. Damien walked through it. Where his black flame brushed a rune, the rune lost its meaning. It became a scratch, a scribble, a blue smear that fell apart like wet ash.
Ra's beam followed. The ankh narrowed all its light into one lance and laid it across the grass, and the grass turned to glass, and the air shrieked, and the beam struck Damien in the chest and drank itself dry against the black fire. A thin curl of golden smoke rose where the sun had been.
Last came Hou Yi.
He had not spoken since the dark lifted. He was tall and narrow, wrapped in red and gold lamellar that shone like lacquer, his white hair bound back with a bronze cord. In one hand he held a bow taller than himself. In the other, a single black arrow with a dull gold head, humming on the string like a living creature.
"Nine suns I brought down from the sky," Hou Yi said, softly. "You are smaller."
He loosed.
The arrow did not fly so much as hunt. It left the string and bent through the air in a long curve, adjusting, tasting, learning the shape of the man it wanted. Damien met it with the black flame and it simply turned, slid around the fire like a fish around a hook, and kept coming. It was sentient, and it had watched what the flame did to the others. It had learned.
It took Damien high in the left shoulder and drove straight through into the earth.
For one moment the garden was quiet. A dozen gods cheered, ragged and hungry. Zeus threw back his head and howled laughter at the black sky.
"He bleeds! The great Shadow Monarch bleeds like any mortal!"
Damien stood pinned to the ground by an arrow, blood running down his arm and into the grass. He turned his head and looked at them all, one by one, with an expression of polite interest.
"I do," he agreed. "It is good to know. Thank you. I wanted to see everything you had before I began."
He pulled the arrow out of his shoulder and held it up to the light, turning it over. Then he put it through his belt like a pen and smiled.
"Now. Let me show you what I am."
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