Agnes's blade parts the chain at my throat and takes a few strands of my hair along for the ride.
"Answer me! Agnes!"
The pendant spins away through the torchlight. I snatch it from the air before it can clatter across the stone, drop it into my coat pocket, and sidestep her next lunge without once looking at it.
Sentiment is a private weakness. A Demon King indulges it in private.
The slender knight does not reply. Her midnight armor drinks the moonlight pouring through the broken ceiling. It would be mesmerizing were it not trying to kill me.
"This is your last chance to stop," I say. "I already put the others down. I will not enjoy doing the same to you."
They lie scattered across the grand hall, my three finest commanders, groaning and twitching on the blackstone where my fists put them an hour ago.
Fists, not spells.
My spells are currently a drawer I cannot find the key to. Dinner was a toast, and the wine, I now understand, was thick with something that tasted of nothing. A binding draught. One-third of my strength, perhaps less, and every drop of it spent teaching three traitors a lesson.
Around us, the castle I built upon the bones of a grand mountain trembles, its legions of undead and beasts gone strangely silent in the corridors beyond. They have been told to stay out of this. By whom is the question that keeps me from sleeping, assuming I live to sleep.
A blue light gathers along Agnes's sword.
I weave. She cuts. I weave again. It is a dance we have done ten thousand times in the training yard, though never with intent to kill, and I know every step she is about to take because I taught her all of them.
With my free clawed hand I draw what little magic I have left, pressing it smaller and smaller until the very air begins to shake. The torched souls lining the walls shriek and swell red in answer.
Agnes drops to one knee, bracing. I take the opening, crouch beside her, and lay one sharpened nail against her helm, ready to peel it from her face.
"Now. Why did you all betray me?"
The visor reflects only the color of me. I see my hair is a mess.
"Do you remember," I say, softer, "how you stole my rations in the demon sector? Forty pounds of you, and you took the whole crate. I should have let the guards flog you. Instead I took the Little Bandit home."
Her shoulders flinch. It is a tiny thing, there and gone, but I have watched this girl for twenty years. For half a heartbeat the blade lowers.
"Don't call me that," she whispers.
"Then tell me why."
The sword rises again, and her voice goes flat and reverent in a way I have never heard from her.
"A new King has come. He will lead us to a world without gods. You were never going to take us there."
My face twists into a scowl before I can stop it.
"Agnes, Agnes, Agnes. I am the one who meant to take you there. Machinations of creation, remember? Cultists of that wretched goddess groveling at my feet? That was the plan. My plan. Where is your loyalty?"
"He is stronger than you."
Mana flares through me, dark and heavy, what scraps the draught has left me, and I rise to my full height and let it flood the hall.
"Stronger? Child, I am the STRON-"
Something slams into the back of my skull.
My mana snuffs out like a candle. My knee nearly hits the floor before I understand that I have been struck, and as I turn, a second fist meets my face and lays me flat.
A hand seizes me by one wine-red horn and hauls my head up. It is warm, slick with someone's blood, and glowing gold. My muscles lock, and I understand with growing fatigue that something is pulling the mana out of me like water from a cracked jug.
"So this is the Demon King?" says a voice. "No wonder everyone's still stuck in this world."
A cloaked figure crouches over me. I give him every ounce of killing intent I have left.
"Who...the hell..."
The hood comes off. The aura around him blazes so bright it hurts to look at.
It is a boy. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Golden eyes, a scuffed jaw, and a tired, apologetic face like a clerk about to deliver bad news. He glances at his left forearm, where a column of small marks has been inked into the skin, and runs a thumb down it as if checking a list.
"Sorry," he says, and sounds as though he means it. "Not really, I guess. But I'm going to have to kill you now. I have a lot to get through today."
"Who are you?" I spit.
"Ah, it's kind of a sob story." He sighs. "I'll tell it to your corpse."
I close my hand around his wrist. What remains of my mana goes through it in one clean pulse, raw and unshaped, and the cloak chars and his skin blisters and boils.
"Do not," I say, "touch me with such sullied hands."
He hisses and lets go.
I climb to my feet. The room tilts, or do I?
I take a rag from my overcoat, wipe the horn he handled, and breathe out. Perhaps I should have saved that mana pulse.
Gold mana fills the hall like fog. Gritting my teeth through the nausea of his drain, I make what is left of my own mana visible. This game is one I am most familiar with.
"The binding draught was yours," I say. "Wasn't it? Or your King's. You arranged this."
"Maybe." He rolls his burned wrist and the skin knits closed as I watch. "Spell magic bounces off me. Raw power, apparently, still stings. Noted." He thumbs a fresh mark into his forearm.
Then he is in front of me.
I have no time. His fist grazes my cheek and I bleed, a thing I have not done in two hundred years. Brows furrowed, I gather my power for a strike, and he is already launching himself at me again. Every last scrap of strength goes into meeting his fist with mine.
The collision is a wicked crack. For one moment there is silence.
My hand and sleeve hang in tatters. His fist is untouched.
A chosen one, then. Of course.
He does not let up. The next blow connects with my perfectly sculpted face, and I am sent flying. Over the groaning commanders. Over the kneeling knight, who has not moved, whose helm does not turn to watch me go. Only my throne is waiting to catch me.
Through bloodied eyes I watch him climb my hallowed stairs, golden and unhurried, ticking another mark off his arm. This time even I feel the pressure of the aura around him.
He grabs my horn again, raising the other in a fist.
I can hear Rule Nine of the Demon King's Handbook, the one I wrote in my own hand at the age of nineteen, as clearly as if it were being read aloud:
A Demon King never kneels.
I have kept it for two centuries. It has never once been tested. And now, with blood in my mouth and cracked teeth, I discover how heavily it weighs.
My fingers find the pendant in my pocket.
"I..."
"Hm?" He pauses, head tilted. A final mercy, perhaps.
I debate the consequences of what I am about to say. My pride is a roaring furnace, and it burns hotter than my common sense. But the necklace is warm now, almost hot, as though it has been waiting for something.
"I surrender."
The boy's smile is thin and unpleasant, the smile of a man who has been told a joke he intends to repeat later. He leans closer.
The pendant flares.
Light pours from my hand, blinding and total, and for the first time the boy stumbles back, throwing an arm over his eyes.
"What the f-"
Crack.
Space itself shatters.
When the world snaps back into place, there are no blackstone walls, no torched souls, no chosen one. There is a creek running over smooth stones, an afternoon sun slanting through green leaves, and a smell of damp moss I have not smelled since I was a child.
I look down. The pendant is dust, scattering on the breeze. My mother's last gift. I never knew what it was for.
The empty hand curls into a fist and presses to my forehead, and I squeeze my eyes shut. Burned into the dark is Agnes's face, or rather, the helm that never turned to watch me fall.
"How unforgivably humiliating."
I breathe in, and I breathe out, and I straighten my back. A true Demon King never kneels.
I reach up to smooth my hair. And find something missing. Or rather, two somethings.
I stumble to the creek, drop beside the water, and look.
"My...beautiful...horns..."
And with that, Rule Nine is broken, and I collapse to my knees.