— POV: Emerion —
Pristilia lifted her fan with the unhurried elegance of someone who has never once doubted the outcome of anything.
The morning wind went still.
"Now watch this," she whispered, voice carrying that particular aristocratic warmth that makes cruelty sound like a gift, "magnificent view."
The fan came down.
The arc that left it was razor-thin, almost invisible a thread of shimmering force that warped the light around it as it traveled, reality bending slightly at the edges as though reluctant to let it pass.
I felt the pressure of it against my skin before the wind arrived.
Move.
My legs responded before my mind finished the thought. I lunged toward the old man's body some instinct, some refusal I couldn't articulate
Pain snapped across my throat.
A sharp metallic sound rang out a single clean ping and then the collar cracked.
A hairline fracture splitting from one side to the other. Then the whole thing shattered, fragments scattering outward like broken starlight catching the morning sun.
I didn't understand what had happened. Neither did Pristilia.
Her eyes widened just for a heartbeat, just long enough to be real.
Then she giggled.
That soft, childish, completely terrifying sound.
"You… oh." She pressed her free hand to her mouth, eyes bright with something that looked almost like delight. "Fortune really does spoil you, pretty boy."
Heat rushed through me like water through a broken dam mana flooding back into my limbs all at once, warmth and power and the dizzying sensation of being whole again after days of enforced silence. My hands tingled. My vision sharpened.
Pristilia's smile twisted into something colder.
"But destiny," she said, tilting her chin up by the smallest degree, "favors me."
"Nebelschlag."
Dark grey smoke erupted from the ground at my feet, rolling outward like living mist, swallowing the immediate world in shadow and the smell of damp earth and raw mana. I used the cover instantly dragging the old man's body backward through the door, into the cottage, my lungs burning, heartbeat loud enough that I half-expected her to follow the sound.
I can't fight her directly. Not like this no staff, arms still shaking, mana barely back. But I won't let her touch him again.
The smoke thinned.
Then vanished, as though something had simply reached down and taken it.
Pristilia stood in the clearing, tapping her fan against her palm.
The expression on her face was the particular brand of bored that people perform when they want you to know they were never impressed to begin with.
"Did you genuinely think that would work on me?" she asked. "That spell disorients beasts and panicked soldiers. Not people who are actually paying attention." She took a step closer. "Though I appreciate the creativity."
"I don't know what your obsession is," I said, keeping myself between her and the doorway, "but you've done enough. Don't come any closer."
Her eyebrow lifted delicately.
"Obsession?" She laughed soft, unhurried. "I don't have an obsession with you, pretty boy. I have an interest in power. You happen to be adjacent to some." She tilted her head. "There's a difference."
"You call yourself a noble," I said. "And you behave like this."
"Oh?" She tilted her head the other way, feigning a thoughtful expression. "Would you prefer I behave like the nobles in your bedtime stories? The righteous ones who never dirty their hands?" A pause. "I've met those nobles. They just have better excuses for the same behavior."
I lunged.
It wasn't strategy. It was anger, and I knew it was anger, and I did it anyway.
She moved her wrist with the minimal effort of someone swatting at something predictable. One fan came up I felt the slice across my knuckles before I saw it, a line of hot pain opening cleanly. My hand recoiled. I didn't let it stop me.
Her second fan moved faster than the first.
The blade sank into the muscle of my hand and my fingers spasmed involuntarily, all the strength in them gone in an instant. I gasped through my teeth.
She leaned forward, close enough that I could feel her breath.
"Killing the old man," she murmured, with the tone of someone explaining something patient and obvious, "was mercy. He was in pain. He was going to lose." A small smile. "You should be thanking me."
My other fist moved.
The punch connected her head snapping sideways, a real impact, real force and for one moment the satisfaction of it was almost worth what happened next.
The pain arrived simultaneously, a white-hot explosion from my near-elbow where her other fan had buried itself during the swing. A cry tore out of me before I could decide against it.
She straightened slowly, a red mark rising on her cheek. Her forehead came to rest lightly against mine, eyes close, expression somewhere between wild and amused.
"Maybe I am a little crazy," she said quietly, almost conversationally. "But you don't get what you want in this world without being willing to break something." She smiled. "Or someone."
Then she pulled.
Both fans. Straight out of my arms.
The scream that left me wasn't a decision.
Blood streamed down to my fingertips, dripping into the dirt.
My hands shook with a violence I couldn't control, every muscle from shoulder to wrist vibrating with shock. My vision whitened at the edges.
And then mana burst out of me.
Not a spell. Not anything controlled or intentional pure survival instinct expressing itself in the only language it knew. A raw shockwave erupted from my core and hit Pristilia square in the chest, sending her off her feet and across the clearing. She hit the ground hard, dirt scattering, rolling until a tree stopped her.
I stood there bleeding and shaking and breathing.
She sat up slowly.
Wiped the corner of her mouth.
Smiled.
"You actually hit me." There was something almost genuine in her voice. "Be proud of that, pretty boy. Not many people can say it."
She stood unsteady, one hand briefly on the tree behind her and flicked her hair back with the automatic gesture of someone reasserting composure.
"But you'll still lose," she said, sharpening. "Without a staff, your mana scatters. You can feel it already, can't you."
She was right. I could feel it the mana fraying at the edges of every attempted spell, no focal point to hold it together. Like trying to carry water in open hands.
She came forward fast.
Too fast.
Her fan sliced toward my head and I moved by instinct alone, the wind of it grazing my ear as I pulled back. The next slash came before I'd finished the first dodge. Then another. I caught one fan against my palm it cut through immediately, blood welling up and the second drove into my stomach.
I choked.
Blood filled the back of my throat.
My knees wanted to go. I didn't let them.
"The game is over," she said softly, "pretty boy."
"Not." I coughed. "Yet."
I gathered everything mana, willpower, the last reserves of something that was probably closer to desperation than power and pushed it into the single spell I had left.
"Zaltreign."
The beam that erupted from my hands was brilliant blue, pure compressed force shaped into a spear of light. At this distance there was nowhere to go. It struck her in the neck with a crack that rang across the clearing, and she flew backward really flew, the momentum carrying her across the ground and into the tree she'd been leaning against, her fans clattering into the dirt beside her.
I stood.
Barely.
My legs shook. My arms hung at my sides, leaking blood steadily into the soil. The morning felt very bright and very far away.
It's done.
I turned.
"Alec--?"
The spot where he'd been was empty.
I looked again, slower, as though I'd simply missed him. The broken wall. The doorway. The clearing.
Empty.
"Alec?" The word came out smaller than I intended.
"You thought you'd defeated me."
I turned.
Pristilia was standing.
Barely one hand against the tree, her neck stained red, her breathing coming in ragged pulls but standing, and her eyes still burned with the particular violence of someone who has decided they are not finished yet.
"How," I said.
"Your Zaltreign," she said, the word careful in her mouth. "With a proper staff it would have gone straight through. Without one the mana scattered at the last moment.
I pushed everything I had left into a barrier." She took one shaking step toward me. Then another. "It cost me. But here we are."
She was right about the other part too. I could barely lift my hands.
"You can barely walk," I said.
"And you can barely live." She raised her fan. "I still win."
Something cold and sharp pierced through my torso from behind.
I looked down.
The blade tip extended from my chest, wet and red.
On the other side of it also impaled, eyes wide, coughing was Pristilia.
One thrust. Through me. Through her.
I turned my head slowly, already knowing.
Alec stood behind me, both hands on the hilt, his face carrying an expression I had never seen on him before something past grief, past rage, something that had gone very quiet and very decided.
His hands were still bleeding from where he had bitten them.
"...Alec," I said. My voice came out wrong. "Why."
He laughed. The same broken hollow sound from before, but colder now. Settled.
"Why?" he repeated. "Because nobles are all the same. Every single one. Sinful. Arrogant. Wrapping cruelty in the language of duty and destiny and calling it leadership."
His eyes moved to me. "You seemed different. I wanted you to be different."
"Alec." I reached for him. My arm barely moved. "I'm not your enemy."
"Not your enemy," he said, very quietly. "That's what they all say. Right up until they aren't around anymore and my uncle is dying on a cottage floor because of something that started with your family's politics."
He ripped the sword free.
I collapsed.
The ground hit me sideways, and I lay there watching the sky tilt at a wrong angle, blood pooling warm and dark beneath me.
Pristilia fell to her knees nearby, one hand pressed to the wound, gasping between clenched teeth.
"You peasant," she hissed.
"After everything biting the hand that--"
"We always bite back," Alec said. His voice had gone very soft. Almost gentle. "That's what you never understand. You sin, and you sin, and you sin, and eventually someone who has nothing left to lose picks up a sword."
He looked down at me. "We're always the ones who pay for it."
He raised the blade again.
For me.
The light caught the edge of it.
"That's enough."
The voice arrived like a door closing sharp, cold, carrying the specific quality of someone who does not repeat themselves.
My eyes moved toward it.
Or tried to.
My consciousness had other ideas.
The sky blurred. The sounds went soft and distant. The pain all of it, the hands, the stomach, the chest faded into something almost peaceful, the way a storm sounds from inside a room with the windows shut.
If only the writer of my story had seen fit to give me a better fate.
The thought drifted through me like smoke.
Then the darkness finished arriving.
And I let it.