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Chapter Text

She shows up when the sun is as close as it ever gets to directly overhead, because she isn't stupid, though it would have been smarter to pick a spot without so many trees or other tall objects. On that note, it would have been smarter to pick just about any spot in the Tiers other than Ashweald, but, to be fair, there's no way she could know that. Could she? It's a strange coincidence, but those do happen sometimes.

He could almost believe she just thought it would be a nice place to die. She's always liked wild things and open spaces, and she's never minded fire damage. There's even music to suit the ambiance, the flute-like whistles of songbirds accompanied by the baritone voice of a lone crow who's about to have a very good day. But Mark isn't gullible enough to take this for the straightforward suicide her missive made it sound like.

She starts talking before he shows himself, probably because she knows she won't get much chance once he does. "I understand if you have to take my head," she says, her eyes darting between pools of shadow at the bases of the trees, lingering on each one for just a moment. "But could you deliver the rest of my body to my Beastwoman friend? And not kill her if she makes a swipe at you, please. You know how it is." It could be an attempt at setting up vengeance from beyond the grave, but, knowing her, she might really care a lot about her friend getting to eat her remains. Or it could be more flirting to try to lower his guard. Not that any of those possibilities preclude the others. If she really is the same sort of creature as Kyros, then she ought to be at least that capable of working multiple angles.

He separates his shape from the darkness, deciding to play fair by emerging in front of her and at a few meters distance. He doesn't need to startle her to bring out her fear.

To her credit—and to his own credit as her mentor—she doesn't flinch when she sees him. But she hefts her shield just a little too quickly, raises it a bit too high when there's nothing yet to guard against, and the muscles in her left arm ripple with both effort and nerves.

She doesn't draw the sword at her waist, nor any of the knives he's sure she has hidden somewhere. Her right hand remains empty, hanging at her side, fingers twitching wildly. That, Mark knows, isn't nerves. She's readying sigils. It's probably smart of her to stick to magic, considering he taught her most of what she knows about weaponry, but a few new tricks won't be enough to keep his daggers from her heart.

"No promises," he tells her, "but I'll see what I can do. They say Archons don't usually leave bodies, but 'they' don't know much about how the young ones die." He leaves unsaid who does know. Odds are good she's already figured that part out.

She stares into his eyes like she's trying to hold his gaze away from what her spell-signing hand is doing. It's a pleasant enough view that he lets her. The kid is no beauty, but her expressions are always fun to watch. "What about you? Any requests for if the unthinkable should come to pass?" she asks.

Bleden Mark sneers. "Don't be absurd."

"Sorry, I don't think I can swing that one," she ripostes with a smile.

All right, that's pretty funny. Mostly because she really, really can't. She's been a walking absurdity from the day he met her, and he suspects she'll find some way to keep acting ridiculous right up to her final moments screaming beneath his blades or choking on his shadows.

As though to confirm that thought, she bows her head just enough that she's looking up at him through her lashes and says, "So. Level with me here. Do you really like my eyes so very much, or were all those wonderfully specific threats nothing but a feint?"

"Why don't you have at me and find out?" Because she's stalling while she lays down cantrips, obviously. Already there's a slight silver glow around her limbs and the telltale blur of illusion magic at the edges of her silhouette. When the fight starts, she's going to be faster than usual and a bit tricky to aim for. None of that should be a problem, and he does enjoy the chance to tease. "Didn't I tell you to meet me with your blade drawn?"

"Yes, yes. Blades drawn, no crying, no begging." She rolls her eyes, like she isn't terrified at all, then goes right back to smiling at him. "Is there anything you would like to hear from me?"

"Now you're laying it on so thick that you're embarrassing yourself. Not that that isn't fun for me too."

"Since you're the one who taught me, shouldn't that mean I'm embarrassing you as well?" Her smile frays at the edges, revealing just a bit more of her teeth than could be considered friendly.

"Hm..." He pretends to consider it for all of half a second. "No. No, it should not. You can't blame me for everything, kid. I've used seduction as much as the next assassin, but it's not exactly part of my curriculum."

"Isn't it?" she asks in a way that sounds like it's meant to be pointed, and her expression unravels into a full-on snarl. "You are many years too late to go back to playing the packfather." That's not what he's doing at all, nor is it anything he ever did. She saw what she wanted to see, and that's on her. But why bother to argue when she's about to die? She can carry her precious anger all the way to the grave.

"There you are," he says to her true face. "Let's end this."

She hurls a fireball at him. It doesn't come anywhere close to striking him before he dives down and spreads himself thin over the ground. He feels a twinge of burning discomfort as it passes above him—more from the light it casts than from the heat—but he jumps to the shadow of the next tree over and emerges none the worse for wear. The kid whirls around on her heels until she spots him, then roars and tries to pin him with a javelin of ice, which of course he dodges even more easily.

If he had any doubts before, now he knows: she thinks this is a real duel and not a less-than-orthodox execution. She's so young and stupid that it's infectious. She never learned to live within the cage, no matter how he tried to teach her, and now here he is overstepping his own bounds just to see her off. Tunon will have to find some way to excuse him, because how could he have resisted? How could he have risked letting someone else get to her first? She's all his, the Archon of the Tiers. Archon of Edicts, to the blasphemous. She's probably the closest he'll ever get to a second shot at...

Even letting himself whisper it in his own head makes him feel more dangerous than he's been in lifetimes.

—

Kids never understand reality until it's stabbing them in the face.

Everyone in the Court knows what Bleden Mark's survival courses are like, but the kids who take them don't really know. Deep down, they believe it's a game, and none of them expect to lose. The first death is always an interesting test of their resolve.

This one's something Tunon plucked from a disbanded guild. He's clearly built up some endurance since he left behind the cushy scholarly lifestyle, but not nearly enough for being hunted through the woods at dusk. He stumbles and trips, flags and doubles over panting, takes longer to right himself or catch his breath than he can afford. Mark gives two free warnings, which is more than anyone gets in the real world. The third warning accompanies a throwing knife aimed at the gut, and the kid fails to dodge.

The boy's hands grab at the wound, moving so thoughtlessly that he cuts his own fingers on the blade sticking out. He's much slower to look down, like he thinks it won't be real as long as he doesn't see it, and there's such shock in his eyes when he finally does. He really is a child, older than fifteen but still in his second decade of existence, just like all the students here. Awfully young to die, but then again, who isn't?

The kid starts to sink to his knees, but Mark jumps to the shadow at his back and catches him, hooking an arm under his shoulder and reaching up to grab his chin. He pulls the boy in close and forces his head back to expose his throat and clamp his mouth shut. The kid flails his arms out behind him, slapping and clawing at Mark's sides, but the way he hits, it might as well be bug bites. Mark retrieves his knife with his free hand, drawing it roughly from its gory sheath, and the kid stops struggling to focus on holding his guts in.

Going against his nature, Mark strides directly into one of the few beams of light that still penetrate the forest as the sun sets, dragging his catch with him. "Eyes over here!" he calls. The four survivors, spread out as they are through the clearing where they've been training, all jump at the sound of his voice and snap their attention toward him. He pauses to smile at each of them in turn before continuing, "It's time for a practical demonstration. The rest of you can relax for the night." Usually having an audience is annoying at best, but there's something special about the way his students stare up at him in moments like this, their fear and awe such a pure distillation of the power that makes him an Archon.

"Let's start with the obvious." He touches the knife against the side of the kid's neck and feels him tense up in spite of how limp the hemorrhaging has already left him. "Right here, where you would feel for a pulse? To make it stop, you're going to want to cut just a little bit deeper than this." A flick of the blade draws a line of blood that starts off thin, then burgeons and drips to the boy's shoulder. His jaw presses sharply into the hand holding his mouth closed, but his scream remains stifled. One of the onlookers gasps out a louder sound of horror than the kid being cut can force through his own teeth.

Bleden Mark drags his knife around to the hollow of his victim's throat. "Windpipe. It's a broad, soft target, but don't let that fool you. If you want to kill, make sure you get all the way in there." He carves a deeper gash this time, not just slicing through skin, but nicking the vital flesh beneath and severing some of the muscle at the edges. The pressure he's been putting on the kid's jaw feels suddenly unresisted, and when he lets go of it, the kid's head lolls forward, seemingly lifeless. Yet, he's still breathing.

"Last one on the neck is right here at the back, where the skull meets the spine." He flips his knife to a reverse grip and holds it hovering above the spot in question. "Works the same as decapitation, but with a lot less mess." As though to end the show with a flourish, he lifts the blade high before plunging it down—whoever it was that gasped earlier makes another interesting sound—but slows his hand at the last moment and instead leaves one more fatal target marked with a survivably shallow cut.

There are two reasons he draws things out like this for his courses. Three reasons if he's honest, since it'd be a lie to say he isn't having fun. The warm blood wetting his hands feels a welcome balm against the chill, dry air of the Northwestern evening, and his own blood buzzes with slightly less adrenaline than it takes to make him twitchy. It's just some kid who overestimated his own potential, not an Archon, not even a full-fledged Fatebinder, but the upside of that is he doesn't need to work quickly for the sake of his own safety. That said, there are two reasons he would give if Tunon were to ask, and the first is that sometimes pushing his students to the edge makes them find a way to surprise him.

Sometimes, but not usually, and not this time. There's clearly no fight left in this sack of meat and bones. Mark drops him like the dead weight he is, and he hits the ground face-first. Once his head's lying level with his floundering heart, he regains just enough consciousness to squirm and moan about it, but squirming and moaning is all that he does.

The second reason has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the kids who can still pretend they matter. Bleden Mark turns his attention to them. A convict who's cut plenty of purse strings but apparently not enough throats stands doubled over with one hand pressed to her mouth and the other clutching at her stomach. That would be the noisy one, then. Maybe the dying kid was her friend—if so, bad idea to play this game with him—or maybe she's just realized that she's next. Two other students hold themselves tall and stiff like good little soldiers at attention. But then there's the Beast kid. She stares fixedly at the soon-to-be corpse, and though Mark sees a healthy amount of fear in those wide, dark eyes of hers, he also sees fascination. And a familiar hunger.

He finds himself staring at her when he says, "So, who wants to finish this?"

One of the soldiers begins to step forward, his expression grim, his movements heavy and deliberate, less like an executioner than a man condemned. He stops when the Beast kid darts out in front of him. She moves like someone who wants something. In little more than an instant, she's standing directly over her doomed coursemate, still staring. It takes her more apparent effort to tear her gaze away and look up at her instructor, but she manages it, and her eyes lock on the bloodied knife he's holding. She reaches out her hand in a wordless request.

"Not for this first round, kid," Mark tells her. He wipes the blade dry on one of his trouser legs, then slides it back into his bandolier. Looking confused, the girl starts to withdraw her hand, but he stops her by grabbing hold of it. She flinches at his touch, making him laugh. "Relax. I already said you get to live another day. Though I can't fault your instincts." He crouches down and tugs on her arm. "Follow my lead. You'll get it soon enough." She kneels alongside him, wary but obedient.

He guides her hand to the dying kid's face, then brushes her fingers with his own to coax her into gripping down. The boy mumbles something that sounds like, "Please," but whether that's supposed to mean please don't or please hurry is anyone's guess.

The Beast kid gets the idea and grabs the other side of the boy's head with her free hand. Mark silently adjusts the position of that one too. Then he lays his hands over hers and gives a small jerk to demonstrate the correct angle. "Make sure to break the spine right at the point I showed you," he says, "or you'll have someone paralyzed but still able to scream." With that bit of advice dispensed, he releases his hold and sits back to watch her work.

The first try fails utterly. Her movement is wild and inefficient, and her composure crumples when she hits resistance. The boy whimpers as his head slips from her grasp and thumps against the ground.

Mark seizes her wrists and insistently moves her hands back into place. "The trick is to keep twisting until you hear the snap," he tells her.

"I know that!" It's the first he's heard her speak all evening. She sounds adorably indignant. "I have killed many rabbits."

He bursts into unrestrained laughter. "Those are... a lot smaller, kid. For one thing."

"So were my hands at the time."

"What are you waiting for, then?" he teases. "If you're such an expert, show me."

The Beast kid starts breathing deep and fast, like she's trying to puff herself up. She clamps her hands down tight on her victim's head and twists again. Yet again she is unable to finish the job in one movement, but this time she doesn't give up. The boy whines at the strain, and she roars over him to drown out the pitiful sound, but nothing drowns out the final, satisfying crack.

The body convulses and then lies still. The girl twitches almost as violently and then continues twitching, unable to shake off the tension even as she shouts from the depths of her lungs and claws at the leather armor over her chest. Just when it looks like she's starting to calm down, her eyes widen as though with some sudden realization, and instead she begins clawing even more feverishly at an unguarded stretch of skin on her arm.

"What's all that about, kid?" At the sound of his voice, she startles and seems to snap out of her frenzy. She shoves her arms behind her back and glares at him with a look of silent challenge, like he caught her doing something she shouldn't and she's daring him to say so. Instead, he grins at her and says, "If you want to bleed, just be patient. You're stuck out here with me for a while yet."

"Blood is not what matters." She winces and clenches her jaw shut like she regrets blurting that out. Her eyes flick down from his face to his chest—or, more likely, to the knives in the bandoliers strung across it—then dart off to the side like she's actively trying not to stare. She is not subtle, which makes it all the more interesting that he can't quite get a handle on her.

"Pain, then?" he guesses. Her only response is another silent glare. "Fine. Keep your secrets. But now, I have a secret I will divulge to you. A rare honor, you realize." He lays a hand on the back of her neck to draw her toward him—gently at first, but when she resists, he jabs the knuckle of his thumb into the juncture between her spine and skull. After all that just happened, the threat is inescapably plain. She shudders, her skin rising into gooseflesh against his palm, and concedes to lean forward so he can whisper in her ear.

She smells like sweat and pine sap, not much different from anyone else he's ever taken out into the woods and toyed with for a while. He wonders, idly, what more a Beastman might be able to pick up.

"You are my favorite of this group," he tells her. He waits for a beat, feeling her shiver at the brush of his breath against her ear and hoping she at least partly enjoys it, before he pulls the rug out. "That's not the secret. The others can already tell. Can you feel their eyes on your back? They hate you, and now you've given them an excuse for hating you. They're going to pretend that what you just did means you deserve to survive less than they do. Perhaps you're thinking that makes no sense, and it really doesn't, but most people aren't very honest with themselves. They can't touch me, so they will take their fear and frustration out on you. Don't give them the satisfaction. And try not to do anything that could slow you down needlessly." He pulls away to watch her face as he concludes, "I am telling you this because I would prefer that you not die stupidly. Understand?"

The kid looks shaken, but her expression quickly settles into one of resolve. She nods solemnly and says, "I understand." Then she headbutts him.

She's fast enough that he doesn't see it coming, which is impressive, but at the cost of aim. She misses crumpling his nose and instead slams her skull into his cheekbone. The way she reels back dazedly, he suspects she got herself worse than she got him, but he won't deny that she got him.

"Nice one," he tells her, grinning wide enough to feel the stretch of it in the bruise forming on his face. "That actually hurt a little. But this is going to hurt more." He moves his hand on her neck around to the front of her throat and squeezes the breath from her as he shoves her onto her back.

The kid thrashes and growls and snaps her teeth at him, but goes suddenly still when he straddles her to keep her from rolling or kicking. He sets her off again by shifting his weight to the hand on her throat. She pries at his fingers; scratches shallow trails of stinging heat down his arms; even bucks up against him, shameless in her desperation to stop him crushing her windpipe. He waits until her furor starts to die, half-suffocated, then with his free hand draws a clean knife from his bandolier and twirls it above her face. Her eyes, though already falling unfocused, widen as they struggle to track the whirling flashes of bronze—until she forces them shut. That's no fun.

He brings the point down on the swell of her cheek just beneath her eye, the same place she left a bruise on him, and presses the blade in slowly, until it hits bone. Her hands tighten just as slowly around his wrist, less like she's still trying to free her neck and more like she's clinging to the only thing within reach. Blood wells up both where he's cutting her and where she's bitten halfway through her own lip to keep from screaming, then flows along the contours of her face until she's practically got her own red paint-mask. A pool of it collects over the eye nearest the wound, so the kid keeps that one closed tight even as she opens the other one and glares up at him as though to say, What's taking you so long?

"I want to see how you react," he explains, then slashes her face open all the way to her ear.

With the blade out from under her skin, she finally lets herself scream. At first it's a breathless wail broken up by gasping for air, but once he lets go of her throat, it crescendos into a roar of pain and rage. She presses one hand to her wound, but with the other—even after all that—she takes a swing at his head. Fortunately for her, it's a lot slower and clumsier than her earlier attack. He has no difficulty dodging it so he won't have to punish her again.

Before she can try anything else, he melts into shadow and reshapes himself on his feet and beyond her reach. He could just stand up like a normal person, but he doesn't have to, because he isn't one. The way the kid's behaving, she could use a reminder.

While he has the breathing room, he takes stock of his audience. The thief with the weak stomach has collapsed to her knees and begun crying openly. Either she'll sleep it off and shape up, or she'll pay the price tomorrow. The other two just stand there like they're not sure what to do with themselves and are trying very, very hard to do nothing notable at all. None of them seem to be enjoying the show.

He wonders whether the Beast kid intentionally got herself hurt to make them pity her instead of hating her. If so, that was a hilariously dumb idea for multiple reasons. First, he doesn't really know that they hate her. It's less that he's already gotten a thorough read on them, and more that he's done this enough times to understand how it tends to go. Second, his own good graces are worth far more than theirs. What made the kid so sure he wouldn't kill her on the spot? Yes, he has repeatedly said he's done killing for the night, and yes, he did just imply he would rather keep her alive. But what kind of person trusts that?

He hears a strange sound at his feet and turns his gaze back down to the kid, who prods at the gash in her cheek like she's trying to feel out its shape and hold it closed at the same time. There's the eeriest grin on her face, wide and toothy on one side and tight-lipped on the other, as though split down the middle between some wild, unconstrainable glee and the inhibiting physical reality of her injury. He didn't believe it at first, but the sound coming out of her is laughter.

His mind jumps back to her earlier attempt to damage herself, and something finally clicks. He pays enough attention to the Beast tribes to know when they produce an Archon, which is more than the attention required to notice that the way they view scars is complex. And not at all compatible with a cheap ploy for sympathy. Whatever the kid was trying to prove when she attacked him, she was proving it to herself first and foremost.

She's quite a sight, laid out in the twilit and red-dewed grass alongside the corpse she made. Its misaligned head lies turned toward her, its face drained pale, its eyes dull as stone, and meanwhile she's flushed and laughing and stubbornly vibrant even with a knife wound gushing through her fingers and Bleden Mark's bloody handprint on her throat.

There are so many things he wants to do to her. Many of them would be fatal, and therefore are unfortunately mutually exclusive. Far from all of them, though. Some of them probably wouldn't even cause injury.

When she sees him looking at her, she pulls her lips closed to cover her teeth, rolls her head to the side to pointedly break eye-contact, and reaches up to offer him the hand not glued to her face. He takes her wrist, clamping tight to feel her racing pulse thrum against his fingers, and hauls her to her feet. She sways a bit when he releases her, then grabs onto his own wrist to steady herself. He allows it, even encourages it by holding out his arm at a better angle for her to lean on, because why not? If she pulls another fast one, she's going right back on the ground.

She stares down at the body as she clings to him, her gaze intense but unreadable with her expression so mangled by pain and obscured by blood. "Was that your first kill?" he asks her.

"Not first. Biggest. I already told you." Her voice is muffled by her effort to avoid opening her mouth too wide and stretching the wound, but her annoyance comes through loud and clear.

"Oh, right. The rabbits." Apparently she still thinks that counts.

"And snakes. Many dangerous, venomous snakes." As funny as it is that she expects him to take that seriously, he has to give her credit for resilience. Most kids this green would be too wrecked to get indignant.

"Sure, kid. That's all very relevant to what Tunon wants from you." Then again, if she doesn't see any difference, maybe it really was halfway decent practice.

She glares at him, then wordlessly pulls away and slinks off toward the edge of the clearing.

"Where do you think you're going?" he calls after her.

"To find medicine," she calls back over her shoulder.

"Out in the woods?"

"Yes? Bog moss. Spider webs."

"Interesting." He was going to have her wash the wound with rotgut and cut bandages from the dead kid's clothes, but he's fine with seeing how her idea works and saving his drink. "Don't stray too far. I'll be watching you." While he doubts she's come all this way just to make a break for the wilderness now, there's no harm in reminding her that isn't an option. Besides, if she collapses from blood loss, he can retrieve her without anyone thinking he was paying attention out of concern for her well-being.

The sun sinks and the darkness spreads as he watches her leave. With night fallen, there's nowhere she can go that's more than a thought away.

The dead kid's blood has already gone cold and tacky against his skin, but hers remains warm. The bruise on his face aches and the scrapes on his arms sting, small sensations heightened by how awake to his own body he feels after the rush of violence. He could easily make himself whole by pulling the shadows in from around him, but why deprive himself like that? It's far more fun to play for keeps, and he has no reason not to when the stakes are this lopsided.

Chapter Text

"Aren't you going to kill me, or will you just keep running and hiding?" the Archon of the Tiers demands of the empty weald, sweeping her gaze back and forth as though trying not to let any of the surrounding shadows out of her sight for more than a split-second. When Bleden Mark laughs, the sound of it rises up from all of them at once. She tenses, coiled to strike but also wound up so tight that a touch more pressure might snap her.

"This is one way I could kill you," he says from behind her.

She flings out her spell-signing hand as she spins to face his taunt, filling the air with a wide spray of powder frost and knife-sharp icicles, but he's not there to get coated and minced. The ice that strikes the trees bursts into flame upon impact, which was a shocking and hilarious trick the first time he watched her pull it off, but that was spans ago and he's over it now. Ashweald has been through worse, and the same dark magic that preserved it while the Edict raged quickly snuffs these smaller fires.

"You'll tire out faster than I do," he continues, casting his voice through a shadow in a completely different direction.

This time she manages to whip around while he's still mid-sentence. The lights at her fingertips vanish as she catches on to his ruse, and she growls in frustration. "Coward!" she shouts, and he has to laugh again, because she's just so shameless.

"Kid, you've gone and cloaked yourself in an illusion spell. Come on." That simple observation tips her expression over from anger to mortification, which makes the whole thing funnier. "Sorry, was I not supposed to notice?"

"Shut up and strike at me already!"

"Oh, so now you'd rather fight than chat."

The kid picks an arbitrary shadow and glares at it.

In truth, he's been trying to figure out how her illusion works. Whenever she shoots off a spell, the fire or ice flies forth from a pace to one side or the other of where she appears to be. She's obviously staying close to her false image, but beyond that he's unsure of her location from one moment to the next. Attacking in her general direction until he hits her won't work, because she's good enough that she might hit him first, but Bleden Mark has other options. As he said, he could simply outlast her. He could also try something a lot more fun and even less fair.

He reaches for her shadow and finds his senses split over where it is. There's the darkness he can see through, and then there's the small patch of cold he can feel where the sun's rays are blocked from touching the ground. He jumps to and merges with the cold patch, and the darkness spreads to meet him. Above it, her image doubles and stretches so she appears to be in two places at once with a blur in between. His perception scrapes away at the illusion as he feels out her position through his bond with her shadow, until, suddenly, her spell shatters and there's only one of her.

While she's frozen in wide-eyed confusion over what just happened, he leaps out at her from the pool of darkness at her feet, daggers in both hands, black blades extended, and takes a swipe at gutting her. The kid reacts in time to bat away the leading blow with her shield, metal striking metal, and his whole arm rings with the harsh denial. She tries to twist aside to dodge the follow-up swing, but he, melded to her shadow, moves with her, the two of them indelibly connected. Leather armor parts against his blade like the skin it once was to some other creature, and her own skin splits beneath it—just barely, not enough to spill anything but a thin spatter of blood. Ablaze with adrenaline and desire, Mark imagines seizing her by the waist to pry the cut wide with his fingers and wring her till she's empty, but he grips his daggers tight and holds out for a real opportunity to tear her apart.

She slams her shield into him to try to shove him away, but there's no escape from her shadow. He stays rooted to the spot as the metal bulk strikes his chest hard enough to make his ribs ache, and the edge catches and splits his chin. In the next moment, the kid lurches backward as though struck, and her own chin bursts bloodily open. Through the pain and the viscous warmth dripping from his face, Bleden Mark laughs at the shock in her eyes as she realizes just how deep the arcane connection between them goes.

He lays into her while she's still reeling, his daggers a ravenous flurry slicing at her gut, at her chest, at her throat, but she pulls herself together enough to parry with her shield, and he succeeds only in nicking her arm as his blades glance off. His own arm remains unscathed. Much like the world at large—and like anyone who's survived in it for as long as he has—his powers are fundamentally unfair.

The fingers of the kid's right hand twitch and glow with some nascent spell. Mark makes no effort to stop her from casting. If she wants to test whether the bond also transfers magic injuries, she can learn the hard way that it does. Watching her burn her own hair off should be well worth getting singed a bit himself.

What hits him isn't fire. It burns even worse. His hair doesn't crackle, it almost instantly disintegrates, and suddenly he can't feel its weight, but he can feel his skin crisping and peeling away from his flesh, can smell blackening meat but can't smell smoke, can't see anything through eyes hot and almost crumblingly dry, his vision blotted out by light, his mind all but blotted out by pain so he can't focus enough to see through the shadows either, and what is the kid thinking why would she do this is she trying to kill them both?

He's actively burning only for one horribly elongated moment. Then he's blinded and painfully scorched but able to pull himself together enough to cast out his senses. He sees the kid wreathed in a soft, fuzzy glow that can't possibly be what he just felt. Did he hear her scream? Did he scream? The inside of his throat hurts, though not nearly as much as the outside.

The glow is moving, flowing toward her from his direction, and drawn along by its current are coils of something that looks like smoke but isn't, something misty and black. The swirling light and shadow press thin against her and then vanish as though absorbed. By the time he can clearly see her skin, she is unburned, patched back together with the substance she stole from him almost faster than she could be damaged.

Gravelight magic. Fuck Occulted Jade. Mark hopes she and her followers cannibalized each other and then starved to death.

The kid must have finally gotten tired of playing nice with her captive Tidecaster. Good for her, but why did she have to go and do it one of the few times he wasn't watching? He would have liked to see how she handled that.

She grins at him as he hunches over panting in agony, her smile like half a moon. Though he doesn't even catch the full force of it in his view from outside his body, he shudders with a faint reflection of the terror that seized him when the light of the real moon struck.

He has to keep himself composed. Her fingers are already busily tracing out another spell, and he doesn't need to be scared of that, but he also shouldn't let it hit him. Though he's dizzy from pain and giddy with the feeling of his heart thrashing against its cage like an animal trying to break free, he can't let himself get carried away. So what if the kid can do some things he didn't know about? That's cute and all, but what she doesn't know about him could fill the Vellum Citadel.

You mean the place I set on fire? he can imagine her saying if he were to voice that thought aloud.

He severs his bond to her shadow and dissolves back into darkness. Human bodies have so many interconnected parts that slow each other down when one gets damaged. Darkness can be dense and strong or pale and weak—right now he's definitely feeling a bit pale—but it isn't complicated.

He jumps away just as the kid calls down another bolt of Gravelight. "No! Get back here and dance with me!" she shouts without any apparent shame. Her knack for picking up bad influences is almost uncanny: first the Beastmen, then Bleden Mark himself, and now this Scarlet Chorus nonsense. He knows he shouldn't be surprised that she continued downhill, but he reserves the right to be disappointed.

On the other hand, she is really making him work for this kill. In that, at least, she hasn't disappointed him at all.

Though he can heal himself in probably under a minute, that's still longer than he wants to give the kid free rein to work enchantments. To keep her busy, he breaks off three little globs of himself and sends them jumping to the bases of three different trees, where they soak up the shadows and expand into frailer copies of his human form. The kid spins in place, unable to catch more than two of them at once in her field of view and obviously uneasy about it. She's seen him pull this trick before, but not enough to know much about how it works. Maybe she thinks it's an illusion and she's trying to figure out which one's real.

All three shadows pelt her with shards of darkness condensed into the shape of throwing knives. She blocks two of them with her shield, but the projectiles burst upon impact and nearly knock her off her feet. The third strikes her in the back, sticking for a moment in her leather armor and then blasting it open, exposing a swath of skin between her shoulder blades and a trickle of blood that starts to flow along the path of her spine.

Mark would appreciate the view more if stretching his senses this thin weren't such a headache. Three or four headaches, even. His doubles can't act on their own, because they're all just him. He doesn't have to consciously control all their movements—that would be impossible with this many at once—but he looks through them and points them in the right direction, and they attack like they're running on muscle memory. Limited though they are, their barrage keeps the kid too off-balance to draw sigils. He doesn't know if they'll be able to bring her down, but the more important thing is to buy himself some breathing room to put his skin back on right.

He jumps to the largest tree in the area, emerging semi-corporal, and leans back against it. The sparse branches above him provide only a thin web of shade, but in Ashweald darkness flows through the land itself. Normally he can't reach through solid objects, only across surfaces. Here, the wood of the trees is so steeped in shadow that he can send his senses through it and take a pull at the power stored within.

Something pulls back. Before he can begin to guess what, the black mist approximating his shoulders has been sucked into the tree. His substance mingles with the arcane reservoir, but it doesn't soothe his wounds; it burns him more.

Startled into panic and superstition, he hits upon the idea that the dead Beastwoman Archon has taken the kid's side. Don't, he thinks at the darkness. She's not some great avenger of your kith. You should see what she did to the Stonestalker Prima. But of course that doesn't slake the burning, because no one's there to hear him. Ashweald is a magical anomaly, but he can be damn sure it isn't haunted by a ghost with an ongoing consciousness and a will of her own, or else she would have taken a crack at him long ago.

He shoves off from the tree trunk, breaking free from the weald's fiery grasp by abandoning a chunk of his body. Weak though the shade of the branches may be, he huddles under them and drinks it in greedily. When he's not in the middle of a fight for his life, he's going to have to figure out what under Kyros' blazing sun that was, but right now he has more pressing concerns.

The shock distracted him from his doubles, and by the time he regains his focus, it's already too late for two of them. The kid took advantage of the disruption to complete a particularly elaborate sigil, and the beam of Gravelight that comes crashing down through the trees is so huge and bright that for a moment it almost looks like she's dropped the whole moon. The shadows in its path sizzle and then vanish from his perception. What remains of them drifts in eddies through the fading light to plaster over the kid's wounds, staunching her bleeding with a lacquer like black pearl. There's a kind of beauty to it, the holes he put in her filled with the pieces of him she burned, but for once Mark doesn't have time to sit back and admire her.

He leaves his body soaking in the shadows and takes full control of his one remaining double. Just as the kid turns to face it, it disperses and rematerializes under a tree off to her left. She spots it from the corner of her eye and moves fast enough to block the blade it flings at her. Mark sends it jumping to a different tree a few meters behind her, but either the kid hears the shush of displaced air as it takes shape, or else she just knows him too well. She spins on her heels and brings her shield to bear before he can even get off an attack. All the while, her right hand glows with the light of a gradually forming sigil. When his double again disperses, her fingers abruptly stop moving, like she's one stroke away from completing the spell and means to hold it in reserve.

Clearly knife-tossing is too slow. If he tries it again, she's going to blast him. Instead, he sends his double leaping up behind her from the shadow at her feet, a blade in each hand, too close on her heels for her to turn without slamming into him. The kid twitches at his sudden presence looming over her. There's a flash of light as the spell goes off, but whatever it is, it doesn't hit him.

He stabs two crystallized-shadow knives into her back, where she's been laid bare by the damage to her armor. He feels the rough scrape of bone as his blades sink between her ribs, feels a gurgling spring of blood running warmer than even the muggy, midday air—and then feels a sharp pain flare through where his guts would be if shadow doubles had guts.

The kid's shield shines brighter than bronze ought to, bright as Terratus' Grave. When Mark looks down, he sees that same brightness spilling from a dagger she's backhanded into him.

With a grunt of effort, the kid twists the blade, putting a gaping hole in his abdomen that the Gravelight fills and then spreads from. It devours him, disintegrating even his knives. Just before he's jolted back to his body, Mark feels the wounds in her back suck up his double's ashes to close themselves. Then he's watching her from a distance and a different angle, his semi-corporal form throbbing with both real and phantom pain, too disoriented to even try to stifle the laughter that tears its way out from his chest.

Did she intentionally lure him into reach while laying an enchantment on her weapons, or did she rework her spell at the last second and still manage to draw on him that quickly? Either way, she got him good.

The kid must hear him cackling, because she wheels around to face him and forces her buckling knees stiff and straight. She coughs up blood from her barely healed lungs, then gasps for air to replace what she lost through the holes in them, but all the while she keeps him pinned with a deathly glare.

"This is your idea of meeting as peers in open battle?" she asks.

She's already sheathed her dagger and started tracing more sigils. Mark readies himself to jump away and find another hiding spot where he can let the shade mend him, but the kid presses her signing hand to her own chest, and he recognizes the green glow of life magic. Apparently they both need a breather.

He imagines this fight stretching on for hours like the mythical Archons' duels of old, the shadows growing ever longer, until the darkness is thick enough to swallow her where she stands. Time is not on her side, so why should he rush things?

"Maybe you haven't noticed," he says, "but my gifts don't exactly lend themselves to honorable combat. You didn't expect me to hold anything back, did you?" Then, because he really is impressed with her, he adds, "We're both using everything we've got. That's an equality of sorts."

"I didn't use an Edict."

She sounds so matter-of-fact about it that he laughs out in shock. "A whole Edict just for me?" he says once he's collected himself. "I suppose I should be flattered you even considered that."

She shoots him her most withering look. "Yes, cursing an entire region to kill one Archon does seem excessive."

Mark winces inwardly at the reminder. It never would have been necessary if he weren't so useless against Cairn. Was his failure there part of the reason Kyros put him up on the chopping block alongside the problem children?

He forces those thoughts from his mind. Now is not the time to let the kid see him flinch. "Exactly," he says, trying to sound as though she's just picking up on the point he meant to make all along. "For you, the bar is so low you'd have to dig under it."

"You admit that so readily, yet you keep choosing her every time."

"I don't get a choice," he reminds her, though he really shouldn't have to.

Apparently he didn't have to, because she responds so quickly she must have been expecting it. "But if you did, you would still choose to kill me, yes?" He walked right into that one. Before he can credit her too much, though, she continues, "When was the last time Kyros made you do something you really didn't want to?"

She doesn't get it. Of course she doesn't get it. She's so young, and she's been granted such a long leash, and she's going to hang herself on it before she can learn any better. "Kid, you're a spoiled little shit and you haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about. Don't take that the wrong way. I know it's partly my own failing. But you might as well ask about the last time I took issue with the sun deciding to rise."

"Spoiled?!" she repeats as though she didn't hear anything after that. "How dare you—you, of all people? I have clawed my way to power through pain and indignity! Now I can blot out the sun with smoke and rains of ash!"

Bleden Mark has heard more such speeches than he can count. But pointing that out never convinces anyone mad enough to make one that things won't end any differently this time. He'll just have to show her.

He tries materializing fully and takes stock of the remaining damage. His skin feels raw and perilously thin, but at least he's not flayed open and oozing everywhere. His eyes don't work quite right, so he lets them stop being squishy, finicky organs and go back to being pools of darkness. With those, he can see just fine. His hair is uncomfortably short, but that's a personal problem, not something that could impede him in any way. He can fight like this.

The kid watches him warily, her signing hand frozen like she's torn between finishing up a healing spell or switching to attack. He grins at her and clicks his daggers together, drawing attention to the curve of their blades, then tilts them like he would crook his fingers to gesture her forward. She glances down dubiously at the web of shadows around his feet. Her caution is well founded; he could use that to snare her, though mainly he wants to stay where he is so he can keep soaking it in. He compromises by striding forward to the edge, where she won't have to step on it to meet him.

When still she hesitates, he says, "Didn't you want to dance? Go on then, Archon. Let's dance." The kid looks skeptical, and he can't blame her, but he really isn't trying to goad her into a trap. He just wants to keep things interesting. "You must know by now that tossing around fireballs is no way to win this. Wouldn't you like to see what happens if you stick my real guts with one of those awful moon-blades? Or would you rather wait for nightfall and see what happens then?"

Bleden Mark's students always seem to end up hating him, but they ought to give him more credit. It's a rare kind of mentor who would continue dispensing sound advice to a protege who's trying to kill him.

Maybe the kid finally realizes that's what he's doing, because she draws her sword—a blade nearly a meter long and gleaming so intensely that he can't tell whether the metal beneath the Gravelight is iron or bronze—and charges.

She takes a swing as she comes into range, but it glances so easily off the dagger he brings up to block it that he barely even feels it in his arm. Is she scared he'll vanish and send her stumbling forward into the shadows if she lays on too forcefully? If so, he can't fault her for being wary, only for thinking he has so few tricks that she can predict and guard against all of them. Her blade's reach is longer than his own, and he'll have to do something to draw her in close enough to cut, but he has a different tack in mind.

The shade he pulls in around him roils over his skin. Instead of absorbing it, he allows it to thicken as the kid crosses blades with him once more, twice more. She slips past his guard and nicks his side as he tries to lean out of the way, drawing blood that sizzles against incandescent metal and fills the air with the smell of butchery. The thin lash of pain only serves to spur him, and he parries her next blow, and the next, and the next—until finally he catches her sword just right against one of his daggers to make it glance down into the gap between the blades, and with a twist of his wrist he traps it there. Before she can pull it free, he strikes.

The darkness rises off of him in tendrils and surges forward. Loops of it coil around her sword arm and pull tight enough to let him feel how her muscles strain beneath her skin. The kid cries out in horror and smashes her shield against the strands to try to break them. Luckily for her, the Gravelight enchantment allows that to work. But then the next wave of tendrils splits before it crashes over her and grabs at her from all directions, snaring her throat and waist and thighs. The vines of darkness wither away to nothing wherever the magic's glow touches them, but her heavy bronze shield makes for a poor torch, and soon she's panting from the effort of swinging it fast and wide enough to keep all the shadows at bay.

She has given him the best fight he's had in ages, but she won't last much longer now. When he hears her struggling breath, he imagines drinking it into himself until her lungs go still. The darkness slavers to devour the warmth from her flesh and the gleam from her eyes. Most keenly of all, he hungers with an Archon's appetite for her story. Wild child, Fatebinder, Queenkiller, Firestarter, Archon of Edicts—and victim of Bleden Mark. She will end with him.

She tires enough that he feels the tension where their blades have interlocked go lax. With one quick jerk, he yanks her sword from her grip and sends it clattering off across the dirt. The shadows seize her right wrist before she can sign a spell or draw a knife, and he feints toward lopping off her now-empty hand. The kid moves her shield in a terrified rush, and his leading blow clangs against it, but she's exposed her whole left side to the follow-up.

He brings a twin-bladed dagger down on her shoulder. The edge of the first blade slashes open her leather armor, and the point of the second pierces her skin and bites into the muscle beneath. The young Archon howls in pain, and her shield-bearing arm goes uselessly limp.

Mark pulls down on the tendrils around her wrist, but she struggles against him and stays on her feet. She stops struggling when he presses his dagger in deeper and hooks the curve of it around her collar bone. She must feel how easily he could pry her chest wide open, because she yields to the tug of his blade and falls on her knees before him.

Her shield, dragged down by its own weight, pins her left hand to the ground. Her right hand's movement is restricted by the shadows' grip on her wrist, and her frantic attempts to sign out more spells don't seem to be getting anywhere. Mark considers cutting it off just to be safe, but that could make her bleed out faster than he wants. Instead, he sheathes the dagger not currently embedded in her and wraps his hand around hers, crushing her fingers against each other. The pulses throbbing in their palms meld together, his as quickened by exhilaration as hers is by fear.

While he has her, he asks, "What did you do to my trees?

"Your trees?" With her face contorted by pain and her voice reduced to a breathless rasp, he can't tell whether she's indignant or confused. It's possible she doesn't know what he's talking about. Archons this green seldom fully understand their own power, and her connection to Ashweald runs almost as deep as his own, if not deeper. This is part of the land upon which she proclaimed the Edict of Fire that she then broke and absorbed into herself. It might be reacting to her mere presence, or to her blood watering the roots or her magic striking the bark, or to any number of other provocations. Still, he decides to interpret her words as a challenge, because why shouldn't he? Even if he's mistaken, she's the one who will suffer for it.

"Fine. The dead Archon's trees." He wonders whether Kills-in-Shadow would happen to know that story. Could she be how the kid learned of Ashweald? "Call them whatever you like. I am not playing word games, Fatebinder."

"Archon, now," she insists between labored breaths.

He was hoping she'd respond like that. "What did I just say?" he asks, and bends her fingers back. It takes some effort with four of them bundled together, but after the first snap the resistance lessens, and the second snap comes more easily, and as the kid starts screaming, the last two fingers give at the same time with a combined SNAP loud enough to cut through her cries.

"No more weapons," he tells her once the screams have receded into a low whine. "And no more sigils. Have anything else for me, Archon?"

She spits on him. He gives it a moment to see whether it will burst into flames or something—he did ask—but all it does is stick wetly to his chest.

"Really? Am I meant to be upset by a little mess? I'm going to be scraping your blood out from under my nails for days."

"Am I meant... to be scared... of pain?" she counters, gasping between every few words. "You... ruined me for that... long ago."

He did teach her a bit about interrogation and resistance, both with her holding the knife and with her under it. The ultimate lesson there is that if you ever find yourself in a situation where it really matters, you've already fucked up. Anyone will break with enough pressure applied, but they might or might not break usefully. Technique doesn't enter into it much, and anyhow, you'll learn a lot more watching people from concealment or stealing their communications.

He still can't believe she wasted so much of her time letting the Voices fill her ears with bullshit. Nerat isn't a genius or an artist, he's an Archon. Things that would never work for anyone else mysteriously work for him, because that's what magic does.

None of that is worth thinking about now, Mark reminds himself. Now, she is his. He shifts his hand over her own, pressing their palms together and interlacing their fingers, and squeezes her shattered knuckles. She screams again—wordless, senseless, but that's what he expected. Much as he would like to wring some answers from her before she expires, he'll be satisfied just feeling her come apart slowly.

She wraps her thumb around his wrist and digs her nail into the skin on the back of his hand, clinging to him even as he hurts her and stubbornly trying to hurt him back. "Will talk about trees," she pants out. "Whisper. No voice. Come closer."

She's plotting to bite his ear off. She is adorable. "I can hear you just fine, kid. Right now, I'm as close at it gets." He lets the darkness drip from his hands and flow over her, not quite touching her skin as it coils down her right arm and wafts across the wound on her left shoulder. The two streams join around her neck and swell upward to surround the lower half of her head, drawing close enough to her mouth that they flicker with her breath. "Well? Whatever you have to say, you can say it to the shadows."

As he expected, she says nothing at all. Fear and hatred mingle in eyes glaring out just above the high water mark of the rippling darkness.

"What's that look for, hm? Think of it this way: I could be saving you from the Voices. Anything can be a mercy if the alternative is worse, right? That's what you've been going around telling everyone since you fell in with the Chorus. Or were you lying?" With a burning little thrill, he realizes he is sincerely angry about that. Who would have thought he still had it in him?

"You think... you're so honest!" The rage in her voice rings clear even through the pain. "Said you would help. Only wanted to hurt." He did help her. Not in all of the ways she wanted, but he never promised her more than he could give, and he certainly never implied that what he gave would come for free. "Wanted it so bad... I almost had you. Knew you couldn't resist... getting me alone." It's hilarious that she's still overestimating how much of a chance she stood. "Never could resist. Killed four other kids... just for... private lessons." She's overstating that, too. It's not as though he planned to make her the sole survivor. Undoubtedly his personal biases affected the outcome, but that's unavoidable when you have power. Only the most tedious people in the world believe they can make their desires stop mattering by hiding them behind a mask.

"We already had this argument a long time ago," he reminds her. "I won." Before she can contradict him, he closes the shadows around her.

He sinks around the edges of his dagger into her shoulder wound, chilling her from beneath her twitching muscles and within her severed veins. He laps across her skin and tastes the grit of salt and iron. Rough lines of scar tissue mar the softness of her flesh, more of them every year, but he can still pick out the ones he left on her. He lashes those open first (you were marked for me from the start, I remember, and I know you can't forget) then the others (everything you ever were will be taken and consumed by the way you end) and decorates her body with thin cascades of blood. When she screams, he seeps into her mouth. He could press on into her lungs and burst them, or shred them, or just fill them until there's no room for breath, but for now he ventures no deeper than a kiss.

With the thinnest tendrils of his embrace, he climbs her cheeks to tease at the corners of her eyes and slip beneath the lids. Tears leak out around his touch. He told her not to cry when he warned her this would happen, but he was setting her up to fail and he knew it. At this point, it's likely a physical reaction, something she can't help any more than she can stop herself from bleeding.

He could pop out her eyes and slash them apart while they hang from the nerves, or simply crush them in their sockets. He hasn't decided yet. Before he does either, he pulls just enough of his awareness back into his solid form to speak. "I am about to make you bleed a lot. This could be your last chance to talk. If you insist on staying tight-lipped till you die, I might just take my questions to your 'pack'."

Though she's limp and trembling in his grasp, that gets a reaction. He can feel her breath catch and her mouth go dry. It's promising enough that he decides to try one more push.

"Your Beastwoman 'friend' has an interesting name, doesn't she?" he asks with a smirk.

A huff of steam billows from her nose. That would almost make sense if they were up North, except for how it scalds him where it mixes with his shadows.

"Die in a fire," she commands. Before he can figure out what's off with her voice, Ashweald ignites around him.

The fires rise high enough to catch his hair. He tries to snuff them out, but they overpower his shadows and take root in his scalp. Falling embers shower his shoulders and set alight his bandoliers with whips of flame that lick at his bare chest and back. He writhes. The kid slips from his hold on her, and he can't find her again by touch or by sight, because both senses are overwhelmed with burning.

There's nowhere he can jump. He reaches and reaches, but the shadows in all directions twist and flicker like the flames that cast them. His vision twists and flickers with them, enough that it would make him dizzy if he weren't already dizzied sick by heat and pain.

It's not the worst pain he's ever felt. It's something else entirely. When Kyros tortured him with her magic, he could sense it wouldn't kill him, no matter how much he wished it would. She wanted him alive and suffering. The new Archon of Edicts wants him ended.

Bleden Mark's life has been too damn long to flash before his eyes, but all that really matters now is the last couple decades.