Kyle lay on the ash-floor of his own sundered realm in the wreckage of his first armour.
It had surfaced from his skin during the long duel — drawn up out of him by the realm in its desperation to defend its prince — and it had manifested in the shape of the thing he truly was beneath the patrician damask and the polished boots: a dark plated carapace the colour of dried blood and colder iron, ribbed and angular and predatory, fanged shoulder-pauldrons flaring upward from his collarbones, a high-pointed crown of the sa black-red tal rising jagged from his brow, his forearms gauntleted in curving blades that echoed the cruel architecture of bat-wings, his calves sheathed in greaves whose edges were themselves weapons.
A vampire-progenitor’s regalia — summoned from his own flesh, lived in for longer than kingdoms.
The armour was now a grave.
Every cut Phei had opened on him remained open.
The long diagonal gash across his chest, drawn with the Void-Ice dagger sowhere in the middle of the duel — still unhealed, still weeping arterial red into the hollows of the cuirass, the frost Phei had left along its edges refusing to yield the flesh back to repair.
The bone-deep furrows down both biceps where Phei had carved him open beneath the pauldrons — still weeping. The line across the small of his back where Phei had did it so fast, falling around him to dodge only to rise behind him and opened the lumbar.
Both outer thighs, drawn deep.
The long brutal score across the lower back where the spine had shown through white.
All of them remained as they had been drawn — the Void-Ice edges holding the wounds ajar, the red energy that should have re-knit the tissue guttering at the margins without purpose, without direction, without a realm intact enough to drive the repair.
Kyle’s instantaneous regeneration — the apex trait of his race that had allowed him to walk into battlefields and walk out of them laughing — was now a pipe dream.
The Cosmic Dragon had rendered it inert.
Every wound Phei had dealt him stayed dealt, and stayed open, and wept steadily onto the shattered realm beneath his ruined armour.
That was the worst of it.
Not the pain. Not the humiliation. Not the cosmic certainty that he had lost during this fight that has lasted more than he could rember.
The non-healing.
He could feel the wounds refusing to close. Could feel his body and energy trying, at the edge of each cut, to reach across the gap and rebuild — and failing, and failing, and failing, the Void-frost holding the wound edges apart with an authority his own flesh could not overrule.
For a creature whose body had been a closed and perfected circuit since the beginning of recorded ti, the experience was closer to torture than any rely physical injury could ever have been.
Phei stood perhaps ten paces off, unhurried, watching him.
His athyst eyes had the patient boredom of a man inspecting at.
"Pathetic," he said, to no one in particular.
The word was spoken softly — almost kindly — and the realm heard it. A ripple moved outward from his boots across the shattered ash-floor in a slow ring of beckonent towards Kye, and wherever the ring passed, the remaining bone-drifts shivered in quiet surrender.
Phei took one step forward.
And was already beside Kyle in a single breath with his dagger already in his raised right hand, the blade already growing.
The Void-Ice dagger lengthened in his grip — eight inches of blade becoming fourteen, then eighteen, then twenty-two, the tal extruding forward out of its own tip in a slow deathly exhalation, the violet-white edge acquiring a new glow that was not violet at all.
A deep clean sepulchral white, the cold of a thing that had never needed sunlight and had forgotten sunlight existed.
The blade’s length acquired a faint lambent halo along its edge — the Void asserting itself, broadening, the weapon rembering that it was not a dagger at all but a promise the Cosmic Dragon had made to itself years ago and was now, finally, permitted to keep.
Phei looked down at the armoured chest.
Then drew the blade in one long diagonal downward from the left pauldron to the right floating rib.
The armour parted.
The carapace that had turned away before a blade that was not a blade but a conceptual refusal of the armour’s right to exist.
Beneath the separated carapace, Kyle’s bare chest ca into view — pale, muscled, already scored and unhealed from the earlier wounds — and the dagger continued through the flesh beneath as though flesh and armour were the sa material and both had been adequately asked to yield.
Phei crossed the first line with the second.
Upper-right pauldron down to lower-left floating rib.
A great clean X carved into Kyle through his own regalia, the edges of the cuts already blackening into Void-frost before Phei’s hand had finished its arc. The cry Kyle wished to release never reached his throat. Phei had not given it to him. The Void-frost was sealing Kyle’s scream into his chest along with the blood.
Phei’s left hand ca up.
Punched through the X.
The fist went into Kyle’s chest past the cut armour, past the opened flesh, past the ribcage that had been pre-weakened by the earlier blows and that now gave like kindling under Phei’s wrist — and Phei’s fingers found the hot wet obscene beating of a vampire-progenitor’s heart.
He closed his hand around it.
And lifted.
Kyle’s entire armoured body rose from the ash-floor as Phei straightened his arm, suspended now from the single point of contact inside his own ribcage.
His black-red greaves dangling in the air, his gauntleted arms hanging slack at his sides, his crowned head lolling forward, the blood from the X flowing down his cuirass in two long parallel rivers that did not drip because the Void-frost was freezing each drop before it could fall.
Phei raised him higher.
Until Kyle hung above him at full arm’s length.
Until Phei could look upward into the one still-functional wine-red eye.
And smile.
"Do you know," Phei said, voice conversational, almost tender, "what the worst disadvantage a vampire-progenitor can ever have in a fight with ?"
Kyle could not answer.
"It’s a beating heart. FOOL!"
Inside the chest cavity, Phei’s closed fist began to tighten — and along with the tightening ca the Void-Ice. Slow. Patient. The cold creeping outward from Phei’s palm into the hot wet muscle it was holding, frost crystallising along the ventricles, the pulse stuttering against the expanding cold, the whole great pounding engine of an ancient being’s life beginning to slow.
"All that power, Kyle. All those centuries of bloodline powers and what you’re. All that cosmic power. And in the end, you still carry the sa weakness your pathetic unawakened human form carries. A soft wet pumping thing in the middle of your chest that all your progenitor glory doesn’t requires.
"You never ascended past it. None of you did. You still walking around with your mortal liabilities that your soul pretends not to notice."
The heart in his fist was a white-black stone now.
Void-Ice had consud it.
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