[Madikai Molotov.]
It was a world of shuddering fiction and ragged reality, a place without a clear start or end.
Time folded over itself and memory bled into moment until nothing held a true edge.
Every strike felt like a rumor; every wound landed as if on someone else.
His blade came from all directions and from nowhere, and while I felt the wounds.
I felt no force, only the terrible fact that everything he did was real and nothing I did mattered.
I hate abilities like that. It is hypocritical to say so, since I traffic in tricks of my own, but hate it I did.
Calista bent truth; she could name a thing and make the world obey.
His Regalia was crueller still: a collapsing, intimate logic that turned perception against the perceiver.
To beat such a thing you needed a mirror as perfect as a knife.
He was stronger than I wanted to admit.
Stronger than Malachi, stronger than the arrogance that puffed up in my chest when I imagined myself immortal.
The truth gnawed at me and I rejected it at once because acceptance would mean I had to go further than promise allowed.
I would have to betray everything I swore.
As his blade fell again, Jaqnerats smiled. It felt like the world deciding my end. I could live with death.
Dying was a thing I could calculate for, could accept. But Aubrey would die too.
That possibility, their warmth snuffed because of me, was a cruelty I could not stomach. It twisted me into action.
"Mad God: Sekhmet!" I screamed.
The walls of his inner world shattered like glass.
Delusions sloughed off like old skin. Jaqnerats' eyes widened as his blade, for the first time in that collapsing space, pierced himself.
The event shook his kingdom, and shook his very being.
"Damn it, you were holding back," he spat, madness leaking from the places that had once been sane.
His eyes wept something like black blood.
I planted my hand and called my Mythical Beast into being.
A wolf born not of fur but of coagulated crimson and steam, fangs like serrated moons, rose up behind me.
It was twice the size of any ordinary beast, its howl a lunatic song that twisted the air.
It bit down on his shoulder with the hunger of famine, ripping at the seam of his armor and the seam of his mind.
He screamed, and a fissure opened in his inner world.
"To tell you the truth," I said to the echoing dark, to the man and to myself.
"I hate myself. I am cruel, ruthless, without the moral bones of a saint."
I fell to the ground as if the confession had weight. "Not that it matters," I breathed. "Morality is a blindfold you tie on so you can sleep."
He sneered with contempt. "That is the mindset of a madman," he spat, as if naming me could make me smaller. "Although it suits you."
I smiled, bitter and small. "I know. I'm heartless. That's exactly why I'm furious. I broke my vow for something stupid."
I pressed my hand to my chest and felt the thrum of something soft inside my ribs. "Don't laugh, but I think it's love."
Jaqnerats laughed, a sound edged with blood. "We all love, you foolish thing," he said, mockery softening into a strange pity.
"You betrayed yourself for it."
He rose then, that awful serenity that comes when a monster believes the end is near.
"Before I die," he murmured, voice thin, "I will tell you names you cannot forget."
He leaned forward, and as if the world obeyed the theater of his surrender, he began to fade.
"From a fractured world, from fire and ruin." He rasped.
" A woman rose, born of flame and iron. Jeanne d'Arc… born in flame, slaughtered in flame."
His shape dissolved like soot on his breath, and the last of his words unfolded into nothing.
The inner world cracked open, and I tumbled back into the real sand, knees dragging.
Aubrey was there in an instant, arms under me, pressing me up and carrying me without question.
"Madikai," she said, breathless and fierce, "we've fought enough. Come on. Run."
Heat roared through me then like a living thing. It shouldn't have been possible, this kind of heat so close to the dawn, but it was.
My chest cleaved with a pain like a spike. My throat tightened as if by a rope. I was being executed.
Her face blurred with movement and then with pain. Aubrey burned.
Flame licked her skin like a jealous thing, bright and holy and cold in the same bite. I had no time to scream.
The voice that spoke above the blaze was not human; it rang with a merciless purity that made my marrow ache.
"The rats who deny any will beyond their own," the voice intoned, its cadence both sermon and sentence.
"These have been judged. God has gifted me power, born and reborn in flame."
Aubrey's eyes found mine through the searing light.
For a single, impossible second I saw everything, her constellations of freckles, the way she tucked hair behind her ear, the private small laugh she kept for dawn, and then the flame took her like a vow.
She did not scream. Her mouth made a small sound, half an apology, half a prayer, and the world tasted of iron and ash.
I tried to move toward her, to wrench the fire away, but my limbs were lead and the heat braided into the air like barbed wire.
The light carved my skin into maps of burning, and I felt something inside me split and begin to leak out.
Aubrey's hand reached for mine for the briefest moment, and when our fingers closed it was like touching a comet.
Her palm was hot and then gone.
Her body collapsed into embers and then into nothing more than a memory that smelled like burnt lacquer.
The speaker's voice, holy and cold, sank into my bones.
My Regalia can mirror anything, light, shadow, even the geometry of death, bending the world's weights until they obey me.
It can reflect the shape of an ending as easily as it can reflect a sunbeam.
I have used it to steal truth, to fold space, to twist consequence.
I could have reflected death itself as a lesson, a lesson for others to learn by seeing an end.
I could have let the world keep its cruel arithmetic.
Instead I made a choice that would brand me for the rest of my days.
I took the totality of what I was and hurled it at a single rejection: life…and death.
I rejected both. I reached into the loom and unpicked the thread that bound
Aubrey to the final breath, then caught that frayed end and tied it to myself.
It was an inversion of natural law, a theft dressed as salvation. It felt like stealing from the sky.
My Regalia answered like a thing delighted.
A crown of red, misery and madness braided into metal, formed and settled over my arm.
It was not regal; it was a ring of rot that crawled along my flesh as if it were finished eating at last.
Flesh slackened where it touched. The skin beneath it began to decay in slow, precise stages, as if a mortuary artist were at work.
In that same instant I swapped places with the world's decree. I kept my breath, and Aubrey's did not stop.
She rose from the edge, a life returned, while I inherited the slow, perfect unmaking.
The law I had broken was ancient and honest: death has weight and cost. I took that cost into my bones.
For a moment I fancied myself a fallen king, dying so a beloved might live.
The illusion was brief and stupid. I tasted vanity and found it sour.
***
[Aubrey Molotov.]
My vision was an ocean of dark, an eternal sea where the dead float like driftwood.
I was a thing within that salt, a body worn thin and indistinct to the living eyes that had watched me fall.
Then fingers closed on me, iron-quick, trembling, impossible, and hauled me toward air.
I broke the surface like a thing newborn and vomited sea from my lungs.
He stood above me and for a second, only a second, he smiled.
Madikai, ridiculous and ragged and brilliant. Madness and arrogance split across his face like sunrise.
"Madikai!" I cried, staggering forward because my knees would not be trusted.
A crown fell on my head as if a storm had dropped it there.
My hair flared red at the nape and something foreign slid along my skin: his power, a hot brand that sank into me and left a map of light.
My left eye thinned, like a pane clouding over, and then it was gone, replaced by a vaulting thing that was not mine, raw with his memory.
I collapsed to my knees and my gaze dropped to the sword at my feet, his sword, black with sand and the dark gloss of battle.
My eyes climbed the blade as if it were a ladder and landed on him.
His grin did not fade.
Heat swelled in my chest, a living heat that was not the sun.
It was the aftershock of some sacrament, a burning that promised both blessing and burn.
My lungs tightened. My skin hummed with a metallic ache.
Through the hollow where my eye had been, the world looked different, sharper, angrier, and unbearably close.
I tasted iron. I tasted ash. The heat was not merely physical; it was a verdict settling into my bones.