The last words left Aeloria's mouth and the sky darkened even further.
The thunder grew louder, deeper, until the sound itself became a living thing that clawed at the ears and shook the bones inside the body.
She stared at the man in black.
He stood exactly where he had been, unmoved, unfazed, his expression blank, his gaze directed downward as though studying an interesting pattern in the dirt while the heavens prepared to obliterate him.
A few more rumbling protests rolled across the clouds.
Then everything stopped.
For three full heartbeats there was silence.
The rain fell in heavy torrents yet made no sound when it struck the earth.
Even the wind died.
Then…
The first thunder slammed down.
It came fast and hard, a solid column of white-violet fire as thick as a man's entire torso. The air ignited around it. The ground cracked beneath the pressure long before it arrived.
The man in black lifted his left hand, opened his palm, and met the bolt head-on.
He parried it.
The thunder struck his hand and simply changed direction, deflected with impossible, insulting ease into the centre of the Lonorith river.
The impact flash-boiled an entire stretch of water in the blink of an eye. A roaring geyser of steam exploded upward, hundreds of feet high. Fish flashed to ash mid-air. The riverbed itself glowed red for a heartbeat.
Blank leapt from the rock he had been lounging on a fraction of a second before the shockwave pulverised it into gravel.
Aeloria's mouth hung open.
'He… he deflected the thunder?'
But the incantation was far from finished.
Almost before the first bolt vanished, the second struck.
Twice as fast.
Twice as thick.
Twice as loud.
This one gave no warning, no time to breathe. It punched straight down like the fist of an angry god.
The man in black did not even raise his hand this time.
The thunder hit him square in the chest.
The explosion hurled Aeloria backward through the air as though a giant had kicked her. She flew twenty feet, crashed into the ground, rolled, and slammed spine-first into an oak. Bark exploded. The tree behind her splintered as leaves filled the sky.
Before the dust could settle, the third and final thunder came.
This was no longer lightning or thunder.
This was the sky itself falling.
The bolt was wider than the oldest trees, brighter than the sun at noon, and it screamed as it fell—a sound that could be heard in the next kingdom and the one after that. The pressure alone flattened ground for a hundred paces in every direction.
It struck true.
The concussion repelled everything outward in a perfect circle.
Aeloria was lifted again and hurled like a doll, smashing through one tree, then another, then another. Splinters and branches tore across her skin; blood sprayed, then vanished as her flesh knit itself together almost as fast as it was shredded. She hit the ground hard, bounced, rolled, and finally lay still among the wreckage of half an acre of forest.
Silence returned, broken only by the hiss of cooling stone and the soft patter of returning rain.
Aeloria lay on her back, staring up at a sky that had gone strangely pale again.
She tasted blood.
She tasted dirt.
She had no idea where she was anymore.
She had no idea where the man in black was anymore.
The world spun slowly.
Memory surfaced through the haze—During one of their Šërēĺįťh training sessions.
"But with such strong power, surely there has to be a price to pay," she had asked, wiping sweat from her brow.
"Of course," Orin had answered, leaning against the wall of the private training yard. "There is only one price. Pain."
"Pain?"
"Yes. For example, if you use a spell that burns your enemy, you will feel being burned yourself—though it will have no actual physical effect on your body. Just train your pain tolerance and you're good."
"So it's only pain? Nothing else?"
"Of course not. The number of Šërēĺįťh words you speak is divided in half, and you will experience the pain multiplied by that many folds. Six words to burn someone? You feel being burned three times over. Twelve words? Six times over. Healing spells work the same way: you feel the patient's pain multiplied by half the number of words."
"Then what is the point of learning it if the backlash is worse than the spell itself?"
Orin had given her that rare, tired half-smile.
"Because while your enemy's body is actually burning, you only feel the pain. Build your tolerance high enough, and the difference becomes everything."
Aeloria coughed, tasting more blood, and laughed once—short, broken, bitter.
She had used forty-four words.
That meant twenty-two folds of pain.
The smoke began to clear.
Aeloria pushed herself up on trembling arms and looked around.
Everything was gone.
The proud trees that had stood for years were now nothing but blackened stumps and smouldering splinters. The ground itself had turned to cracked, glassy earth that steamed in the rain. The wasteland stretched from the distant road where the two strangers had first appeared, all the way past where she now lay, and a little beyond. Not a blade of grass remained.
Her eyes found Blank first. He stood exactly where he had been, clothes untouched, expression bored, as if the end of the world had been a mild inconvenience.
'Does he not care that I just killed his king?' she thought, panic rising.
Blank's gaze flicked to the centre of the destruction, calm and unbothered.
'I didn't think Nyxelene would actually teach the cursed tongue to an already frightening monster. She could have beaten almost anyone with that spell. Shame,' Blank thought.
Cough. Cough. Cough.
Loud, wet coughing cut through the silence.
Aeloria's head snapped toward the sound.
The smoke parted.
He was still standing.
The man in black stood in the middle of the scorched circle, coughing into his fist, waving dust away from his face with the other hand.
"I'm sorry," he said between coughs, voice perfectly polite, "there's just so much dust in my eyes and mouth."
Aeloria stared, her mouth open.
His once-perfect black cloak was gone, burned away.
His fine clothes were nothing but charred rags clinging to his hips.
His long, wavy hair was a wild, singed mess.
He looked like a mad beggar who had walked through a furnace.
That was all the three thunder strikes had done.
"Honestly," he said, starting walking toward her, his bare feet silent on the ground, "if you had asked me to take my clothes off so you could admire my body, I might not have turned you down. There was no need to burn them off with thunder."
Aeloria coughed.
Blood sprayed from her mouth.
More blood started dripping from her nose. Then her ears.
The backlash hit.
Pain exploded inside her like the thunder had decided to strike from the inside out. Every nerve lit on fire. Bones felt like they were being ground to powder. She doubled over, coughing harder, blood pouring between her fingers.
'I attacked with every Šërēĺįťh word I know, so why am I the only one taking damage?'
"I didn't think Nyxelene would actually teach you the cursed tongue," the man in black said, still walking. "Well, it doesn't matter. She has always been unpredictable. And stubborn."
Aeloria coughed again, harder, blood splattering the dirt.
'He knows the queen?
If he knows her, he should know what she can do.
So why is he going out of his way to offend her?'
"Let's forget about the boring queen," he said, stopping directly above her. "Let's continue our game. But first, I have a question."
'It looks like I'll die here today.'
"Since you hit me with three strikes of thunder," he asked, smiling gently, "does that mean I get to hit you three times now?"
'He's a demon. I need to get away.'
Aeloria tried to crawl, to stand, anything, but the backlash pinned her like invisible chains.
The man in black reached down, grabbed her right ankle, and lifted her upside-down into the air.
Blood ran from her ears and nose, dripping into her hair, onto the ruined ground.
"Are you ready?" he asked. "Remember: no screaming."
"If you kill me," Aeloria rasped, blood bubbling at her lips, "Lady Nyxelene will surely—"
He drove his bare foot into her stomach.
The impact folded her in half. Ribs shattered like dry twigs. Her spine cracked. Breath exploded from her lungs in a red mist.
She didn't even have time to feel the pain before everything went dark.
"I'm afraid to inform you," he said, conversational, "but Nyxelene does not have what it takes."
He swung her by the ankle and slammed his foot into the side of her head.
Her skull bounced off the ground.
"That was my second strike, by the way."
"Your Majesty?" Blank called as he approached.
"I thought I told you I'd only play for a bit," the man in black replied, lifting Aeloria again like a rag doll. "We're just getting to the fun part."
"But…" Blank hesitated, "I think she's dead."