"You are pathetic."
The lance through my chest said more than I could process in the moment. There was nothing to say — it seemed too large for what it had passed through, tearing with the specific ease of an object that had been designed for that and had found exactly what it had been designed to find. I closed my eyes heavily. Not as someone embracing death, but as someone who needs a second to distinguish between what is being felt and what is being interpreted — between the sensation and its meaning, the flesh and the pieces that belonged to me pierced by steel and placed before me for contemplation and horror. But at the center of all of that, what hurt most wasn't the scene — not even the sensation of being pierced. Perhaps the adrenaline was too high to feel it. Perhaps the body had switched off the pain from sheer terror. What hurt was the understanding: I had made a mistake large enough for death to be the most likely answer to my own incompetence.
My eyes opened.
The difficulty breathing still hit me — perhaps that was the reality of having half a lung torn out. Blood came from my mouth in a cascade while I processed the results: the absence of one arm, the other hanging at my side with the uselessness of something that had forgotten its function without having forgotten that it had one.
Fortunately the pain was only surpassed by the surprise — because in front of me wasn't the arena that had served as stage for all of that.
In fact, space didn't exist there.
There was no ground underfoot — not in the sense that there was a gap where a surface should have been, but in the more fundamental sense that the concept of ground didn't apply to what was around, as though the place had been created before the concept of ground existed and therefore didn't contain it. There was no horizon. Only the void suspended between existence and oblivion — a dark abyss where not even light had the courage to land for too long, with a texture and density that light recognized as prior to itself.
The silence was absolute, the kind that isn't the absence of sound but the presence of something much larger than any word could name — the silence of before anything had been said, of before anything had existed to say.
And at the center of that nothingness, he was there.
Endless chains emerged from some impossible place in the darkness and coiled around arms that weren't arms — twisted extensions of something that mortal anatomy had no vocabulary to describe, that had developed form through a process that hadn't included any of the references I used to categorize form. The shackles groaned with a dull tension, as though the universe itself needed to make an effort to keep him there — as though the imprisonment was collective work that continued demanding contribution from everything around, not just from the chains. And yet he didn't seem imprisoned. He seemed asleep, with the distinction between the two being more significant than it appeared at first glance — imprisoned struggled, asleep waited.
His silhouette was an affront to the concept of scale. Two immense horns curved to the sides like the open wings of something that had swallowed entire skies — not pointing upward in defiance, which would be the posture of something that needed to demonstrate power, but open like arms that wait. A welcome. An embrace that would destroy anything that drew near not through the intent to destroy but through the physical impossibility of existing beside that heat without being consumed by it. Wherever the gaze tried to find a face, it found only shadow within shadow — a darkness with depth, with dimension, that looked back with something I couldn't call consciousness because consciousness was too small a category for what was there.
From the creature's chest emerged two smaller arms — arms that ended in dry and grotesque hands, immense, of raw flesh, with giant nails driven into every centimeter as though the punishment had been applied to the limb itself and not to what it had done. Even so they seemed extensions of an entirely different system — free while the rest was chained, with the mobility of parts that had been judged harmless enough to be left without restriction. And it was between their fingers that I managed to identify who was there — small in a way he had never seemed small before, held as one holds an object. Not with brutality. With the indifference of something that hadn't learned to distinguish between holding and crushing.
"Zaridan?"
Zaridan barely reached the height of the smaller hands of the creature that held him as one holds an injured bird — free enough to breathe, not enough to fly, with the margin of movement that existed between the fingers being exactly the margin necessary to continue existing and nothing more. The fingers around his body were like vises that could kill him at any moment without additional effort — the threat being structural, not needing active intent to be real. The heat emanating from that sleeping colossus wasn't the heat of fire — it was the heat of ancient rage, rage that existed before the name they gave it, before any tongue had learned the word hatred, before any system had developed vocabulary for what was there.
"Well, well. It seems someone has finally come to visit me."
Zaridan's face lifted when he saw me — with the movement of someone who had been looking downward out of habit and had found something that justified looking up. There was no rage in his face — only tiredness, the kind that comes from too long in the same place, that is no longer acute and gradually becomes landscape. Soon the chains began to move with the sound of metal that had learned that any change in position was worth verifying.
"I think you woke the big one."
The voice covered my mind before I understood where it came from — not through the ears, but through a different channel, as though someone had placed the sound source directly inside the skull and was turning up the volume from inside out. I felt the bone tremble with the specific frequency of vibration that hadn't been calibrated for human bone structure. The pain flowed before the meaning arrived — the body registering threat before the mind finished processing what the threat was.
— How dare you —
The creature's voice came in slow motion, cadenced by the size of what produced it — each syllable being a separate event, each consonant arriving with the interval of something that had been created to communicate at another temporal scale and was being compressed to fit a scale I could receive. It came from inside, from somewhere behind the bones, in the walls of the skull, stirring regions that had no name because they had never been stirred by anything that had arrived from outside.
The chains groaned more intensely.
One of the chained hands began to approach. From a distance it seemed large — which was already an inadequate description, because large was relative and what was approaching had no reference amid the darkness surrounding it. As it advanced, it became clear the problem wasn't finding the right word for the size, but that language had been built to describe differences within a scale — and what was happening was outside any scale I could use as a basis. It grew what seemed like kilometers as it advanced, filling everything that existed in the field of vision even before closing — not through positioning, but through actual size that the field of vision hadn't been designed to contain. The fear grew proportionally. When it finally stopped, the chains had reached their maximum limit — and there was something close to relief in that limit, even though the limit had stopped the hand at a distance that still made destruction possible.
"He's larger than a planet."
The obscure face seemed irritated with the limit the chains imposed — irritated not with acute anger, but with the dull irritation of something that had tried that before and had always found the same result. For that creature, I must have been something between insult and curiosity — too small to be a real threat, too present to be ignored with the indifference that smallness should justify. The darkness around suggested that that void was the dimensional spectrum where only it existed, built around it or created by it, and I had entered without permission and without the capacity to fully understand what I had entered.
The pain in my chest brought me back — not gradually, but with the brutality of a reminder that had been waiting for me to stop looking at what was around me to exist with the intensity that had been suppressed.
"Damn. What pain."
"Relax, boy." — Zaridan said, with the tone of something that had lost the capacity for urgency long ago — not through unconcern, but through having reached the limit of urgencies that time finally dissolves. — "I've been pierced and lost my arms more times than I can count. In the end it's just a wound."
"What the hell are you talking about? Where am I and why did I end up here?"
"HAHAHAHAHAHA."
Zaridan's smile irritated the creature — which looked at him with the expression of something that had decided that demonstration was more efficient than words for communicating disapproval. The squeeze came without warning and with the force that scale made inevitable even when calibrated not to be lethal. Zaridan waited with his eyes closed, with the patience of someone who had learned that reacting to the squeeze was a waste of energy that would be needed later.
"You are a complete idiot." — he said, after the hand had relaxed enough for speaking to be viable. — "You are one of us now."
The revelation arrived without drama, without the preparation that revelations of that magnitude usually required to be received. Just the statement and the silence that followed while I tried to fit what I had heard into some structure that made sense — looking for the category, not finding it, trying to build the category from what had been said, failing.
"What do you mean, one of you?"
"You still haven't understood anything."
Zaridan was clearly not willing to answer directly — with the specific refusal of something that had decided that direct was wasteful when indirect existed as a more interesting alternative. While I was in that place I tried to summon healing — and nothing. It was as though the capacity had been disconnected from access, as though I was still the same person, but was in a place that didn't recognize what I could do on the other side, that operated by different rules from the rules where I had developed what I could do.
"Forget that." — he said, with the tone of someone who had seen that attempt before. — "You won't be able to use anything here. The frontier is the end of everything. The luck is that you are only a specter — if you weren't, it would be your definitive end, not just your temporary one."
"Could you stop saying random things and tell me what the hell is going on?"
"Hahahah." — the smile came from the corner of his mouth, with the quality of something genuinely surprised — not by the content, which he had probably heard in variations over time, but by the tone, the specific way it had arrived. — "I can't remember anyone speaking to me like that for thousands of years."
✦
Zaridan was silent for a moment — not the silence of someone who had nothing to say, but the silence of someone weighing something, calculating the cost of saying against the cost of not saying, arriving at a conclusion I couldn't see but that produced a visible result when he began.
"What do you know about the power you stole from me?"
It was an interesting question because I really knew very little. Morgana's powers were easy to understand because she had explained them with the patience of something that had explained before and had developed adequate vocabulary. Livina's, she herself had detailed with the frankness of someone who saw no reason not to be direct. But with Zaridan it had been different — the power seemed simple in essence, the Mark creating weapons with the naturalness of a body extension, but the more I thought about its real utility, about what it could be beyond what I had managed to do, the more I felt something was missing. Something the surface of the power didn't communicate and that I hadn't had the time or context to discover.
Simply creating weapons seemed extremely limited for an ability that should be stronger than the summoning of Zaetar himself — and Zaetar was Unique, and a Mythic ability that surpassed Unique in only weapon creation was a contradiction I had registered without being able to resolve.
"You mean there's something beyond weapon creation?"
"Weapons?" — the irritation exploded in a way the creature reacted immediately, the squeeze coming with the automaticity of a conditioned reflex — any agitation from Zaridan was a signal that something had changed. Zaridan waited the necessary seconds with his eyes closed, the regular breathing of someone who had learned to calibrate their own state to make the necessary time as short as possible. Then he continued — with the rage still present, but controlled enough not to be wasted on what would come next. — "For the love of— I knew the races of this place were stupid, but you make them seem intelligent by comparison. You're telling me you thought the power that marks my race — that alone shook this entire universe and brought terror and fear to every creature that resides in the space you call home — has only the power to create a weapon?"
The irritation had said more than any explanation — it had communicated the magnitude of the gap between what I had discovered and what was available to be discovered. The power was much larger. But what good was knowing it was larger without knowing what the larger was — I didn't know how to truly use it, and I also didn't know how to get out of there. In fact perhaps it was too late — after all the only thing I clearly knew in that moment was how I had gotten there.
"There was a fourth enemy."
Zaridan, who still appeared to be angry, went quieter — with the specific quietness of someone who had received information that had altered the internal state without the external state having had time to catch up.
"Of course there was." — he said, with the tone that made it obvious retroactively what had seemed unexpected in the moment. — "Perhaps you haven't noticed, but this was a battle that wasn't made for you to win. I've killed enough Infernals to know that what they say almost never matches what they do — especially when the blood is blue."
"How… You?… To hell with it."
I didn't care how he knew. What mattered was that I had lost — and more than lost, I had erred. I had calculated countermeasures. I had foreseen interference — that Infernal didn't seem the type of person who had built what she had built trusting the rules would be sufficient to protect the result she wanted. But I hadn't calculated that the interference would arrive in the form it did, that the fourth enemy would be the kind it was, that it would enter through the variable it had entered. And my mind flew back to the fight, looking for the specific point where the calculation had failed — the moment where something had changed that I hadn't included.
Morgana's screams arrived before I finished searching — they came as the echo of something that had happened in the space I was no longer occupying, they came as the memory of sound before being sound, with the quality of something happening elsewhere while I was here.
"You are weak and pathetic — just as that child said." — Zaridan said, without particular cruelty in that moment, without the pleasure of someone enjoying the information. Just observation, with the detachment of something that had passed through weak and pathetic and had arrived at what was on the other side. — "Fortunately, you are no longer part of that. You are one of us."
"What does us mean?"
Zaridan seemed surprised for a second — genuinely surprised, with the kind of surprise of someone who had forgotten that what was obvious to him wasn't necessarily obvious to someone who hadn't lived what he had lived. As though he hadn't realized he had never explained what was most obvious to him. He began to say something with the slowness of someone finding words for something that had existed before needing words.
"I think if we make a deal, perhaps I can—"
"No."
"What do you mean no?"
The rage exploded again — with the speed of someone who had gotten close to something and had found refusal where they had expected reception. The creature squeezed. Zaridan waited the five seconds with his eyes closed, with the timed regularity of someone who had measured that cycle enough repetitions to know the exact duration.
"You said I was weak and pathetic and I admitted I am." — I said, with the calm that came not from the absence of fear, but from the presence of calculation more important than the fear. — "But I'm not stupid. I'd rather die than let you out."
Zaridan observed me — with the specific attention of something that was evaluating and had found something it hadn't expected to find in that place, in that form, in those circumstances. Even without being able to see his eyes behind the blindfold, I knew he was looking directly at me — there was something in the direction of his face that communicated attention that eyes normally communicated but that in that case existed without them.
"Remove my blindfold."
"Not a chance."
The answer came out before I could even conceive the alternative, with the speed of a refusal that had been formed before being requested. I knew he wanted to escape — he had said so directly, hadn't tried to disguise it. And if he was blindfolded, it was for some specific reason I wouldn't risk ignoring however convenient ignoring might be for what was being requested in exchange.
"Unfortunately I would remove it myself if I weren't trapped here." — he pointed his face in the direction of the giant hand with the gesture of someone indicating restriction without needing a more elaborate gesture. — "If you don't unblind me, there's nothing I can do. We'll both die."
The pain was intensifying — with the specific progression of something happening in real time, that hadn't stopped while I had been processing other things. My body was cooling with the regularity of a process that didn't consult urgency or emotional state to continue. The labored breathing pulsed with a regularity that communicated time was running out in a measurable way — not abstractly, not as a concept, but as a count I could feel.
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't know how."
As though in response to the sentence — not to the intent behind it, but to the sound of it, to the fact of it having been said as an accepted limitation — the hand holding Zaridan began to approach me. Slow, with the deliberation of something that had decided my presence in that space was sufficient justification to try to reach me, that had calculated that presence was provocation that didn't need intent to be provocation.
"I think the excuses have run out now."
Zaridan seemed as surprised as me — but didn't seem to care about the prospect the way I did, with the quality of surprise of someone who had reached the stage where surprise was no longer a driver of action. When the hand was a few centimeters away — centimeters being relative at that scale, centimeters being the interval that carried different weight depending on the size of what was moving — it stopped. Something had changed in the scale or the perception of scale, and I couldn't identify which of the two was happening.
I transformed the tattoo into a dagger and pointed — not at Zaridan, but at myself, after all it was clear that my one arm wouldn't be capable of any movement that required deflecting or cutting, only driving. With the logic of someone who had arrived at a conclusion about what had negotiating value and what didn't.
"Someone seems intelligent." — Zaridan said, with something that could have been approval — not of the act itself, but of the logic by which he had arrived at it. — "But tell me: how do you intend to remove my blindfold?"
"Don't worry. There's always a way."
I approached Zaridan's face with the care the situation required and that my state made more difficult than it should have been. My neck was close enough that a single bite could kill me — with the ease of something that had learned the neck was the point, that had developed that knowledge through repeated application. But the possibility didn't disturb me in a way that surprised me slightly. I was worth more alive than dead — and that I still believed with the firmness of something that had survived enough to continue being true.
I bit the blindfold. Pulled with the strength that the trembling left available. It gave — not all at once, but with the gradualness of material that had been in place long enough to develop resistance to being moved.
"Done. And now?"
Zaridan still had his eyes closed — not from reflex, but from choice, with the quality of something that had decided closing was necessary before opening.
"Now look at me." — he said, with the tone of someone arriving at something they had been waiting to arrive at for a long time. — "And see the passion of our race."
✦
When he opened his eyes, the first thing I saw was green — not color as decoration, but as substance, as something with weight and temperature and presence that color normally didn't have. The fire. A pool of emerald flames that came from the eyes like fluid that had found an exit after too long dammed — not an explosion, but a leak, the pressure having existed for so long that any opening produced a flow that had been waiting for the opening to exist.
Then I began to see other things.
A planet — with the scale of something seen from a distance that communicated size without communicating details, the surface being general data before being specific data. Ships. Flight — not the concept, but the state, the specific weight of movement that happened out of necessity and not choice, the urgency being felt before being understood.
Hatred, rage and fear intertwined without order — not as a narrative I could follow with the structure of beginning and middle and end, but as direct experience of the kind you don't observe but traverse, that doesn't pass through you as information but passes through you as state, that changes what is inside before being processed by what is outside. After the chaos — with the abrupt transition of something that had changed all at once and not gradually — came tranquility: running water over stone that had been stone long enough to be completely at peace with being stone, silence of a kind I had never encountered before because the silence I knew was absence and that one was the presence of something different from sound.
Peace.
"Brother, you have passed the trial. Now we are the frontier guardians."
The voice arrived as the memory of a voice before being a voice — with the quality of something that had existed at another time and was being received as an echo that had traveled further than it should have to arrive.
Joy.
The emotion arrived before the word that named it — with the intensity of something that had been felt before having a name, and that the name couldn't completely contain. Then it changed, abruptly, as though the memories hadn't learned to transition slowly.
"How can you fail. We gave you everything and you—"
Sadness.
With the specific quality of sadness of someone who had given something and had discovered that what they had given was used differently from how it had been offered. Perhaps not rage or sadness — disappointment. Which was heavier.
Silence again — and I felt in motion, going toward deep and forgotten places. Not forgotten because they didn't deserve to be remembered, but forgotten because they were impossible to revisit without a cost that made the visit too expensive to be frequent. Disconnected images that brought more questions than answers, that communicated context without communicating content, until finally something useful arrived — with the quality of data that had been waiting to be transmitted and had found a moment.
"You will carry the strength of our race. While you bear the Mark, nothing will touch you. While you bear the Mark, all those of the past will be with you. Let them in."
What seemed like a train — linear, with direction, with an identifiable destination — became a rollercoaster with loops that existed before I could prepare for them, with the inertia of each loop being what launched into the next, infinite in a way that wasn't number, but was quality. Disconcerting memories arriving and passing before being completely processed, with only one sentence resonating with the consistency of something that had been repeated for a reason and not by accident.
"Let me in."
"No. No. NOOOOOO—"
I woke.
With the abruptness of an arrival that had given no time for transition — the previous state being cut by the following state without the interval that made the change processable. Zaridan's eyes were mysteriously blindfolded again — and tears of green plasma ran down his body with the temperature of something that had been inside and was coming out, that had been contained and was being released. I brought my hands to my face. The tears also ran down mine — the same color, the same temperature, with the quality of something that belonged to another system and had arrived in mine through a channel I hadn't authorized but that had existed regardless.
I waited a second before looking down — with the hesitation of someone verifying before confirming, who preferred the uncertainty of the previous second to the certainty of what might be below.
My body was whole.
"It's done." — Zaridan said, with the tone of someone who had arrived at the end of something and was communicating the arrival.
"What's done? What did you do?"
The pieces I had seen were fragments of a life of millions of years — fittable in theory with sufficient patience, inaccessible in practice for more time than I would have available to try fitting them, like a puzzle where each piece was also a separate puzzle that needed to be solved before revealing what it contributed to the larger whole.
"You are saved." — he said. — "We protect our own. Always."
Zaridan's voice had changed — not in tone, but in texture. As though it wasn't only him speaking, but many using the same mouth simultaneously, each with their own weight, summed without canceling each other.
"How?"
"It's still early."
The impact arrived before I finished processing the answer — not as sound, but as state, as something that had arrived from inside out instead of outside in. Rage and hatred distilled in doses that weren't mine — that I could feel as mine, but were identifiable as not mine from the way they had arrived, from the origin that was in a place that wasn't where my emotions came from. Coming from a place I couldn't locate precisely, but could feel precisely enough to know it was real and not imagined.
Something was happening in my body with the irreversibility of a process that had begun and had no stopping mechanism.
"Don't block it. Let it in."
"Go to hell."
I moved desperately while feeling the body heat with the temperature of something that had arrived to stay — without understanding the mechanism, without being able to find the point where intervention would be possible. And then I realized — my body was disappearing as I moved. Not disappearing in the sense of ceasing to exist. Transforming — with the distinction between the two being all the difference, being the difference between ending and changing.
"I'm surprised." — Zaridan said, with something close to genuine admiration I hadn't expected to find in him — the admiration of something that had been through that and had taken time, and was watching someone go through it at a different speed. — "It took me many years to gain control of my body. I've grown fond of you."
I closed my eyes — not as surrender, but as the decision not to fight against something that fighting couldn't change, that needed to be crossed rather than resisted.
When I opened them, the arena was completely destroyed.
Not partially — not with the specific damage that combat produced, with marks that communicated what had caused each one and what had resisted and what had yielded. As though a force of a scale incompatible with anything that had been there had passed through every surface and decided none should remain in the form it was — not with malice, but with the indifference of scale that didn't distinguish between what should be preserved and what should be altered, because the distinction was smaller than the scale.
The screams around weren't of mockery, hatred or contempt. They had changed in quality — with the precision of something that had been replaced by something else entirely. They were of despair. The kind that wasn't performance, but was state. That wasn't being displayed, but was happening.
Blood covered my entire body — not from a wound, the absence of which I could feel if I searched for the origin. But as presence. As the sign of something that had happened during my closed eyes and had left an external mark without leaving internal damage. As though the process had cost the environment what it hadn't cost my body.
"Finish this already, aberration."
At my feet — on my foot, specifically, with the weight of something that had arrived there through force that hadn't been its own — there was someone. I looked down with the slowness of someone verifying what was there before deciding how to react.
"Lagherta?"
The look of confusion on her face appeared as she tried to understand what she was looking at — not with the rage or mockery that had been present before, which had been the dominant state of every moment that had passed in that arena. With the specific expression of something that had calculated the world in a way that had worked long enough to become certainty, and had found data that didn't fit in any of the calculations. The confusion of someone not accustomed to being confused — who had developed models robust enough for most situations to fit within them, and was encountering a situation that didn't fit.
"So it really wasn't you." — she said, with the tone of someone confirming a conclusion that had arrived before finishing speaking. — "What are you?"
The question was genuine — not rhetorical, not tactical, but the kind that existed because the answer was unknown and the unknown was relevant. It was the first time I had heard her ask a question that had no prepared answer.
Before I could respond — before I finished processing what I would respond, searching for vocabulary for what had happened without having adequate vocabulary for what had happened — something appeared before me.
[ You are being expelled from this world. Prepare to be removed. ]
"What?"
My body was sucked upward — pulled rapidly out of the planet at a speed that left no time to process what was happening. Not gradual. Not with the transition that would have allowed some preparation. All at once, with the brutality of a process that had been designed for efficiency and not comfort. Lagherta's incomprehensible face moved away as though I were falling upward, the arena shrinking below me before I finished understanding I was leaving.
At my side, what was also leaving were Morgana and the Griffin — both extremely wounded, with the damage that communicated that what had happened while I had been elsewhere had cost what it cost.
The Swamp Abomination was nowhere. The data arrived as absence before arriving as information — the space where it had been perceptible before I formulated that there was space because something had been missing to fill it.
As I left the atmosphere and nearly reached the exosphere, the speed decreased enough for the view to exist for a second — the moon-planet growing smaller with the speed of an object being left behind, the surface losing details as the distance grew. And then I was thrown back to the Colosseum — the same hall, the same board with scrolls, the same jar. Now completely full and glowing.
My mind was still trying to fit together what had happened when a voice arrived.
"Lord… Is it you?"
I stopped.
The voice was Morgana's — but it wasn't the voice I knew. It was the same structure, the same timbre, but with something different in the texture, like a familiar instrument played by someone who had learned to fear what the instrument could produce. She was healing herself, the damage from what had happened still visible on her body, her eyes fixed on me with an attention that wasn't recognition, but evaluation — the kind used when one isn't certain that what is seen is what it appears to be.
I had seen her afraid before. Afraid of the enemy, afraid for the territory, afraid for me. But never with that specific expression — the expression of something that had found, in the place where it expected to find the familiar, something it couldn't classify.
"Why are you afraid of me?"