Moonlight spilled across the ruins of the ancient city, catching on broken obelisks and shattered halls. Marble slabs lay in piles across the plaza, choked by vines. Dust drifted through the still air.
At the center of that stillness stood a man, as rigid as a marble statue. Sigils glimmered across his dark robes like living runes. The air around him seemed stretched thin, as though reality were uncomfortable in his presence. In his hand, a crystal shard pulsed with an eerie rhythm. Within it, golden veins throbbed like molten rivers. Each beat echoed faintly through the stone beneath his feet.
The world watched him, wary.
Then, the air behind him trembled.
It began as a low hum, too deep to be sound and too sharp to be anything the mind could dismiss as illusion. Shadows pulled inward, and dust drifted sideways. A swirling cloud of ash and embers spiraled into existence, folding in on itself like a collapsing star. Out of that vortex, a figure materialized.
He was tall and powerful, his presence carrying a grim authority that transcended nobility. His armor was heavy plate, dark and battle-worn, engraved with restrained infernal filigree and gold that caught the moonlight in sharp, hungry flares. At the center of his chestplate burned an orange-red gem, its facets catching the light with a muted, malevolent glow.
Polished black horns curved from his brow. The right side of his face was ruined by pale, spiderwebbed scarring that ran from temple to cheek. A jagged, faintly glowing fissure split the skin as it crossed his eye, the flesh tight and lifeless around a single fiery red pupil burning with quiet, constant malice. His other eye was a plain, unassuming human brown. He had long, pointed ears and sharp, chiseled features. Dark hair fell past his shoulders, unkempt but deliberate, framing a rough, close-cropped beard.
He walked with the slow, measured grace of something accustomed to violence, neither hurried nor hesitant.
This was Arkaedros: Bhaalspawn. Oathbreaker. Murder Incarnate.
He stopped several paces behind the shard-bearer, letting the silence stretch between them. When he finally spoke, his voice was deep, resonant, and cold.
"You are making a great deal of noise in the Weave," he said, his tone calm and edged faintly with amusement.
The shard-bearer did not turn. "You intrude upon delicate work," he answered, voice low yet betraying immense power.
Arkaedros stepped closer, boots striking the stone with deliberate weight.
"Delicate," Arkaedros repeated. "That word is doing a lot of work for you."
Only then did the other man pivot… slowly, with the poise of someone accustomed to control. Moonlight revealed a face too still to be natural. Angular elf-like features, yet lacking pointed ears. Pale, almost ageless skin. Eyes that did not glow so much as burn, like gold compressed into something dense and merciless. His expression was carved from something too sharp to be peace and too controlled to be rage.
Recognition flickered across Arkaedros’s expression, tilting his head ever so slightly. A madness pulled at the corner of his lips.
The man raised the shard slightly, as its molten veins spilled golden light across his wrist. "You know me."
Arkaedros smiled, a slow, appreciative curl of his lips. "Ah," he spoke softly. "So this is what remains of you…”
A breath passed, as if the world itself was resisting the words to come.
“Jon Irenicus."
The name rippled through the plaza with such weight that even the dust seemed to recoil. Somewhere far off, a broken arch collapsed under its own forgotten tension.
Irenicus regarded Arkaedros with a calm that felt like the silence before an avalanche, studying him. "And you are…?"
"Arkaedros," he replied plainly, as if the name were self-explanatory.
Irenicus’s eyes narrowed, his gaze sliding over Arkaedros’s armor. "They sent a paladin in gilded armor. A hollow display."
"I shed my oaths when they ceased to be useful," Arkaedros said. "And no one sent me. You simply pulled on the Weave hard enough that even gods may have noticed. Unfortunately for you, you got me instead."
Irenicus turned his attention to the shard again. Arkaedros recognized it instantly: a fragment of a mythalar, once the beating heart of a flying city, still swollen with unfocused power.
"It answers me now," Irenicus said.
"It answers your need," Arkaedros replied. "Need is not the same as control."
"You presume to understand either."
Arkaedros tilted his head, red eye brightening. "You are a man who lost something and decided the world would pay for it. You cut, carve, steal, and bleed magic dry, and still nothing fills the gap. So, you tell yourself you just haven’t taken enough yet. You are not difficult to understand."
A flicker of something sharp passed across Irenicus’s face before disappearing. "You intrude into my work," he said coldly, "you offer misapplied philosophy, and you imagine yourself my equal. You are an animal who traded one leash for another; you are beneath me."
Arkaedros gave a soft, amused laugh. "There you are."
"Begone," Irenicus said. "I am done tolerating you."
"No," Arkaedros replied plainly.
"So be it," Irenicus murmured, lifting two fingers. "Tempus, cessa," his voice echoed.
Before Arkaedros could take another breath, reality cracked like thin ice. Dust froze midair. The quiet deepened into something absolute. A falling stone hung motionless two feet above the ground. The faint shift of Arkaedros’s armor halted, his breath and the fall of his hair freezing in the same instant. Even the glow of his red eye paused, captured in time.
Irenicus stepped through the still world unimpeded. Power gathered around his hand, coiling in tight spirals of shadow and pale light. He aimed a finger at Arkaedros’s back.
"Radii dissolvam."
A thin beam of disintegration formed, anchored outside time.
"Exscinde animam."
A noose of soul-tearing force coiled around Arkaedros’s throat.
"Fissura aperi."
The stone beneath his boots split into a thin, hungry void.
At last, Irenicus leaned close, the shard’s gold glow painting harsh lines across his face, and whispered the deadliest command.
"Verbum Mortis."
The word of death: Power Word Kill.
He stepped back and exhaled. "Farewell."
Time lurched violently, and every spell detonated at once.
The disintegration beam ripped across Arkaedros’s spine, tearing plate and flesh. The fissure yanked at his legs. The soul noose tightened. The killing word slammed into his chest…
…and collided with something ancient and stubborn.
A blood-red shimmer flared across Arkaedros’s body, radiating from the gem set into his chestplate. A death ward, twisted by spite rather than faith, surged awake as the killing word struck, the stone burning white-hot for a single, violent heartbeat before splitting apart with a sharp, crystalline crack, its light tearing itself out as ward and spell annihilated each other.
Arkaedros grunted, his teeth bared in pain as the other spells tore into him. His legs buckled under the drag of the fissure, and the soul noose tightened.
A claymore materialized in his hands, as if the night condensed into steel. Long and slender, forged of blackened metal polished to a hungry sheen. A raised central ridge caught the moonlight, and threads of molten-gold filigree traced infernal patterns toward the tip. It looked less crafted than conjured by a mind that understood only the language of killing.
Arkaedros turned with a sound caught between a snarl and a laugh, sweeping the blade in a wide arc.
The strike collided with Irenicus’s bindings in an explosion of force. The noose ruptured. The fissure snapped shut. Splinters of spellwork burst away in fading motes.
Arkaedros dropped to one knee. Blood ran along the torn edges and seams of his armor, sizzling as it pattered onto the stone.
Irenicus watched him with bright, feverish eyes. "You should be dead."
“I get that a lot,” Arkaedros said as he pushed himself upright, leaning for a second on the claymore before finding his balance. He wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his gauntlet, regarding it with mild interest.
The Weave twisted.
The plaza erupted into motion.
Irenicus hurled a bolt of crackling shadow. Arkaedros moved to meet it, the claymore cutting through the air in a clean vertical slash. Darkness split around the blade in two twisting streams.
A chain of necrotic light followed. Arkaedros twisted, the tip of the claymore flicking up to knock it aside. The spell shattered on impact, leaving a scorched gouge in the stone.
"You are reckless," Irenicus called. "Charging an archmage with a glorified piece of metal."
"You are clinging," Arkaedros said between pants for breath. "To a shard, to your name, to a grudge no one shares. We all have our habits."
Irenicus’s lip curled. He vanished and reappeared behind Arkaedros, hurling a spiral of flame at his back. Arkaedros pivoted with impossible speed for a man in heavy plate, his claymore sweeping through the approaching blast. The blade split the fire, sending tongues of flame washing around him as the claymore glowed with the heat consumed.
“You flail at power you cannot comprehend,” Irenicus snarled.
“Funny,” Arkaedros responded. “You speak as though threatened.”
The mythalar shard flared in Irenicus’s hand, bathing the plaza in a blinding gold light.
"Aperio cor."
A beam erupted from the shard: not a clean ray, but rather a torrent of raw, unstable energy that shrieked as it left. It hit Arkaedros squarely in the chest, the blast hurling him across the plaza and through a jagged column. Stone exploded outward around him.
He vanished into the cloud of powdered stone.
Irenicus descended slowly, robes moving with a life of their own, and his eyes shining intensely.
"You persist," Irenicus said, drifting lower. "How tedious."
The dust shifted, and Arkaedros stepped out of it, cloak torn, armor cracked along the breastplate in a spiderweb of damage. The flesh beneath smoldered faintly in spots where the mythalar beam had bitten through. His breathing came rougher now, air whistling around clenched teeth.
He raised the claymore and rested it across his shoulder.
“You hit like you’re afraid of wasting power,” Arkaedros provoked.
A spark of fury passed through Irenicus’s eyes. “You mistake luck for ability.”
Arkaedros advanced.
The claymore transformed into a blur of motion. Arkaedros closed the distance in a heartbeat, blade cutting in a smooth, murderous diagonal intended to split wards, flesh, and bone alike.
Irenicus raised a shield of glowing force. The blade collided with it. Crack lines spidered across the barrier.
Arkaedros struck again. And again. Each blow landed in the same rhythm, exact and relentless, building strain in the magic that opposed him.
The fourth strike shattered it. Irenicus twisted aside, the next slash tracing a sharp line across his ribs. Instinctively, he retaliated with a blast of telekinetic force that slammed into Arkaedros’s chest, sliding him backward and burning molten grooves across the flagstones.
"You could have been more," Irenicus spat. "Divinity in your veins, yet you wallow in filth."
"So do you," Arkaedros replied. "I’m simply honest about it."
Irenicus hurled a cluster of crackling spheres. One struck Arkaedros on his left pauldron, the impact spinning him half around and blowing a spray of scorched metal. He grunted, catching himself with the sword point dug into stone.
For a long breath, the two regarded each other, blood and smoke marking the ground between them.
Then Arkaedros surged forward.
Irenicus met him, grabbing his throat with iron fingers. Arkaedros’s claymore flickered out of existence, as his gauntlet instead seized Irenicus’s wrist holding the shard. Their faces hovered inches apart.
"You are beneath me," Irenicus hissed.
Arkaedros smiled, his teeth stained with blood. "Keep saying that."
"If I had my full power," Irenicus snarled, "you would already be ash."
The shard burned in Irenicus’s hand, golden veins brightening, humming with unstable strength.
Arkaedros glanced down at it, then back up at Irenicus’s face, before twisting sharply, wrenching his throat out of Irenicus’s grip, and driving his shoulder into the mage’s chest. Irenicus staggered, and in the same instant, Arkaedros struck out his hand towards the crystal.
Suddenly, the claymore re-materialized in Arkaedros’s hand, stretching out toward the crystal, until it finally struck.
The shard did not crack.
It detonated.
Golden light swallowed the plaza. The fragment’s stored power ripped free all at once, a backlash of mythalar force tearing at everything around it. The ground buckled. Columns crumpled. Both men were hurled away like toys flung by an angry child.
When the light faded, the city could no longer be recognized. Sections of the plaza hung a handspan above the ground before settling again. Cracks in the stone glowed faintly gold, as if something hot lay just beneath the surface. The air shimmered in waves. Gravity pulsed in sudden, disorienting ripples, tugging up, then down, then back to normal. Ghost-images of the two men flickered half a heartbeat behind them.
The Weave had not torn, but it convulsed.
Arkaedros pushed himself onto one knee. His armor was split in several more places now, edges jagged and blackened. The claymore lay nearby, half buried in fractured stone. He reached for it, fingers brushing the hilt, and hauled himself to his feet with the sword as a support.
Across the plaza, Irenicus dragged himself upright using the remains of a shattered pillar. His robes hung in rags. Blood trickled from one corner of his mouth. His eyes, though, blazed brighter than ever: no longer a refined gold, but streaked with wild, uncontrolled power.
"You broke my conduit," he rasped. "Fool. You have no idea what you have done."
"I don’t," Arkaedros admitted. "I also don’t particularly care."
The ground lurched sideways for a moment. Both steadied themselves.
Irenicus flung out his hand.
"Vincula flammae."
Chains of fire roared across the plaza, their path bending as gravity stuttered. Arkaedros stepped into the misalignment, letting the strange pull carry him partly aside, and brought the claymore down in a brutal cut. The sword met one chain, then another, shattering them into sprays of sparks.
Irenicus shifted tactics, fingers slashing through the air.
"Frange velum."
Reality tore in front of him in a brief, jagged line, then snapped closed again in the same breath, wild and unstable. Fragments of the spell, miscast by the damaged Weave, lashed back and scorched the ground at his feet instead of Arkaedros.
Arkaedros laughed once, sharp and amused despite the blood he spat at the same time.
"You’re fighting the air as much as you’re fighting me," he said.
Irenicus gathered power again. It came faster this time, but rougher, like water drawn from a broken fountain.
"Exscinde animam."
A pulse of soul-tearing force surged outward. It hit Arkaedros full in the chest and drove him to one knee. His vision flared white, and it felt as if something had tried to peel his body loose from his soul.
He dug the claymore into the stone and forced himself up through sheer spite. His eye twitched, and something in him wanted Irenicus to scream. He swallowed the urge.
"Damn," he managed. "That kind of hurt."
"Insolent animal," Irenicus said.
Arkaedros rolled his shoulders, ignoring the protest of torn muscles. "You keep saying that. I must be getting to you."
The floating pulses of stone and gravity turned their clash into something almost weightless in places. Arkaedros stepped off a briefly hovering slab, using the upward lurch to add force to a downward swing that smashed through another of Irenicus’s hastily raised wards. Irenicus answered with a force blast that curved sideways, annihilating a chunk of stone.
They collided at close quarters yet again. Irenicus seized Arkaedros by the pauldron and tried to twist a spell directly into his flesh. Arkaedros slammed his forehead into Irenicus’s, horns scraping skin, and drove the pommel of the claymore into his ribs.
They broke apart, staggered, then came together one more time in an ugly exchange of will and exhaustion.
When the motion stopped, both remained standing.
Arkaedros’s armor was in ruin. Blood ran in slow trails from several voids in the metal. His grip on the claymore was steady only because he refused to let it falter.
Irenicus was breathing in harsh draws, shoulders heaving. The light in his eyes flickered, not from weakness alone, but from too much energy trying to burn through him and finding nowhere left to go.
For a long moment, they regarded one another across the fractured space.
"This is over," Arkaedros said at last.
The words were neither mercy nor demand. They were an observation.
Irenicus bared his teeth in something between hatred and resolve. "You have not killed me."
"No," Arkaedros said. "But if you cast again, you may yet manage it yourself."
"You presume to know my limits."
A pulse went through the ground. Stones drifted up, then settled again. The Weave groaned in the air like something overworked and brittle.
Irenicus held his stare a heartbeat longer, then let his gaze slip past Arkaedros, to the ruined shard fragments, to the warped plaza, to the sky.
"This is not finished," he said.
"It never is," Arkaedros answered.
He turned his back on Irenicus and began to walk. The claymore trailed sparks as its tip brushed stone before dissolving into shadow. A patch of darkness ahead deepened and folded around him. In a breath, he was gone.
The plaza slowly began to settle. The faint glow in the cracks of the stone dimmed. The floating fragments of debris dropped back with soft, scattered thuds. The air remained thin and wrong, but no longer convulsing.
Jon Irenicus stood alone in the ruins of the plaza, robes torn, blood running from his mouth, the mythalar’s broken power still trembling faintly in his bones. He was not defeated. He was not dead.
But for the first time in a long time, something else in the dark had refused to break before him.