Flanged flowing architecture stands in smoke-shrouded parody of gothic buttresses. Silver spires call the lightning, blue midnight and shadow-storms rage on the heavens. Here in the murderous sprawls of Saingediir, two sword-bearers war against heap-limbed horrors.

Today the umbra rides the crevices of my pauldrons, the depths where my helm overhangs my cuirass, the folds of the long cobalt-blue coat pressed against my silver-armored shins with every lunge. The six-horned demon wielding Chiron's Pyre--ablaze, its wake reality devoured. Every stroke sends shear-lines of causal distortion through my victims. And they are victims. This scarcely constitutes a battle.

Under any other circumstances, I'd find it restful. I fought hard to become inevitable. I deserve this easy dominion, this killing glee.

For my sins, capricious chance has seen fit to curse me with a raging child as an ally.

When my temper builds beyond tolerating the brat any longer, I speak--pausing only long enough to gauge the situation before phasing towards a new group and flickering through the continuum of kill-strikes already accomplished.

Time. Yes, I know the bite of time and timelines better than anyone. Now that I've finally reached completion, I see all too clearly how much sooner I could've had my joy. It was so close, that final month on Earth. If I just tore myself away from my writing for a little while, if I just allowed my flesh-vessel time to push back the cough, the fever, the weakness and the pains in my heart, I could have recovered.

I could've taken the time to pierce the deceptions cast by the Shard of Seurchraig. Then she'd only have stolen twenty-nine years from me--enough. I'm brooding over this so much because the would-be heroine fighting beside me, she reminds me of the exact self-sacrificing brashness that turned me so easy for Sech to use.

"Look, kid," I say, spinning out through a psionic-charged slash of blue radiance.

As I whirl to one knee and my nova slit-eyes regard my ill-tempered ally, that slash multiplies. Its searing blue line forks upward and out like cracks in a glacial cliff. It unfolds twenty-seven gouges through the many-bellied hide of a kindred spirit with hundreds of abdomen-eyes, and a long maw of needle-teeth running down its left flank.

Beautiful, sculpted, and stubborn, the heroine shows me how impressed she is by glaring, spinning about, and hurling herself with a scream of fury at the next foe.

I speak on while green gore fountains around me, kept from my gown's settling silk and my hair's starfield sweep by my power's invisible thrum. Any other time I'd bathe in the viscera and be happier for it. Right now, sadly, I'm trying to touch a fool's heart. Scathing days, why do her kind keep crossing my path?! Still, I try: "Did you come here to prove something?"

"I came here to fight!" she screams, rushing at a blur of stained-glass refractions. It distorts away like a migraine. Its radiance-wave raises glows in her armor.

"You realize I face them because they and I are kindred spirits, yes?" I ask.

A blue-white flare highlights the broken echoes of my world-lines, incomplete silhouettes of myself springing like spokes from the wheel-hub of me. And I am beside her, drinking heat from her plate's outer faces before it seeps deeper and cooks her flesh. Steaming torrents pour forth, weave gleaming ribbons in helix patterns, and combine to a sweet iron tide that meets my throat in a scalding caress.

I give myself to lusty quivers. Pain has long since become another indulgence.

"This is home for us," I add. A whip of shrieking plasma condenses into my hand. Its crack spawns a midair blast of ball-lightning, downcast tendrils of the storm burning the next wave out from the inside. Eyes pop, sinews steam, metalloid inclusions glow and sizzle against rumpled other-flesh. “Why have you come?”

"I have to do this!" she yells. "I have to become strong enough to protect my friends--"

"Is that how you think I became me?" I ask. I condense into the blue-force cone of a thrust, lancing metalloid organs and drilling through a cavern of humid, reeking air beneath a chitin outer-spin to explode from the other side in a wake of bright blue ichor. "You want the truth?" I halt, one razor-pointed sabaton poised atop the exoskeletal jaw of the legless, tendril-squirming being I just gutted. "I wanted this for myself, and only for myself."

My own adamant sinews tense, surge with stellar fire, crush down in a cratering spray of blue-black gore.

"I like contests, yes. A sword shining in my hand.  Sometimes I enjoy the emotional rewards of beings to look up to me. I understand the allure. I certainly understand wanting to help those close to you. Still, I warn you." I sweep the Pyre through the air. Its azure nova and silver lightning, its consuming shadow, cleanse its edge. "If you call this thing you're building 'strength,' they'll try to trap you in it. They'll say how much they admire you, how perseverant you are, but every time they'll lament, 'oh, I could never be as strong as you!'"

My hand flickers. The myth-slaying threshold blade returns to its scabbard. "Even when you need rest more than praise." Black thunder tears rifts in the clouds above Saingediir. The spires sizzle with anomalous superheating. And I approach the wrathful form of a young girl with a bright future, who wants to make herself a hero. "Your strength will become an excuse to use you, kid."

"I'll let them use me, and gladly!" she says. "I am choosing this, damn you!"

"I know, kid," I answer. "I know you are." A low breeze stirs the blue coat around my ankles. " But you'll grow. You'll change. You'll want more from life, and they will guilt you out of chasing it. So you agree to that too, at first. You feel strong, they seem weak, and it's so much easier to say yes than no. You'll starve while they get stronger, while they grow and claim new joys, and even then they'll say 'you have to be strong for me.' You'll reach a point where you're no longer choosing to carry their burdens, but they refuse to let you stop. It does take a measure of strength to reject responsibility that's become exploitation, and..." Plasma streams from my helm's seam as my claws loosen it. Pull it free.

Reveal the face of the demon inside. Horns and scales and cleft chin and fang-exposing chasms in my cheeks. Extra eyes, altered shapes. Yet this much unites us: a gravity, a conviction, an energy that's deeper than light and dark. That animating something manifests in our expressions. "When you most need to put the heroine aside, you be too weak even to reach for someone else to take the burden. And the ones who cared enough to do that for you? They'll be long gone anyway. Watching you will turn too painful."

She's so young. Shining-eyed with such lustrous hair, driven and glowing with that special something. I feel the gut-punch of her parting words before it comes.

"Then I'll just have to be strong enough for both of us," she says. Clasps her amulet. Fades out of Saingediir in golden light.

I watch the emptiness where she stood for long seconds.

"Miidyaerita kastejul," I say, "kindred. See you when breaking becomes the only thing your heart knows."