"Lyra." Maximus didn't take his eyes off Morikk. "The commander is yours."
Lyra's sword was already up, crimson light crawling along the blade. "He was never mine, Max. He was ours."
"Positions!" Seraphina shouted, her staff flaring gold. "Elias, with me! Pip —"
"On it!" Pip shot upward, her light going sun-bright.
Morikk sighed, almost fondly. "So serious." He set Annabelle down — gently, obscenely gently — and pushed her toward a fallen slab. "Stay there, little one. Watch." Annabelle curled into the shadow of the stone, her green eyes wide, and didn't move.
Then Morikk raised both hands, and the chamber detonated.
It wasn't fire. It was unmaking — a wave of gray nothing that rolled across the floor, and where it touched the basalt, the basalt simply stopped. Maximus moved — the world stuttering violet — and was across the chamber before the wave reached him, Abyssalfang screaming blue as he brought it down at Morikk's head.
The construct caught the blade. With one hand. The impact rang like a bell the size of the world.
"Stronger," Morikk said pleasantly, "than you remember."
He twisted — and Maximus was flying, smashed through a basalt column hard enough to crack it. He hit the floor rolling, came up spitting blood, and the markings were burning now, violet-white up both arms.
Across the chamber, Lyra met Kael.
He came at her in perfect form — the Vanguard's finest, even in death. His blackened sword swept for her throat and she turned it aside, crimson shields flaring. "Kael!" she screamed. "Kael, look at me!"
"Your Highness," he said, and cut at her legs. She jumped it. "You should have stayed in Veyloria."
"I am Veyloria!" She drove him back a step, then another, her blade a wheel of red light. "And you don't get to call me that! You called me Princess!"
Something flickered in the green fire of his eyes. Just for an instant. Then it was gone, and he was pressing her again.
The army came on.
They poured through the archway in endless ranks — and Seraphina met them with a wall of golden fire. It held for three heartbeats. Then they walked through it, burning, and Elias was beside her, his hands moving in the patterns his master taught him —
"Sleep," Elias whispered, tears on his face. "Let me give you sleep."
The front rank stumbled. Some of them — the freshest, the weakest — simply stopped, the green going out of their eyes, and crumpled. But there were hundreds more behind them.
Pip was a meteor. She dove through the ranks, her light searing, shattering skulls with stones she ripped from the walls. "Come on, you green-eyed bastards! Come on!"
Maximus was losing.
He knew it with the cold clarity of a man who'd lost before. Morikk was fast — faster than any construct had a right to be — and every spell was a killing spell. Gray fire. Unraveling. A spear of nothing that took Maximus in the shoulder and erased a handful of flesh. He was bleeding from a dozen places, his right hand shaking so badly he could barely grip the sword —
No.
He closed his eyes. Breathed in. And reached — past the pain, past the tremor, into the place where the song lived.
The world stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. Dust frozen in the air. Morikk frozen mid-gesture, green fire caught in his eyes like insects in amber. The whole chamber held its breath.
Maximus walked through the stillness. Each step was agony — he could feel his heart stuttering, feel the vessels bursting in his nose, hot blood on his lip. The price. Always the price.
He stopped in front of Morikk. Looked at the seams — at the throat, where the pieces met.
"I'm sorry," he said. And drove Abyssalfang through the seam.
The world restarted.
Morikk looked down at the blade through his throat. His mouth moved. "Clever," he said. "Always — so —"
The construct cracked.
It started at the throat — hairline fractures racing across the too-perfect face, down the robes, through the hands. Green light bled from every crack, brighter and brighter —
And then the construct burst, and what came out was not a man at all.
It poured across the floor like spilled ink — a fog, a mass, black shot through with green, formless and vast and hungry. It rose in a column twenty feet high, and where Maximus's shadow touched it, the shadow screamed.
"You broke my hands, brother," said the fog, in a voice like a grave collapsing. "I don't need hands anymore."