It was clear that Seskel was seething, though he did his best to hide it. "Come forth, Xhaun," he called.
And it came.
The ink-born horror Yvain had glimpsed before emerged once more, an undulating mass of liquid night, teeth like warped ivory, eyes without number or shape, scattered across its form like shattered stars. It moved like oil and thought, unmaking geometry as it came, a presence dragged from the cold between constellations, an elder thing from beyond the skein of mortal logic.
Xhaun lashed forward, a tidal wave of living shadow, and Yvain conjured an auric ward in an instant. The entity crashed against the shield and splintered like black water on glass, flowing to surround it entirely. The ward held but Xhaun was clever. It didn't attack again. It pressed. Circled. Squeezed. Its shapeless bulk thickened the very air, wrapping around the shield like a cocoon.
"You're making this too easy, Yvain," Seskel gloated, his voice echoing within the dark bubble, smug and distant.
Yvain could no longer see him, could barely see anything at all. The darkness was total, the world reduced to nothingness pressing in from all sides. But still, he was calm.
He whispered, "Mobius Reality."
With a breath, the ward shattered, not in failure, but by design.
Xhaun surged inward, eager for prey.
And froze.
Reality fractured.
Space unraveled like a ribbon. A step became a league, and a thousand miles collapsed into a single breath. Up folded into down, left into yesterday. Xhaun, a creature born of twisted laws, reeled, unable to process the spell's topology. And in that impossible geometry, Yvain vanished.
He reappeared a whisper away from Seskel.
The conjurer spun, genuine surprise flickering across his painted face.
It didn't last.
"Bhaneth Dhum!" he snarled, the words ancient and venomous, Shi'Ur, a forgotten tongue Yvain knew quite well.
The Breath of the World responded. A storm broke loose.Wind and dust howled through the tunnel as the air exploded outward. Stones trembled, dust blinded, and the lantern burst, plunging the chamber into chaos. Magic gathered like a stormfront around Seskel.
But Yvain did not retreat.
Yvain stepped forward, unshaken by the storm that clawed at the tunnel walls. He inhaled slowly and willed, calling upon his deep reservoir of Breath, the ambient essence of the world that pooled in his marrow like quiet fire.
"Awaken," he intoned, voice like flint on stone.
This place was a tomb, not just for the near-lich in its coffin, but for dozens, maybe hundreds of long-forgotten corpses buried beneath baronial arrogance and old rock.
And the dead listened.
Fingers broke through stone and packed earth. Crumbling nails clawed free from shallow graves hidden in the walls. Half-mummified bodies, bone-thin and eyeless, tore their way into the world once more. Wights, drawn not from ritual but sheer will. Not his thralls, but drawn to his cause. And it was enough.
The chamber became a writhing chaos of limbs and snarls. The wights, howling in hunger and command, surged toward Seskel, their broken bodies heedless of pain or peril.
But Seskel did not falter. His arms moved in wide, sweeping signs, his own Breath answering with jagged precision. From a flaring ring of black flame emerged another conjuration, this one flesh-bound. A brute of a creature, green-skinned and iron-muscled, with horns curled like ram's, clad in armor that shimmered with abyssal runes.
It slammed into the nearest wights with a roar, tearing them apart in wet sprays of gore and grave-dust, shielding its summoner with furious loyalty.
Yvain observed, calculating.
The storm still roared around him, but he moved through it in a conjured veil, a shadow pulled from the mind of a mad priest, thick with warped geometry and lunatic dreams. It wrapped him like a shroud, warping perception, dulling the storm's force to a whisper.
Seskel was formidable. A conjurer well-versed in summoning and demonology. One who had made pacts and bled through the veils between worlds to command things that ought not be named. In any other duel, against most mages, he would have triumphed through sheer momentum.
But Yvain was not most mages.
He was not yet an archmage, but he stood at its threshold. The line between mortal and myth blurred around him.
It was time to end this.
Breath reeled as Yvain lifted both hands, fingers dancing through the invisible fabric of spellwork. The signs came fast, ancient and forgotten ones. They moved with such precision and speed that the very air seemed to warp and shriek with friction.
The world groaned in protest.
Seskel, still grappling with the wights and issuing commands to his conjured protector, sensed it too late.
When he turned, his painted face twisted with sudden dread.
Floating above Yvain was something unnatural, a singularity of sorts. A core of absolute null, a perfect absence. Sound fled it. Light bent around it. Even the storm dared not touch it. Matter refused to acknowledge it.
Null-space. A pocket of un-being.
And as it condensed, it grew more dangerous. Not by expanding, but by shrinking.
It became smaller. Tighter. Denser.
Until it could fit in the palm of a hand.
Yvain raised his hand toward Seskel, and the void swirled gently above his palm, docile, patient, hungry.
"Do you understand now?" he asked, voice eerily calm.
He didn't need an answer, and Seskel didn't try to give one. But he saw it in the man's face, clearer than words ever could be.
Terror.
Not the kind born from pain or defeat, but a more ancient thing. Primal. A soul-deep confusion masquerading as fear, as if Seskel had looked too long into something that had no right to exist and found himself understood by it in return. He trembled, stark with the unbelief that the universe could unmake itself around a single man.
And the singularity condensed again, becoming no larger than a prayer bead.
Yvain dismissed it with a sharp twist of his fingers, folding space back into coherence. It had done its work.
He would come to regret it.
No sooner had the null been dispelled than Xhaun—that ink-born aberration—howled back into motion. Space had held it briefly, but not destroyed it, and it remembered what had tried to trap it.
It didn't turn on Yvain.
Instead, it twisted like smoke in reverse, throwing itself at Seskel.
"No—!" Yvain breathed.
Too late.
Xhaun pierced through Seskel's throat like a spear of oil and void. The man's scream gurgled and warped as his neck swelled grotesquely, distending with black ichor. His body convulsed, back arching in torment, fingers clawing the air, legs kicking against unseen bindings.
Teeth ruptured from his wrists. A third eye blinked open on his cheek, then a fourth, sideways on his collarbone. His skin pulsed like something gestating beneath it. The clown paint ran like blood.
The mockery of Seskel turned its gaze on Yvain.
And charged.
Yvain barely had time to react. He conjured a ward, a hasty one.
It shattered on impact.
The blow slammed him into the far wall like a thrown doll, stone fracturing behind him with the force. He collapsed, coughing, bones rattled, stars swimming in his eyes. Fingers scrabbled against cold ground as he fought to lift himself.
And in that agonizing moment, he heard her voice in his mind. Celeste. Dry and sharp like winter glass.
"Don't hesitate. No one gets to kill you but me."
He had hesitated.
He had let the moment pass.
Yvain forced himself upright, pain screaming through his ribs as the thing that was once Seskel barreled toward him again.
He threw out a hand, palm forward, fingers splayed. "Vok-tan Zar'qualeth," he whispered, not in any known tongue, but in a language stitched into the Breath by mad prophets and dead gods.
From his hand erupted starfire.
It came out white and hot, pure and absolute, like a thousand suns packed into a furnace.
It hit Seskel full-on.
And the thing he had become didn't just burn. It ceased.
Flesh turned to light. Bone became vapor. The air cracked and howled around it, warped by the sheer intensity of the spell. For a moment, it was as if a sun had bloomed underground. Shadows danced like mad things on the walls, and the smell of death seeped through the tunnel.
And when the starfire dimmed…
There was nothing left of Seskel.
Not even ash.
Only a faint heat that still clung to the stones, and the echo of breath being slowly drawn back into the world.
The coffin shook, sweeping up the breath of the dead mage. Then it opened.