Yvain would have preferred the quiet sanctuary of the library, surrounded by tomes and silence, but Celeste had insisted, insisted with that same pointed charm that made refusal feel like cowardice. So, they made their way to the training hall instead, their boots echoing along the stone corridor like the ticking of an unseen clock.
The hall itself was vast, the air sharp with the scent of oil and old sweat. Its floor was lacquered wood, worn smooth by generations of drills and duels. Along the side walls, rows of ancient weaponry gleamed, swords, staves, cruelly curved daggers, and hooked spears, all relics of a bloodstained legacy. At the far end loomed a portrait of Vaor the Sewn, one of their more tragic forebears, who had famously stitched shut his own fate only to drown in a vat of mercury, seeking to defy destiny through death.
Both cousins changed into sparring garments of black and ash-grey, tight-fitting yet fluid, tailored for speed and spellwork alike. Their long hair, hers white as moonlight, his black streaked with winter, was drawn into tight buns, ceremonial and practical.
Celeste stepped barefoot into the center of the hall, lithe and lethal, her eyes bright with mischief and promise. "Are you ready to fight?" she asked, her voice silk over steel. "Or will you simply brood and bleed like last time?"
Yvain said nothing. Instead, he inhaled deeply.
The temperature dropped. The wood beneath their feet creaked, as though chilled by an unseen frost. Around them, the Breath of the World stirred, a metaphysical wind, the invisible script upon which all thaumaturgy was penned. It howled faintly in the bones of the room, responding to him.
First, he warded his mind, tightening it into a fortress of will, for his cousin was an enchantress of rare and terrifying skill. Then he cast a second spell, subtle and coiled like a serpent. The shadows beneath his feet twitched in anticipation, waiting to be unbound.
Celeste grinned wider. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Poor cousin," she said. "Still afraid of what your hands can do."
She struck first.
She moved like silk unspooling in a storm, graceful, fluid, and utterly lethal. Her fingers splayed wide, and her mouth shaped forbidden syllables in Old Enochian, the language of the fallen. "Vi Ashenel."
The moment the words touched the air, Yvain flinched. His breath caught. She had aimed for his memory, that most fragile of sanctums.
He snapped back with a whispered counterword, an augur's incantation that folded the moment inward. For a single heartbeat, time slowed. He twisted aside and raised a wall of armored ice, conjured in a breathless blur of gesture and thought.
It shattered instantly. Her voice followed like a thrown blade, and in it was the precision of her art. She had not broken his wall with strength, but with truth. The spell unraveled the quiet deceptions he clung to, slicing through every self-comforting lie with surgical precision.
"Still hiding behind walls, Yvain?" Celeste taunted, her voice a whip. "Be a god, or get out of my way."
They both knew the truth, though neither would ever say it aloud. Yvain's mastery outstripped hers. Not just in breadth, but in depth. He had delved into arcana most feared to speak aloud, poured over lost grimoires until his dreams were haunted by languages long dead.
But for all his knowledge, he hesitated. Always. He clung to it like a scholar clutching parchment in a storm, reluctant to unleash the full weight of his learning. And in that restraint, Celeste eclipsed him utterly.
She lived her power. Reckless. Radiant. Unafraid.
Yvain stepped forward, the air trembling around him. His dark eyes flared with quiet fury, and he whispered a phrase, a phrase only he knew. A thread of speech in a dialect older than Babel, drawn from a codex sealed in skin.
Reality bent. For one breathless instant, Celeste's mouth vanished from her face, erased clean, as if it had never been there at all.
She reeled backward, her features warping and shifting. Her voice emerged fragmented and layered, as if spoken by a chorus of ghosts through water. "You can't silence me, cousin," she growled, her mouth reforming as her glamour twisted reality back into place.
Then she lunged again, faster than a blink, her hand outstretched with killing intent.
Yvain's voice rang clear this time, a deep and echoing intonation that vibrated the stone beneath their feet.
"Arms of Issthar."
The shadows under him burst forth like ink boiling through parchment, twelve arms, black and veiny, rotting in smoke and sorrow. They leapt toward Celeste, grasping, clawing, their joints creaking with otherworldly hunger.
But just before they touched her, he hesitated.
He saw her. Not the combatant. Not the creature born of madness and lineage. He saw Celeste, his cousin, his betrothed. The girl who once wept beside him during a lesson too cruel. The woman who still sometimes looked at him as though they were not monsters.
And so, he pulled back.
The spell faltered.
She did not, crashing into him with the force of a star, her palm striking his warded chest.
He fell to a knee. "You win again," he said, voice low, not bitter, but resigned. As if he had expected nothing less.
"I always will," she whispered, stooping before him. "Until you choose to lose everything else. Including me."
For a heartbeat, silence held the room. It was the silence that followed old grief, the silence before a war that had not yet begun. Then she leaned forward and kissed his temple.
And without another word, she rose and walked away.
He lay there for a long while, unmoving, his breath slowly steadying in the aftermath of the duel. The training hall was quiet now, the Breath of the World once more still, the shadows curled tight around him like tired animals. Only the faint creak of timber and the distant hush of wind through the high spire accompanied his thoughts.
He thought of himself.
Of the boy raised in a tower of ghosts and whispers. Of the scholar-prince who studied a hundred dead languages but barely spoke his own truth. Of the blood in his veins, sorcerous, monstrous, divine.
He thought of his lineage.
The old tales claimed that one of his mortal foremothers, some say a priestess, others a queen, had seduced Samyaza, chief among the Grigori, the Watchers who defied heaven and taught humanity the forbidden arts. From that union had come a line of kings too potent for the world to bear, wielders of the black arts, rulers who called down fire from stars and shaped kingdoms like clay.
And in time, they broke the world.
Yvain had read the stories. Studied them. Memorized them. He had recited his genealogy seven hundred generations deep, as Vaelha demanded, until his tongue bled with names long buried.
But now, as he lay there with his bones aching and Celeste's final words echoing in his mind, all that knowledge felt like ashes.
He had not lived the world. Only studied it. Watched it through the lens of ink and prophecy, always from behind enchanted glass.
And perhaps—no, certainly—such learning was flawed.
Truth was not found in books alone, nor power in restraint without purpose. He saw now the shape of what had been growing inside him for months, perhaps years. A disquiet, a question, a hunger.
He had to leave.