Back in the heart of the burning city, Yvain and the lich, who had once been called Khan, stood face to face in the ruined square. The very air between them trembled, as if unwilling to exist in the space where two such forces met.
Their Breaths clashed in silence, two oceans of power grinding against each other in a pressure that bent the stone beneath their feet and darkened the sky above. Lanterns flickered. The firelight from the crumbling banquet hall guttered low, smothered by their opposing auras.
Yvain moved first.
"Issthar!" he called, his voice ringing like a bell through shattered time.
The void answered.
Behind him, space cracked, like glass. From the fracture emerged a being not meant for mortal realms.
A towering creature unfolded from the wound in reality, its many wings stretching wide, casting long, twisting shadows. Its limbs were wrong, arms upon arms upon arms, layered like draped robes, ending in fingers that curled in impossible ways. It stood upright, but its legs ended in grasping hands, not feet.
Its head was avian and strange: a sharp, obsidian beak and a wreath of feathered tendrils that shimmered between colors not seen in normal light.
Yvain did not glance back. He did not need to. "Stall him." His voice was firm.
Issthar responded not with sound but with movement. Its wings beat once, and the gust shattered windows along the street. The beast ascended, then surged forward, gliding just above the cobblestone like a blade of godly judgment.
The lich raised one hand. "An Outsider," he muttered. "You bargain with the great dark?"
Issthar descended upon the lich with a shriek like a thousand dying birds, a sound not made by lungs but by vibrating wings and twisting geometry. Its many arms reached out, fingers curled into jagged talons, each coated in glistening voidlight.
The lich did not flinch. It raised a skeletal hand, and with it, conjured a wall of fused bone and sinew, pulled from the remnants of the estate's graveyard. The barrier rose high, its surface twitching with half-formed faces and teeth.
Issthar tore through it.
Its talons shredded the wall like rotted parchment, splinters of bone flying in every direction. The moment it pierced the barrier, the beast slammed into the lich with the force of a falling star. They collided with a wet, grinding crack that echoed across the square.
The lich was hurled backward, crashing through a statue of Saint Zorina in a burst of shattered marble and dust. A moment later, he rose from the rubble, jaw broken, bone exposed beneath hanging strips of torn skin. One eye socket wept black ichor that sizzled where it touched the stone.
He raised both arms now, and the dead answered.
Graves burst open across the city. From every crack in the earth, skeletal hands reached skyward. Dozens, then hundreds of undead poured from the city's underbelly. Some fresh, their flesh still soft and weeping, others ancient and mummified, wearing rusted armor, bearing broken spears.
"Fall, creature of the void!" the lich bellowed.
Issthar responded by twisting midair and unleashing its wings.
The feathers, if they could be called that, extended like blades, serrated edges of vibrating reality. It spun, a divine buzzsaw, slicing through the first wave of undead like they were paper dolls soaked in oil. Limbs flew. Heads popped. Guts unraveled in wet, flapping ropes across the cobbled stones.
The lich hurled a spear of necrotic flame.
It struck Issthar in the chest, bursting in a detonation of green-black fire. Flesh boiled. Voidlight sputtered. For a moment, the creature recoiled, wings curled tight.
The lich charged, clawing at the air as it summoned tendrils of spectral bone that whipped forward like serpents. They lashed around one of Issthar's arms, then a second, then a third.
It was bound.
With a guttural, hateful sound, the lich lunged, and bit. His jaw distended grotesquely, cracking open far wider than humanly possible. He latched onto Issthar's shoulder, his fangs, jagged and bone-white, sank deep.
Black ichor oozed from the wound, hissing like acid. The beast screamed, an aurora of distorted light flaring from its open beak.
But it was not done. Issthar's lower arms surged forward. One jammed a curved talon through the lich's ribs. Another gripped the skull and twisted. There was a sickening crunch as cervical bones popped like dry stalks. A third hand grabbed the lich by the spine and ripped down, tearing away half his back in a spray of marrow and shrieking tissue.
The lich staggered back, clutching his torn body.
"Enough," it hissed.
It released a pulse of raw death, a necrotic nova that melted flesh, shattered stone, and killed every bird within a mile. Even Issthar was knocked back, its void-flesh steaming, wings frayed.
Issthar's six wings beat rapidly and the cratered stones beneath it exploded outward in a burst of pressure.
The creature ascended, dragging voidlight behind it like a comet's tail. The air buckled, folding in on itself as it surged upward. The lich followed without hesitation, summoning a spiraling pillar of bone that lifted him skyward. His robes, tattered and slick with necrotic energy, flared around him like the wings of a dark seraph.
Above the ruined city, beneath a bruised and fractured sky, the two immortals collided again, this time in the air.
Issthar shrieked, soundless yet deafening, and dove.
The lich met it, cloaking himself in a storm of bone blades and phantom crows that screamed with the voices of the damned. Their collision high above Adwini was thunderous. The heavens cracked, and lightning split the clouds.
Below, thousands could see the fight, those who had not yet fled, those watching from rooftops, towers, and distant fields. They looked up and saw a nightmare written across the firmament.
Yvain watched the heavens for a long moment, stormlight flickering across his eyes as Issthar struggled against the soul-forged chains, and the lich raised the skybreaker of undead wrath. The battle roared like a wrathful god above him, but below, in the shattered courtyard of the Baron's estate, there was stillness. Silence.
He knelt and picked up a discarded spear, its haft scorched, the metalhead cracked but still sharp enough for what he intended.
With slow, deliberate care, he began to draw in the sand and ash. Curves. Lines. Runes. Spirals upon spirals, sigils nested within each other like thoughts folded in dreams.
All disciplines are equal, they said. It was a mantra often repeated at the Magisterium, and in theory, it was true. But in battle, theory withered.
Alchemy and augury were not suited for warring, at least not directly.
Most believed augury to be the art of seers, of readers of bones and stars. They were wrong.
They were so very wrong.
Once, Celeste had asked him plainly, "Which of your disciplines is strongest?"
He'd hesitated then, expecting himself to say Conjuration, perhaps Necromancy.
"Augury." He said after much thought.
True augury was not mere foresight, it was the manipulation of reality through awareness of its alternatives. It was the stitching of possibility into causality. It was the understanding that time was neither line nor circle, but web. And those who saw the strands… could pull them.
A woman named Sarai Vinterglass, an augur of terrifying ambition, had torn a hole in her own timeline to correct a childhood sorrow. And though she succeeded, she unraveled the rest of her life like thread from a shroud. She died in madness, but her will had reshaped a river of time.
This was the weight of augury.
As bone and void clashed above, Yvain's runes took form below. Glowing faintly now, the spear's edge hissing as it cut through grit and powdered bone.
When he was finished, he stood at the center, a point amid many spiraling geometries, some sharp and angular, others flowing like water.
The Breath inside him pulsed once.
Then again, louder.
Reality began to quiver at the edges, possibilities thrumming like strings on a harp.
Yvain closed his eyes, breathing deep. In that breath, he tasted the air from five futures. The salt of death. The dust of ruin. The ash of glory. The iron tang of sacrifice.
He opened his eyes, and they were no longer his.
The pupils had vanished, drowned in a milk-white glow that pulsed with the weight of hidden knowledge. Not the glow of light, but of revelation. His dark hair, once sable as midnight with white tendrils, bled into alabaster, strand by strand, as though time itself had aged him in a breath.
He looked down at the broken spear, splintered wood, a cracked iron head, warped from battle and fire. A thing discarded, forgotten. Unremarkable.
But as his fingers closed around it, something ancient stirred.
"I name thee Lichkiller," he whispered.
And the world agreed.
Possibility bent, and the spear became what it was meant to be in another branch of time. In another life.
A weapon born to kill the unkillable.
He turned his gaze to the heavens, to where the lich floated within his necrotic monolith, preparing to crush Issthar beneath a collapsing sky of dead suns.
Then, without flourish or chant, Yvain hurled the spear skyward.
It did not travel.
It vanished.
A blink. A flash. A shudder in the fabric of cause.
And then—
High above, in the breath between the lich's triumph and Issthar's annihilation, the spear appeared, exactly where it needed to be.
The lich stared at it, and in that moment, for the first time in centuries, the lich felt something cold crawl through the hollow where his heart used to be.
Dread.
This was not just a weapon, it was the perfected answer to his existence, the one rejection the world had fashioned specifically for him.
Then came Issthar, wings spread like prophecy, catching the weapon mid-flight in one taloned grip, and thrusting it down. The spear screamed as it sank into the lich's chest, trailing behind it a storm of unraveling futures, every possible victory the lich might have once claimed, now fraying into ash.
And the Lichkiller, true to its name, achieved its singular destiny.
A destiny written mere moments ago by the will of an augur.
Then, as all such tools must, the spear crumbled to dust, its purpose fulfilled, its timeline sealed. It withered not from age or damage, but from completion. There was nothing left for it to do.
The lich fell, his corpse crashing into the earth like a fallen star, impact shaking the ruins of the Baron's estate and raising a cloud of dust and silence.
Even the dead paused.