Already exhausted and breathless from nothing more than walking, Azriel bumped against the wall of a corridor lit by silver-flad torches. He leaned his shoulder against the stone and tried to catch his breath.
"Ah, fuck..."
He spat blood onto the floor, then wiped his mouth with a hand already crusted in dried blood.
"She really ticked off..."
He needed a shower.
He stank. He felt filthy. His skin crawled beneath the gri, the blood, the sweat, and whatever else clung to him.
"Fight until the bitter end?"
Azriel gave a bitter, breathless laugh.
"Saying that while having no clue... It really pisses off, dammit..."
He had not expected Celestina’s words to irritate him this badly.
Luckily, the irritation gave him sothing else.
Energy. Not much. But enough.
Fueled by pure spite alone, Azriel pressed his arm against the wall and pushed himself forward.
He started walking again.
Then his vision flickered.
For a mont, the corridor before him changed.
The silver flas burning in the torches surged violently, spilling over the walls and ceiling. In an instant, the entire passage was drowned in silver fire. It consud everything.
The stone.
The air.
Azriel himself.
Then he blinked.
And everything was normal again.
Azriel stopped in his tracks.
For a mont, he hesitated.
Then he summoned the silver flask and drank from it.
"Haa..."
He exhaled softly, a faint sense of relief washing through him. His mind felt a little calr now, or perhaps simply quieter, as he continued walking with the flask in his hand.
When he turned into another corridor, he nearly jumped out of his skin.
Azriel leaped back and almost stumbled as a sharp pain tore through him.
There, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, was another him.
Tears slipped from beneath those closed eyelids.
"Oh, Orpheus..."
His other self whispered the na as though grieving.
Azriel stood still, cautious and unsure.
"You sang until the underworld grew still, until the asphodel bowed and the dead, those dolorous things, forgot the silence of their graves. You carried her na through chthonic halls and breathless stone, past black rivers, past gods with pitiless eyes, past every threshold love was never ant to cross."
’Orpheus... from Greek mythology?’
Azriel recognized the story.
His other self continued.
"Oh, Orpheus. And there she was behind you—Eurydice, soft as a vanished prayer, near enough to wound you, far enough to doubt. Oh, Orpheus, you had one command. Do not look back."
The tears kept falling.
"Oh, Orpheus, why did you? Was the silence too vast? Was her footfall too ghostly, too tenuous, too much like grief pretending to be rcy? Did hope itself beco unbearable when it walked behind you without a voice?"
Azriel felt as if he were being mocked.
Thwarted.
Toyed with.
He gnashed his teeth and walked past himself.
Behind him, his other self continued in that sa sorrowful tone.
"Oh, Orpheus. You turned not because your love was frail, but because it was ravenous. Because love, when starved too long, cannot live on faith alone. It must see. It must know. It must ruin itself against the truth."
Azriel did not want to listen.
But still, in an even quieter voice, he heard the end.
"And in that single, catastrophic glance, she vanished—first into shadow, then into song, then into the imasurable absence your music could never again redeem."
At last, no more words followed. Azriel did not hear his other self behind him anymore.
In fact, he did not even know whether that other self was the sa one he had t at the table in the arena.
Maybe...
Maybe none of them were real.
Azriel scoffed.
Then he took another sip from his flask and kept walking.
"I guess it’s official now..."
He drank once more and released a tired sigh.
"I’ve lost it."
As soon as he said those words, his vision flickered again.
Silver flas consud the corridor once more.
This ti, too, Azriel was swallowed by them.
But nothing burned.
He looked down at himself, at the fire devouring him without heat, without pain.
Then he blinked.
And it was gone.
Oddly enough, Azriel accepted it calmly.
It was strange.
Freakish.
Terrifying, probably.
But he was too ntally exhausted to find the strength to wonder what new, fucked-up thing was happening to him.
So he walked.
Then he blinked again.
Another him stood in the middle of the corridor, arms crossed.
This one, too, looked as if he were mourning so unbearable loss.
Azriel clicked his tongue and kept walking.
But as he looked at that face, his free hand curled into a fist.
The mont his other self opened his mouth, Azriel’s fist shot forward.
"Get out of my head!"
He scread the words in rage.
Then sothing shifted.
Before Azriel could understand what had happened, his fist was lodged in the wall. Cracks spread around it like a cobweb.
His other self stood beside him now, leaning casually against the stone with his arms crossed.
Tears rolled down his face as well.
He watched Azriel with eyes so fragile they looked as if a single touch might shatter them into a thousand pieces.
"Oh, Arthur..."
His other self said.
Azriel pulled his fist back with so effort.
Dust fell from the cracked stone and settled over his knuckles, which throbbed with pain.
He glared at his other self.
His other self did not seem affected by Azriel’s gaze at all.
"You were crowned by a sword no child should have touched, beneath a sky already heavy with augury, while Britain knelt not to a boy, but to the burden hidden in his blood. You built Calot from oaths and candlelight, from bright steel, holy banners, and the impossible belief that n could beco noble if only they sat as equals around a table."
A hollow, disbelieving laugh escaped Azriel’s throat.
’This cannot be real...’
His lips curled with even more disbelief.
"Just... just how many poems are you going to tell ?"
Of course, Azriel knew this story too.
It was famous enough that even an illiterate fool would have heard of it.
"Instead of talking about King Arthur," Azriel said, his voice sharpening, "how about you explain how you know I have less than forty-eight hours left to live?"
His other self, of course, did not answer.
"Oh, Arthur, you fool. For a while, they did. Your knights shone like borrowed stars. Excalibur burned at your side. Guinevere smiled beside you like spring given human form, and Lancelot, your beloved blade, your brother in all but blood, stood nearest your throne with devotion in his eyes and treason sleeping in his heart."
Azriel’s expression tightened.
"Oh, Arthur, did you know? Did so quiet part of you hear the fracture before it split the stone? Did you feel Calot rotting beneath its gold, love turning clandestine, loyalty curdling into sha, prophecy sharpening its teeth in the dark?"
His other self’s voice trembled, yet did not break.
"You were not undone by monsters. Not by dragons. Not by foreign kings or naless wars. You were ruined by the hands you trusted, by the woman you loved, by the son you should never have fathered, by the dream you held so tightly it bled through your fingers."
His other self looked down and murmured, sounding almost heartbroken.
"And at Camlann, beneath that ashen, funereal sky, when Mordred rose before you like your own sin made flesh, did you finally understand? That kingdoms do not die screaming. They die rembering what they wished to be."
Tears continued to fall.
"Oh, Arthur. You struck him down. He opened you in return. And so the king fell, not as a tyrant, not as a saint, but as a weary man at the edge of myth, watching his perfect world collapse into mud, blood, and silence."
A silence followed.
Then his other self spoke again, softer.
"Excalibur returned to the lake. Avalon opened like a wound. And sowhere beyond the mist, the once and future king closed his eyes, still waiting for a country that would never again deserve him."
Azriel sighed and shook his head.
"I don’t understand the point of this..."
There was no point.
None at all.
They were just poems.
Beautiful.
Sad.
And yet...
aningless.
So Azriel gave up and walked away.
That was when he heard his other self whisper, in an inconsolable voice, another na he recognized.
A na that made Azriel stop.
His eyes widened.
"Oh, Lucifer..."
A pause.
Then, softer still,
"Oh, Samael..."
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