The silence between heartbeats stretched into eternity as the two versions of Kaelion faced each other in the tower's belly.
The air between them crackled with the weight of unspoken laws. Kaelion's double stood motionless, pristine white robes untouched by the tower's weeping walls, his uncorrupted fingers tracing idle patterns in the thick air. Each movement left behind faint silver trails that lingered like smoke.
"You don't even know why you're fighting," the double said, his voice smooth where Kaelion's was ragged. "Just a wounded animal lashing out."
Kaelion adjusted his grip on the Oblivion Sceptre, feeling the archivist's threads squirm beneath his skin in response. "I know exactly what you are."
The double's smile was a knife wound. "Do you? Then say it."
Before Kaelion could respond, the attack came, not as a physical blow, but as an unraveling of his very history.
The double's hand moved in a scribe's precise gesture, fingers plucking at the threads of memory. Suddenly Kaelion was eight years old again, standing in the Scriptorium's library, his small hands struggling to hold the heavy tome his father had given him. The memory flickered as his father's proud smile dissolving, the book's pages emptying, the warmth of that moment leaching away into nothingness.
"You see?" The double stepped closer as Kaelion gasped, the loss like a punch to the gut. "This is why you'll lose. You still care about what was taken."
Kaelion's silver-threaded arm reacted before he did. The filaments lashed out, embedding themselves in the tower's fleshy walls. Reality shuddered, and suddenly the memory reshaped itself not his father giving him a book, but pressing the hilt of a dagger into his palm, whispering battle instructions instead of scholarly wisdom.
The double staggered back, surprise flashing across his perfect features. "You'd corrupt even that?"
"Better corrupted than gone," Kaelion growled, and struck.
The Oblivion Sceptre arced through the air, its black crystal humming with pent-up annihilation. His double barely dodged, the weapon's edge grazing his cheek and where it touched, pristine skin blackened and cracked like old parchment.
"You always were too sentimental," the double spat, touching his wounded face. Silver blood welled between his fingers. With a sudden violent motion, he ripped a handful of pages from the empty air itself and hurled them at Kaelion.
Each page became a law,
Let his lungs forget breath
Let his blood refuse to flow
Let his name unwrite itself
Kaelion's body locked in place, his throat closing, his heartbeat stuttering. Darkness crowded the edges of his vision. Then,
His shadow moved.
The severed darkness flowed up his legs like rising floodwater, absorbing the lethal laws. It pulsed grotesquely with each absorption, its form becoming unstable.
"Too much", it whispered in his sister's voice. "Can't hold..."
The explosion of released energy sent both Kaelions flying in opposite directions. Kaelion crashed through layers of reality, the tower dissolving around him.
They stood in the moment before creation.
The infinite blankness stretched in all directions, with all the possibility. The First Scribe's tools floated between them, the knife, the inkwell, the hungry parchment.
His double recovered first. "You don't belong here," he hissed, lunging for the knife.
Kaelion was slower but smarter. Instead of reaching for a weapon, he drove the Oblivion Sceptre straight into the parchment's waiting maw.
The scream that followed shattered the void.
His double froze mid-step, eyes widening in genuine terror. "No! you can't..."
Kaelion leaned close, his breath stirring the silver hair at his double's temple. "I remember now," he whispered. "You're not what I could have been."
He spoke the syllable from the well.
"You're what they wanted me to be."
The world folded inward, and when it unfolded again.
Kaelion stood alone.
The crown lay at his feet.
His shadow was gone.
And the tower's walls bore one final message, written in something darker than blood,
"You were always the better monster."