[CHAPTER 36- THE END OF WAR, XORATH AND ZOKRAKS DEAD]
Xorath moved without preamble, like a predator that had learned to speak only through violence. The bruise-blue of his face was mapped with old fights; his gaze, a single thing now, had the concentration of a planet on a collision course. Zokraks pivoted, monstrous smile splitting his features into living geography, and for a breath the world between them thinned to a single narrow corridor of intent.
"You think we end with bruises?" Zokraks taunted, voice grinding like distant plates. "You think this is the ledger you owed me?"
"I count with less sentiment," Xorath replied, and then his hand was gone—fast, precise, surgical. He closed his fist and struck at Zokraks' face with the motion of a comet. The blow was a statement: flesh and bone answered and an eye answered with a sound like glass being unthreaded.
Zokraks' right eye — a black opal of old conquests — popped free of socket and arced through the battlefield like a small, vengeful moon. It left a well of raw tissue where perception had been. Pain painted new lines across Zokraks' countenance, but the creature barely registered it; a laugh, broken and wet, crawled out of his throat.
"You butcher," Zokraks snarled, wiping the slick from his cheek with what might once have been courtesy. "You take what titans guard and you call it justice."
Xorath said nothing. He only watched the pupil-planet spin and fall, watched Zokraks' hands twitch with the reflex of a god that had been taught sudden stoicism. For a moment the battlefield tasted of copper and the smell of old prayers.
Zokraks' lips tightened. With movements that were part ritual and part animal, he reached forward and found Xorath's head with both hands. Fingers like oiled levers eased behind the ears and then, with a twist that sounded like chromosomes rearranging, he ripped them free. Ears tore from cartilage as if plucked from maps; blood and hearing fell away together.
Xorath staggered, hands flying to the empty hollows at the sides of his skull. The world had narrowed to the slam of heart and the thud of blood. For a second he was other—rudimentary and furious. There was a noise in him like a temple being stripped of its idols.
"I keep what I need," Zokraks said, and in the absence of one eye and the other's ears, his voice carried with an obscene clarity. "You struck first. I answer with subtraction."
"You think you've subtracted enough?" Xorath rasped, touching the place where his ears had been as if to recall a vanished geography. He drew breath and tasted the metal of the moment. "You mistake removal for advantage."
They both drew spells like breathing. Zokraks' hands moved, slow and deliberate, tracing a ring of fingers in the air. The ring gathered around him like a court of moons, silver and patient. He chanted with a voice that folded like iron into silk: "God Ring."
"God Ring," he said again, not asking but announcing. A halo formed — not cosmetic, but juridical — a circumference of law and decree. The ring wrapped the space between them like a leash made of authority. It hummed with claims older than empires, with the smell of decrees written in bone.
Xorath did not flinch. He let blood from his ear drip along the line of his jaw and drew his own sigil with a hand that had lost its left companion. He spoke the name as if tasting a bitter root: "Bissaper."
"Bissaper," he repeated, and from the syllable came a pressure like distilled silence. The spell was less ornament than instrument, a blade of negative space that wanted to excise rather than carve. It moved like a surgeon's lullaby.
The two magics met between them with the reluctance of tectonic plates. God Ring arrived first, a law that struck like a hammer and then revealed its teeth. The ring's arc unrolled across Xorath's exposed skin and the air around his left arm grew thin as parchment. Paper and decree beat at the limb; reality obeyed the circumference and consented to a new geometry.
Bissaper struck with a contrary cunning. The spell folded upon itself and aimed like a scalpel for the places where laws bind flesh. But God Ring was a majority, a judge with a hammer; its will declared the left hand a public thing, subject to adjudication. The ring's verdict was swift and blunt. With the sound of a bell and a bone-snap, Xorath's left hand cleaved from his wrist. It came away like a paragraph torn from a book.
"No!" Xorath howled, the cry a ragged eclipse across a battlefield that preferred nouns to mercy. The severed hand tumbled end over end, a small tragedy with nails and blood and handwriting.
Zokraks threw his head back and laughed, a long wet sound like thunder marinated in bile. "Justice," he crowed. "Look how the law strips you, editor. You wanted margins, I gave you an excision."
Xorath's face twisted in an expression that was not merely pain. The loss was an argument; it was a recalculation. He tasted grief and then quicksilver turned to motive. With a single functioning hand — the right — he blurred.
Where Xorath moved next, light itself seemed to cheat. He accelerated in a line that scraped the edges of perception. He was a thought made flesh, a shard of purpose finding fulfillment. The right hand became a piston of will. He crossed the distance to Zokraks in what could only be called betrayal of tempo; his speed was not wind but decision.
Before Zokraks could finish his laugh, Xorath's one-hand strike found the jugular of momentum in a place most adversaries keep as furniture: the leg. He seized Zokraks' thigh with the force of a collapsing star and tore.
The leg gave like a moral. Bone snapped and muscle unfurled; sinew and cordage protested in languages no longer used. Zokraks' screech was brilliant, a high-sprung note that cleaved through the laughter and became the new punctuation. Pain rewired features into new geometry; the creature staggered, crumpled, and then—driven more by will than by structure—continued to fight.
"You bastard," Zokraks spat, voice ragged and jagged. Blood poured where none should have. "You take what you need."
"I take what you give me," Xorath said, breathing hard, every exhale a sharpened clause. "You hand me opportunities."
They resumed, and the fight turned into a catalog of desperate economies. Each move stitched a wound into a token and then spent the token to buy another sequence of violence. Zokraks, on three limbs now, used the remaining leg to twist and lurch; he planted the stump and found leverage in memory. His arms were working engines of spite.
"Do you feel lighter?" Xorath asked, sort of incredulous, sort of cruel.
"Lighter?" Zokraks snorted, one hand patting the place where his leg had been as if to reassure anatomy. "I feel honest."
"You feel venal," Xorath said. He moved, even injured as he was, with the rhythm of someone who had rehearsed catastrophe. He struck, parried, and left marks like marginalia across Zokraks' exposed flesh.
The battlefield was an anatomy lesson. Blood and spirit braided into motifs. Bissaper had cut enough to make him adapt; God Ring had taken its punishment and its prize. Each spell simmered in the air like aftertaste.
At some brutal cusp of the fight, Zokraks found purchase. He lunged, hands opening with the hunger of contracts. For a moment everything narrowed and the fight was all mouth. He drove both palms into Xorath's chest, fingers plunging past muscle and ligament in a way that made the air itself flinch. The rings of breath around them fractured.
Xorath felt claws of bone sink toward his sternum, felt the abrasive taste of another's claim on his innards. He countered in the only way left to him: with a single desperate reciprocation of violence. His right hand — the one remaining — dove with the resolution of a last law and found the thin window at Zokraks' front. He thrust.
Xorath's fist found a chamber and filled it. For a clean, obscene second, Xorath's hand was planted in Zokraks' heart, a living question lodged where life makes claims. The organ beat around fingers like a drum, and the sound took up space between them like a proclamation.
Zokraks' palms had already rooted themselves inside Xorath's chest, digging, scouring, seeking purchase. Fingers splayed, elbows anchored; he pressed until ribs softened to bargaining. He had two hands inside a single chest, not gentle but juridical, and he used them to lever Xorath into a place of vulnerability. He laughed, a sound torn and bright. "I own this paragraph," he said, breath ragged with oxygen and triumph.
Xorath's free hand tightened in Zokraks' heart. It was not merely a grip but a claim: he held the pulse and through it he held the right to be bitter. Pain rolled across both faces; they were mirrors of each other, both surprised and unsurprised by the symmetry.
"You think this will end us?" Xorath rasped, breath leaking around the hands that filled him.
Zokraks' fingers dug deeper until the nails bit into tissue. "I do not think in ends," he replied, a smile that was almost prayer. "I think in signatures."
The two of them hung in that impossible balance: both maimed, both mutilators, both with intimate mortgages on the other's inside. Blood ran from many sutures and pooled in little liturgies around their feet. Xorath's left sleeve fluttered from an absent hand; Zokraks' one remaining leg trembled like a bell.
They locked eyes across the space their injuries had carved. For an instant the world outside them was a rumor; their present was nothing but the press of pain and the deep stubbornness of survival. Fingers closed and opened in chest and heart, each palpitation a metronome counting out a kind of treaty neither would sign.
"Say my name," Zokraks rasped, the hand in Xorath's chest finding purchase on an old seam.
"No," Xorath breathed. "Not yet."
They tightened their grips as if to keep that refusal from slipping away. The chapter finished in the rawness of that hold: Zokraks with both hands buried inside Xorath's chest and Xorath's one remaining hand planted inside Zokraks' heart. The violence held them like punctuation between sentences, and then the page closed.