By the time the sun knifed through the ragged mouths of torn clouds, the Spire was a scroll of corrections.
Ridges written over. Valleys redrafted. Peaks abridged to summaries of themselves. Where the titans had fallen, amphitheaters lay in place of slopes; where they had knelt, buttresses of bone held up nothing but the idea that once there had been weight here.
Noctis stood on a collar ridge with one foot in a notch he had cut to belong there. Around him, the air was a library of dust motes arguing about gravity. Below him, colossi scrabbled to stand with less of themselves than they had planned to keep. Above him, the crown of the Spire stung with ward light crawling like fire across dry paper.
He didn't breathe harder. The Dragon Heart beat steady, sovereign pulse crushing the idea of fatigue whenever it put up its hand.
He pointed at three titans trying to rebuild a wall out of their own broken ribs and shook his head. Orbitals made that no into definition: five knives threaded where ribs wanted to lock, cut the dovetails off the joints, and left the pieces to shrug at each other and fall apart.
He didn't jump. He stepped off the ridge and trusted the air to remember it owed him. Blood anchors found the memory and nailed it down. He walked a switchback staircase of nothing while a hand the size of a market tried to clap his ghost; he let the clap go through where he had been and arrived where he would be in time to remind a sternum that being two pieces is just as respectable as being one.
"Bloodstorm."
It ripened out of him in a low roll, a weather of knives and pressure that moved like tide and had the manners of an ax. It shaved a hundred yards of surface off anything that hadn't been built by a better word than temporary. It turned ward-script to confetti and taught it to flutter.
He went hack-and-slash mad and precise at once. Cut wrists while wing-splitting jaws. Land on a scapula to heel-kick the owner's neighbor in the temple ridge. Anchor to the air left of a forearm to be at the elbow when the fist arrives at where you were, then open the elbow like a surgeon saving a life you don't believe in. Hook the Reaper in a pelvis loop, twist, and let that twist teach a thigh where the ground is. Spin, low, behind ankles; leave a gift there—Exsanguinate primed to trigger when the weight returns. It returns. It empties. The ground drinks hymn wine and forgets why it was angry.
He carved lines through crowds: slantwise diagonals that began in one rank and finished in the fourth; perfect verticals that bisected a phalanx and left two educated halves; shallow arcs that looked like vanity until their echoes arrived a second later and knocked back everything trying to fill the vacuum he'd made.
He used the battlefield as instrument. He slapped a wing not to hurt a titan but to push dust in a sheet into a leader's eyes; the leader blinked, ward light flowed wrong for a heartbeat, and a heartbeat is all a scythe needs when it believes in itself. He rode falling ribs like sled rails to be there now instead of later. He kicked off a rolling head like a farmer off a barrel, light-foot, laughing, right into the throat of the next problem.
The titans dwindled—not in number (yet) but in confidence. The light between them wobbled. The hymns came crooked. Wards flickered and went out in patches like windows on a street going to sleep one by one.
He let them try one more wall just to be polite, then burned courtesy.
"Blood Wave."
He wrote it big, arm sweeping, hips turning, the Reaper singing so bright even the shadows under his halo winced. The wave went low, took ankles, took knees, took the dignity of anything that thought height fixes everything. A lane opened that had not existed since the gods were young.
He ran it.
At its end, he found a clearing on a shelf of broken ridge where the Spire's crown flattened. Thirty titans stood there in a circle around the highest spine.
They were taller. They were cleaner. The ward-script on them didn't flicker; it pulsed with the mechanical patience of a heart you can set a clock by. Their cores burned white-gold without histrionics, and the holes where eyes might have been stared not at him but at that spine, as if awaiting a permission that wasn't mortal.
Their hands were raised but not aimed.
Noctis slowed to a walk.
Dust hissed at his ankles. His halo dimmed its outer ring so the inner could be seen: sigils in tight rotation, black serpents of shadow coiling through gold, blood threads running like capillaries through script.
He stopped ten strides from the circle.
The thirty did not move. The ground hummed under them. The spine at their center brightened from within, channels in the fossil lighting like veins.
Weather began.
Not wind. Not cloud. Weight. An ambient pressure that suggested we will write the rules and you will thank us. Pebbles lifted. Gravel turned lazy. Noctis's hair lifted off his brow. The ring of his orbitals widened of its own accord, each knife warbling a note as if the air had taken violin lessons from a god who hated sound.
He smiled.
"Good," he said, and rolled his shoulders, scythe lowering into a line that had ended a civilization and been called grace at the time.
He lifted his left hand. The orbitals snapped to three crowns. His right foot slid half a pace, hips setting like a door on true hinges.
"Then sing," Noctis told the thirty, voice low and pleased as if welcoming guests who had finally arrived dressed properly. "I'll cut between the notes."
The thirty cores drew breath they didn't have.
Noctis bared his fangs, halo blazing, four wings rising, and stepped forward into the weather they had chosen to be.
The circle tightened.
Thirty titans stood around the central spine of the Spire, their marrow cores pulsing white-gold with mechanical steadiness, not flickering like the lesser colossi Noctis had already cut down. Where others had groaned as they moved, these moved with silence, joints slotting with an engineer's precision. Where others had swung clubs of bone, these raised forearms that thickened into shields, their marrow light knitting ribs into seamless walls.
Leaders.
War-lords of the Spire. The marrow remembered them, and the marrow obeyed.
Their hymn began as pressure. The air in the circle quivered, flattening to a plane where sound was a hammer. Sigils burned brighter across their ribs and skulls, hexes nested within hexes, geometry that looped back into itself. The sky dimmed above them, clouds pulled into a vortex of lightless gray.
Noctis stepped forward, scythe balanced across his shoulders, wings unfurled wide. The halo behind his head burned so bright that dust motes cast shadows across the ground. Shadows themselves writhed like serpents around the ring of light, their coils forming glyphs no mortal priest could name.
He bared his fangs and whispered, amused, "Good. You're worth killing."
The hymn struck.
Thirty cores exhaled light and intent. It wasn't one voice but thirty braided, each tone locking into the others until the marrow of the world shivered. The ridge beneath their feet sagged, flattened, then groaned back upward as if even stone wanted to kneel.
Noctis raised his left hand.
"Blinding Inversion."
The hymn bent against the halo, its chords unspooling, notes unraveling. What had been harmony came back to the titans as discord—half their hymn turning sideways, stabbing at the seams of their own formation. Two faltered, the perfect geometry on their chests flickering for an instant.
He moved.
Orbiting Arsenal erupted outward. Fifteen knives streaked in spirals, each tracing its own orbit before converging into a triad. They struck three shields in sequence, cutting precise crescents through marrow plate. Sparks of golden marrow fire burst outward like fountains.
Noctis blurred into the gap.
Scythe in both hands, he slashed from hip to shoulder. The edge hummed, marrow light spraying. The titan's chest cracked open, ribcage splitting like a book. Noctis vaulted upward, used the fractured bone as a step, and slammed his wing outward.
The gale of blood feathers cracked another titan's jaw sideways.
They swung as one. Thirty arms came down, bone and ward-script blazing like falling temples. Noctis laughed, twisted, and shot upward in a spiral. His orbitals wove around him in three rings, their glow bending incoming blows away. Predator's Stance drank the shock of one fist, sent it ricocheting down the line into three of its allies.
Hack. Slash. Pivot. Leap.
He landed on a shield ridge, boots digging anchors into marrow script. His scythe retracted into twin Bloodfangs, shorter, faster. He stabbed down between plates, blades grinding through layers of marrow light, carving channels where no gaps had been. The titan howled, staggered.
Noctis vaulted again, orbitals streaking ahead. Five blades braided into a spiral and drilled into a leader's thigh joint. Bone burst outward in molten fragments; the colossus collapsed to one knee. Noctis landed on its shoulder and cut down across its throat. The head fell, a meteor crushing ridges below.
The circle shifted. Twenty-nine remained.
They pressed inward.
Their hymn grew sharper, geometry folding into new layers. The ground beneath them glowed with ward lines, sigils burning up through the stone. The circle of thirty was becoming a cage, each titan's marrow binding to the next.
Noctis's halo flared.
"Eclipse Binding."
Shadow ropes lashed from his orbitals, wrapping elbows and knees. The titans strained, joints grinding, marrow plates splitting under the bindings. He sprinted along one shadow tether, scythe reforming mid-step, and cut upward through a titan's clavicle. The blow carried into its core—light detonated outward, a sun going nova.
Noctis laughed in the blast, wings curling around him as the shockwave rolled past. He burst through the fire and drove his scythe into the chest of another. Blood Wave rippled out, a crimson crescent knocking three leaders back at once, their shields splintering under the force.
The hymn faltered again.
He pressed the opening.
Orbitals became spears, fifteen knives forming three tridents. They shot into shoulders and ribs, pinning titans to each other. Noctis anchored on one spear, vaulted, and spun midair, wings outstretched.
"World-Rend Tempest!"
The scythe carved downward. Reality itself shivered. Space parted in a blinding slash that tore through the circle. Wards cracked, ribs shattered, marrow light bled like rivers. Four titans fell at once, their bodies crumpling into the trenches they had made.
Twenty-five.
The rest roared, their hymn surging louder. They stomped as one. The ground broke, splitting into jagged terraces. Shards of fossilized marrow shot upward like spears, forcing Noctis to weave between them. He darted, wings slapping, scythe flashing in tight arcs. Hack at one spear, slash through another, pivot over a third. He landed on a shard, used it as a springboard, and dove into the chest of another titan.
He ripped its core out in a burst of gold.
Twenty-four.
They began to adapt. Shields overlapped, ward light reinforcing into an unbroken dome. Their hymn hummed steady, weight pressing down, marrow geometry weaving tighter.
Noctis's eyes blazed crimson-gold.
"Blood Flood."
The halo pulsed. From above, a crimson deluge rained down, washing over the circle. The hymn sputtered under the flood, notes drowning in the torrent. Wards hissed, shields cracked. Noctis dove with the storm, scythe carving arcs through weakened plates.
One titan split from crown to pelvis. Another lost both arms in a single sweep. A third staggered back, core sputtering, before an orbital drilled through its skull.
Twenty-one.
The circle tightened again, twenty-one titans pressing inward, their hymn harder, more desperate.
Noctis landed at the center, scythe dripping marrow light, orbitals humming around him. Four wings arched wide, halo blazing brighter than the core of the Spire itself.
He grinned, fangs glinting in the storm of dust and fire.
"Come closer."
The leaders obeyed.
And the circle became a slaughterhouse.
The circle broke on the third breath.
Not because the thirty leaders were fragile—they were the cleanest bone the Spire still remembered—but because Noctis refused to treat a wall as more than a list of angles. He stepped where their hymn told the world to be hard, and because he was harder, the world took his side.
He moved.
Orbiting Arsenal splayed into three crowns and then into a wheel of teeth, fifteen Bloodfangs grinding in counter-rotation as he slid under the first shield and let the wheel eat a crescent from the titan's ribs. Marrow fire sprayed. The leaders tried to fold the geometry shut; Noctis jammed his scythe into the seam and levered, hips turning like a door on the only right hinge.
"Open."
It did. The chest parted down the median like a book, white-gold light bleeding up through the spine like a confession.
He rose, four wings flaring. A palm the size of a plaza came down to make him smaller than the notion of defiance. Predator's Stance drank the blow and spat failure along the arm in three tidy cones; the elbow unlearned its job and hung like a bell's tongue.
Noctis used the sag to run, anchors firing from boot heels and wing-fingers, carving a storm of crimson nails into bone. He vaulted from wrist to shoulder to crown ridge, spun, and raked a wing. The slap cracked the jaw with a sound like a cathedral easing its last stone into place—a lovely sound, if you're building a ruin.
He laughed into the dust. "Next."
They obliged him like soldiers who had been told their king enjoyed music.
The hymn thickened. Not loud—dense. Ward-script crawled across marrow plates in loops within loops, hexes humming into a lattice that made the air gelatinous. Gravity chose favorites. Pebbles circled in slow moons. On the horizon, a freestanding spine wavered, considered a different century, and fell toward it.
Noctis's halo burned whiter at the core. The shadows within it tightened into serpents and then into a crown of black script coiling through gold. He set the Reaper along his forearm and cut not at a body but at the space between two notes.
"Blinding Inversion."
The hymn kinked. Their geometry kinked with it. The dome of pressure they had inflated blew inward like a lung that has learned about knives. Ten leaders wobbled a fraction—enough. He put himself in the fraction.
Hack. Slash. Pivot. Leap. Scythe long, short, long again. Left blade bites the seam where a shield grows into a forearm; right blade kisses the radius and steals a quarter-inch because a quarter-inch multiplied by him is a world that makes sense. Wing slap into a ridge. Anchor. Turn your hips. Now.
"Blood Wave."
The crescent left his scythe and took knees as if knees had been his since he learned to walk. The front line sat down without meaning to. The rear line tried to hold them up and learned that compassion makes poor architecture.
"World-Rend Tempest."
He wrote the cross-cut into the dome they thought was uncuttable. Space asked him politely if he was sure; he nodded. It split. The hymn bled out through the crack, wards crisping at the edges like burned paper. When the cut snapped closed, two leaders were missing half their arguments.
He chased the silence.
Orbitals split into an X of five and five and five. One X became needles and stitched a chest that didn't want to be clothing. The titan's core sputtered, fought for pitch, found none, and went out. The second X became a cage and dropped over a skull; the skull tried to be more than skull and ended as gravel. The third X spun faster than the eye could find and planed a shield-plate until it was a red mirror, then until it was a memory of a mirror, then until it was gone. Noctis stepped through that absence.
He landed on a shoulder. The titan turned its crown ridge into a hammer and tried to headbutt him into fossil. He ducked and cut the hinge that headbutts depend on. The skull hung wrong, ward light leaking from the wrong corners like bad carpentry. He gave it help.
"Exsanguinate."
No shout. Permission. The core came out like water seeks down. He drank it through the scythe, and the white-gold taste of old altar smoke ran under the iron on his tongue. Devotion. Command. Absolution. He swallowed all three and let none of them argue.
Twenty remain.
They pressed tight. Shields dovetailed, marrow plates welding at the seams. Their arms became a colonnade. Their hymn recentered into the spine they guarded, and the spine answered, glowing from within until lines of light climbed its height like veins of a god waking in the rock.
Weather gathered. The air went heavy. The sky lost blue the way a dying man loses the names of countries.
Noctis set his feet. "Bulwark."
Crimson scales flowed across him in panels, shoulder to hip to thigh to shin, a moving fortification that bit the light and made it tasteful. He walked into their weather like a man opting for rain over an umbrella. He lifted the Reaper and carved a neat rectangle of world out of the dome.
It held.
He put another next to it. And a third that overlapped the first two by a hand's width, because he cares about joinery. On the fourth, the dome's skin tore with the gritty scream of old hide.
He stepped through.
They were there—close, trying to crush him with proximity and doctrine. He obliged them by being present. Twin Bloodfangs again, quick now. Left, right, back-cut under a forearm and out along a rib; reverse and gouge the sternum seam; hitch a boot heel in the gap, up; twist at the hip so your spine is a spring; both blades down at the collar and into the chest to pry, because a chest is a door with pretensions.
A leader grabbed him. His fingers closed—a cathedral closing its bell tower around a swallow.
Noctis's halo sang. Sovereign Pulse stepped out of him and asked the hand whether it understood hierarchy. The fingers opened. He fell three feet, landed on palm, and ran, boot anchors punching the lines of the lifeline, wing anchors in the knuckles, laughing because muscle memory is the king's inheritance and he is it.
He punched the Reaper through the wrist from below. The hand left the arm in a sulk and tumbled away, taking three terraces and a stand of firs.
Eighteen.
A trio tried to fold him between their shields. He let them, because timing belongs to the patient. When the plates converged, he braced the scythe across both, pressed, and let the hinge pressure find its own failure. Plates buckled, springs of marrow plate burst like eels in a net, the gap appeared. He fell into it and came out the other side with a throat, because sometimes compromise is murder with manners.
Fifteen.
"Blood Flood."
It rained red. Not blood—his will, liquefied into weather. It washed into joints, filled the little architecture of their doctrine, and made it about him. The hymn wobbled and swallowed itself. The dome sagged. He smiled like a craftsman whose plane has just sung true.
He cut.
Not art now. Efficiency. A path that steps from heart to heart through thirty men and leaves thirty wives with small gods to blame. He laid verticals that never wavered and horizontals that left anyone watching with a new understanding of mercy: it is swift. It is clean. It is absolute. Each strike flowed into balance, into step, into the next strike, a sentence of the body that needed no editor.
Nine.
The spine at the center cracked its husk. Light ran up the column and sprayed from decrees that had been carved into it when the empire that made these engines still believed its gods woke hungry. The nine leaders turned toward that light and tried to pray.
Noctis did not permit prayer.
"Blinding Inversion."
Their hands lowered without telling them. Their ward-script dimmed like windows going out on a block that owes the landlord money. He walked, simply walked, and the nine found their knees not out of fealty but because their geometry said down where once it had said up.
He accepted the posture, and what it gave: necks.
"World-Rend Tempest."
The cross cut hung for a breath, humming like a saw in a bright shop. When it closed, six heads had gone where promises go.
Three remained.
He stood within arm's reach of them. They were beautiful—clean plate, quiet cores, the last good work of a dead engineer. He put his left hand on the nearest sternum, the right hand on the next, and the scythe's heel on the third's hip.
"Open. Yield. Fall."
They obeyed.
Silence took the circle. Weather went out without drama. The sky remembered blue. A wind arrived across the broken peaks like a messenger late enough to be forgiven because he came at all.
Noctis lowered the Reaper. The orbitals spun slow now, orbiting him like thoughts do a mind that has eaten.
He looked out across Spire Peak.
Where there had been one hundred and two—shapes, hymns, weights, objections—there were bodies in stages of becoming landscape again. Ridges chewed flat. Valleys rewritten into amphitheaters and slides. Spine-towers laid horizontal, stairs for a city that would never be built. He had tailored a mountain to fit his appetite.
He breathed once through parted fangs.
"Now."
The feast began.
He didn't kneel. Kings don't kneel to eat. He walked.
The first leader's core pulsed in the ruin of its chest cavity, white-gold flame spilling like a lantern kicked under a table. Noctis set his palm in the light and closed his fingers. The core came away like a hot fruit whose rind had learned to be humble.
He bit it.
Divinity tastes like iron that thinks it's better than you and learns it isn't.
He swallowed. His halo brightened; the shadow serpents around it tightened and then softened, purring against the script. The Blood Sovereign Vein flexed to make room; the dragon lattice accepted the guest; the abyss licked its teeth and decided to stay polite.
He moved to the next. And the next.
Time stretched into a patient geometry: step, lift, drink; step, lift, drink. Orbitals did their work unsupervised, cutting bones into tractable segments, prying plates, unzipping sternums. The Reaper would hum when a joint needed love; he obliged it with a cut quick as a many-years marriage ending in a handshake.