0074. Rift.

Vice stood at the edge of the rift, fighting the pain that scoured through his body like wildfire. Blood slicked his fingers, making his grip unsteady on the hilt of his blade. Across the rift, Delian smiled at him, hateful and cruel. The light from the split in the world’s skin shone blue and silver against his face, turning him into a sharp-edged sculpture of stone and night.

“Still standing, little boy?” Elegant fingers swept out and curled against the air; the pain in Vice’s limbs knotted, threatening to rip him apart fiber by fiber, bone by bone. He grit his teeth but held his ground, his knees shaking, his breaths rattling cold and harsh down his throat.

“I’m already dead,” he spat. “You can’t kill me again.”

“I can enjoy trying.” Delian’s laughter flowed across the chill concrete rooftop like cracking ice. His fingers tightened into a fist, and Vice’s legs buckled as agony crippled him.

He fell to one knee with a snarling cry; the long, slender sword slipped from numb fingers and clattered to the roof, its sigil-marked blade gleaming like liquid moonlight. Vice stared at it blankly, struggling to breathe; his reflection stared back, washed pallid by the silvered surface. “Y-you…you w-won’t…”

“I won’t?” Delian echoed, mocking and cruel, and laughed again. “You’re an idiot, boy.” Vice closed his eyes against the sudden surge of light as the rift pulsed, swelled, its power hot and electric on the air, on his skin, choking with the scent of ozone and magic. “I already have.”

“No!” Vice gathered the last of his strength, grappled for his sword, and lunged.

Delian’s laughter rose, a physical thing that slammed into him like a shockwave. Still Vice fought even as the pain sang through him, playing every note in his body until it shrilled in vicious, debilitating harmony. Step by step he dragged closer to the rift, his steps scraping on concrete, his mind filled with the livid pulse of feral magic as he drew upon the last of his strength. Power poured from his fingers, rolled over the length of his blade in sizzling arcs of crimson light. He raised it with trembling arms, thrust it towards the rift–

“Not this time, boy,” Delian hissed, and breathed a word that shook the very anchors of reality with each forbidden syllable. The rift thundered, crackled, howled and shivered with terrible magic that sent ripples pouring across the plane of matter, warping the very world before Vice’s eyes. Time slowed, seconds ticking by in eternities as he flung himself at the light-bleeding chasm, saw with terrible clarity as it expanded to fill his world, felt its light tearing at his flesh and burning down to the bone. He thought he heard a drum beating, thick bass distant and sonorous and slow, measuring out the last few seconds of his unlife.

“It’s over,” Delian whispered into that last frozen moment. “I win.”

The drum beat one last time, a crashing, cracking roar that tore outwards in a rippling blast of light. Time moved again, quickly, too quickly; Vice threw an arm up to shield himself and raised his voice to speak his own words of power, words of salvation.

The light tore his voice from his throat, his breath from his body. It poured over him, senseless and hungry. White eclipsed his vision, drowning even the pain. The triumphant, reverberating bellow of unleashed magic filled his mind, shattered him, broke him.

The last thing he heard was his own anguished screams.