The throne room was a ruin of broken stone and scorched marble.
Every artifact, every calculated strike, every spell Vell had cast lay in smoking fragments around them.
And Endrith stood unchanged.
Silent. Patient. Watching.
Vell reached into his satchel, but this time, his grip wasn't searching for a weapon to throw.
It was searching for something to take.
He had learned the art of taking power long ago, ripping strength from people, creatures, even inanimate relics. It was a skill the desperate and the ruthless alike coveted, and one he used only sparingly.
Taking from the living left them broken, sometimes beyond repair. Taking from artifacts of power was often worse, dangerous, unpredictable, and never without a price. But if the scales were already tipped this far, what use was restraint?
His fingers closed around a crystal, a gem caged in bone, pulsing faintly. He crushed it in his palm without hesitation and drew its essence into himself.
The surge hit instantly, burning through his veins.
Then another artifact: a vial. He uncorked it and drank. The taste was foul beyond measure, but already his muscles tightened, his vision sharpened.
Not enough.
His hand found a mirror, not a trinket, but a slab of black glass as tall as his chest, its surface rippling like oil under moonlight. The iron frame was cold as a grave, and the longer you looked at it, the more it seemed to cut at your eyes.
Vell lifted the mirror, felt its old, wrong weight, and smashed it against the marble floor.
It shattered.
From the jagged frame spilled things.
Shadowy shapes, neither beast nor man, slipped into the room like smoke that hated the light. Their edges blurred, their forms half-seen, but the pressure of their presence struck like a blow to the chest.
A single one of these shades would be threat enough to break a skilled archmage.
He made sure none escaped.
Vell caught them as they slithered and writhed, dragging them to himself with invisible force. The first one burned like ice as it entered him, and he almost stopped. The second left his breath ragged. The third, fourth, fifth, each was a blade sliding under his ribs.
Taking from living things was dangerous enough. Taking from these was another kind of suicide entirely. They had their own hungers, and they would take their payment from him in time.
He could feel them writhing under his skin, clawing at the edges of his mind.
He couldn't take more.
But he still needed something. So he called on Dico magic, his oldest friend.
The word for pure strength was Vis.
He spoke it and poured every spark within him into its meaning until it was a roaring sun. His heartbeat thundered like war drums. The air around him bent and fractured from the sheer pressure of his presence.
The thought came, unbidden: One second more and I'll tear myself apart.
He gave himself that second.
Then he moved.
The unleashed power ripped through the throne room in a single, blinding arc, slamming toward Endrith with the fury of a collapsing star. The floor ruptured beneath Vell's step, the air howled, the golden throne cracked.
And for the first time, Endrith moved.
He didn't block. He didn't evade. He stepped forward, meeting the blow with one hand, the mask blazing as though the sun itself had been poured into it.
The impact tore the air apart with the power of the two strongest mages in the world colliding against each other.