The Heart was barely recognisable now. Craters pocked the floor. Ice jutted at wrong angles. Patches of grey-black flame burned stubbornly on bare stone with nothing left to eat. The air itself was charged with spent power, rippling like heat over a road in summer.
Three figures stood in the middle of it, and each of them burned differently.
Lucifer's sword was still singing, its note rising and falling as he moved. The pearl-coloured aura of his joined Yin and Yang flowed between his body and his blade until there was no seam between them. His God's Eyes, still crusted with dried blood, followed everything.
Jack had changed again. He'd stopped pretending altogether. The grey-black of the Abyssal Gift had taken over his fire, and every construct he made was more intricate than the last, bending light and weight around it as his two Gifts drew closer and closer to becoming one.
And then there was Arthur.
