Poseidon moved first, and the plain moved with him.
The ground beneath his water-wrapped legs softened into mud, then into a shallow flood. He was pulling every drop of moisture out of the soil and the air, and the grass around him went pale and brittle as it gave itself up. He lifted his trident, and the sky answered. A bruised, heavy cloud swelled out of nowhere over the battlefield, rain began to fall in thick silver sheets, and the whole plain smelled suddenly of salt and deep, cold ocean.
"Come, then!" Poseidon's voice rolled over the water like a tide. "Let the sea teach you what a god is!"
The first wave came low and fast. It rose from his waist in a curling wall and rushed at Finn with a roar, and Finn was already gone. In his Fianna knight form he was a streak of golden-white light, his small frame blurred by speed, his spear Fortia trailing a bright line through the rain. He came in from the left and drove the point straight into Poseidon's ribs.
The water rippled. A shield of liquid had risen in front of the strike, thick as stone and clear as glass, and Fortia sank into it up to the shaft and stopped. Finn felt the pressure crushing against his arms, wrenched the spear free, and kicked off backward as a dozen whips of water lashed through the place where he had been standing.
Behind the god, the shadows peeled apart.
Igris came out of the dark in total silence, crimson cape snapping, the lightning sword of Baran blazing in his hands. He swung it in a wide arc, and blue-white current screamed across the plain. The blade bit deep into Poseidon's back and lightning poured through his body of living water, flashing along every droplet, lighting the god from inside like a lantern.
Poseidon looked down at himself with something close to boredom.
"Salt water, shadow," he said. "I made it. It carries what I allow it to carry."
He turned, and a single backhand of the sea hit Igris like a falling tower. The shadow knight was flung across the field, tumbling through mud and rain, and before he could rise the water closed around him in a sphere. It squeezed. Igris's armor groaned, cracked, then split apart in a burst of black mist.
The mist reformed fifty paces away. Igris stood, whole again, greatsword lifted, helmet revealing nothing.
"Persistent," Poseidon said. "How tedious."
He slammed his trident into the earth.
The storm above them thickened, and the rain turned to spears. Hundreds of them. Every drop in the air froze into a long glittering needle of water hardened beyond steel, floating in rows, pointing at the two generals. Poseidon flicked two fingers, and they fell like a hailstorm of lances. Finn spun his spear and met them in a whirling circle of gold, each strike a ringing crack, but too many slipped through. One tore along his thigh. Another grazed his shoulder. He bit down on the pain and kept moving.
Igris met his half of the volley with raw lightning, sweeping the blade in great arcs that exploded needles into harmless mist. But the god was not finished. Water rose from the flooded ground in a thick pillar behind him and split at the top into the shape of a serpent, vast and coiling, with a mouth full of jagged waves. It struck. Finn dove under the open jaws, rolled, and came up with his spear pointed straight up into the beast's throat, and the serpent burst apart in spray and fell back into the flood. Another rose to take its place.
On the northern wall, no one cheered.
Soldiers, archers, and mages stood shoulder to shoulder, frozen in the pouring rain, watching the two Generals of Orario fight one god. The wave that Poseidon sent next was taller than the wall itself, a curling green mountain of water that rose over the plain and blotted out the horizon. A young archer near the battlements dropped his bow without noticing. An old sergeant beside him gripped the stone so hard his knuckles went white.
Finn saw it coming. He gathered everything he had, planted his feet, and thrust Fortia forward.
"Mac an Luin!"
A spiraling lance of golden water ripped out of his spear, the same water that had once defeated a Monarch of Frost, and it tore straight into the heart of the wave. For one breath it held. Poseidon only smiled, lifted his hand, and the golden water bent. It curled back on itself, folded into the greater wave, and vanished into the god's own flood like a coin dropped into the sea.
"Water is mine, little knight," Poseidon said gently. "All of it."
The wave kept coming.
Igris stepped in front of it.
He raised the lightning sword with both hands, shadows streaming off his shoulders, and brought it down in a single cut that split the heavens. Blue-white lightning tore up the length of the wave, and the mountain of water divided in two. Each half crashed into the plain on either side of the city, shaking the ground, drenching the walls, but not one drop touched the stones themselves.
The soldiers on the wall breathed again. But it was a small breath, and nothing like hope.
Because Poseidon was still standing, and the wounds Finn and Igris had landed on him were sealing as they watched. The gashes in his arms closed. The slashes across his ribs knitted themselves back into smooth, glimmering water. They had cut him, burned him, flooded his body with lightning, and he had shrugged it all off. Finn's thigh was bleeding into the mud. Igris's helmet was cracked down one side.
How do you kill a god?
Finn asked himself the question for the hundredth time. He had run the numbers in his head, a thousand strategies he had used against a thousand enemies, and not one of them ended with a dead god lying in the mud. The people on the walls were asking the same question. He could feel it, the fear creeping through their silence, a whole city beginning to believe that the gods were simply stronger.
Then Finn laughed.
It was a low, easy sound, and it startled even him a little. Igris stepped back, lowering his sword, and turned his helmeted face toward his companion.
"Wow," Finn said, lowering Fortia to his side and wiping the rain from his eyes. "I really can't win this. It's a shame."
Poseidon blinked. Then his face split into a slow, delighted grin, high on arrogance, high on the sight of a mortal finally admitting what he was.
"You have skill, mortal," the god said grandly. "I will grant you that. Kneel. Kiss my feet, and I will let you serve me."
"Serve you?"
Finn laughed again, harder this time, his shoulders shaking, his golden-white eyes bright with something sharp and merry.
"Forgive me, sir. I don't usually underestimate my enemies, and I don't usually disrespect gods. But what you just said is extremely foolish."
"If you think you've won," he added, still smiling, "I have news for you."
A warmth settled along his arm that had not been there a moment before. It crept down through his shoulder into his hand and into the shaft of his spear, the way a hand rests on a friend's shoulder in the dark. He knew whose it was. Somewhere beyond the horizon, inside a black rectangle in the sky, the God King was fighting twenty gods at once, and he had still found a moment to reach out.
"I said I can't win," Finn said softly. "But our God King certainly can. And he will guide all of us to win."
Fortia ignited.
Black energy poured over the blade, rimmed with white lines like the edges of a candle flame. Beside him, the lightning sword of Baran went dark and then caught the same fire. When Poseidon finally looked closer, he saw what it truly was. It was not energy at all.
It was black fire.
"What is this?" the god muttered. His grin was already slipping. "Some mortal trick."
The two Generals attacked together.
Poseidon raised his shield of water, thick as a fortress wall, and Fortia went through it like a hot knife through wax. The black flame did not push the water aside or boil it away. It erased it. Where the fire touched, the water ceased to exist, and no spray fell, no steam rose. The shield simply stopped being there. Poseidon threw a wave at the strike and the wave died. He summoned a serpent of water and it flickered out of being the moment the flame passed over it, as though it had never been made.
Then Fortia's tip grazed his shoulder.
He felt it. Not the body he wore, not the avatar of flesh and water, but something deeper, the thing that sat underneath. His divine self, his name, his place in the order of the world, flinched and shrank away as the black flame bit into it. Poseidon staggered back with a gasp. He had never been hurt in that place before.
"Wha... How? Ho..."
His thoughts scattered. He snatched up his trident, jabbed it blindly at Finn, and the prongs lit with black fire as soon as the spear touched them. The weapon he had called out of the sea began to unravel, water falling away in ragged ribbons. He stumbled, gasping, spun around to retreat, and found Igris standing right behind him.
The shadow knight did not speak. He drove the lightning sword through the great wave of water wrapped around Poseidon's back, through the god's spine, and out of his chest in a single clean thrust. Black fire licked out of the wound and crawled across his divine skin.
Poseidon's eyes went wide. He looked down at the blade's point sticking out of him, then up at the pouring rain.
"No," he whispered. "No. I can't die. I should not die. I am a god. A GOD! Please." His voice cracked and climbed into a scream. "PLEASE, STOP! SPA..."
Finn's spear flashed.
It struck the trident from the god's trembling hand, spinning it away into the mud. Then Fortia swept back in a single clean arc, and Poseidon's head left his shoulders.
It rolled across the flooded grass, the mouth still shaped around the last word, and came to rest in the mud with open eyes.
The headless body stood for one long second. Then it began to glow.
Blue light welled out of every seam, brilliant and cold, as if the sea itself were rising behind the god's skin. The body lifted off the ground, drawing the severed head up beside it, and hung motionless in the falling rain. Then it burst.
Divinity exploded across the sky in a wave of shimmering blue, rolling out in every direction, washing across the plain, the walls, the clouds. The storm above them thinned and cleared. The flood sank into the earth. It was the death of a god, and the world announced it to everyone with eyes to see.
On the plain, Hera stopped in the middle of a strike.
She had been bearing down on Alcy and Ais, dagger raised, a smile on her face, and the light of Poseidon's end washed over her and made her turn white. "A god died," she whispered. "A god... died."
Across the field, Thor lowered his hammer by an inch. His hard, scarred face did not change, but his eyes followed the fading blue light up into the sky, and he said quietly to no one, "Poseidon has fallen." His grip tightened. He was not weak, and he did not intend to fall as easily.
But on the northern wall, the silence broke.
It started with the old sergeant. He let go of the stone, raised both hands over his head, and let out a roar that cracked in his throat. The young archer beside him joined in. Then the line beside them, and the line beyond that, until the entire wall was shouting, weeping, hugging, pounding their fists against the battlements in the pouring light.
For the first time since the gods had descended on Orario, the people of the city truly believed that they could win.
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