Lionhead pushed open the massive doors to the throne room. The air inside was wrong. Thick. Stale. The court was empty. Only two figures stood before the throne where his brother should have been.
He knew instantly. The man wearing his brother's face was not Aldric.
"What did you do to Aldric?" Lionhead's voice was a low rumble, his gaze fixed on the imposter.
The figure turned. It was a man in dark, regal robes, his face handsome but blurred at the edges, like a painting left in the rain. Beside him stood a woman, pale-skinned with dark, spiraling horns and a cold, detached expression.
"You are brimming with golden lines," the man said, his voice like slow-cracking stone. "Threads of structure, law, consequence. You must be Order. An Absolute Concept taken flesh. A shame. You will have to die so it can return to its natural state."
"You are still a child," the woman added, her tone unnervingly gentle, like a mother scolding a toddler. "I can offer you an alternative. Become my child. I will separate you from your concept. The pain will only last a century."
The man, Feredin, shook his head in mild annoyance. "You know that's impossible, Azrathiel. You cannot separate something from its own essence. That is Order. In the flesh."
Lionhead wasn't listening to their debate. In his vision, golden lines of text—clear, logical, and absolute—were arranging themselves, fed by his very nature.
[THREAT ANALYSIS: INITIATED]
[SUBJECT: FEREDIN BLACKCROWN]
[DESIGNATION: NIGHT REGALIA - KING WITHOUT A KINGDOM]
[CORE CONCEPT: GOLDEN ROT / USURPATION]
[WEAKNESS: DISORDER. CHAOS. THE UNPLANNED.]
[CONCLUSION: A CANCER. REQUIRES EXCISION.]
[SUBJECT: AZRATHIEL, THE DARK MATRON]
[DESIGNATION: NIGHT REGALIA - BREEDER/CREATOR]
[CORE CONCEPT: ABYSSAL SANCTUM / CORRUPTION OF POTENTIAL]
[WEAKNESS: STERILITY. NULLIFICATION OF CREATION.]
[CONCLUSION: A BROKEN WOMB. REQUIRES SEALING.]
Lionhead's eyes narrowed. So that's what they were. Cosmic pests.
"You have both underestimated what we are," a new voice said from the entrance.
Everyone turned.
Adam stood there, hands in his pockets, looking bored.
"Adam?" Lionhead said, startled.
"No, dickhead. I'm here."
Wham.
A fist connected with Lionhead's jaw from the side he hadn't been looking at. The force was tremendous, clean, and perfectly unexpected. It broke his perfect guard, his perfect posture. He flew across the room towards the entrance.
Alex stood there, catching him with one arm, barely shifting under the impact. "I'm Alex. Adam's twin. Try to keep up."
Lionhead shook his head, the world righting itself. He glared past Adam to the impostor on the throne.
"So," Adam's voice cut through his daze. Adam was now standing between him and the throne, his back to the Regalia members. "Why do you want to kill your niece?"
"What are you talking about?" Lionhead growled, getting to his feet. "Wait… you mean Elizabeth is being targeted?"
"Bingo," Adam said, not turning around. "Someone paid the Guild to smoke her. Money came from northern bullion. Sound familiar?"
Lionhead's blood went cold, then hot. He locked eyes with the thing wearing his brother's face. "This is the last time I am going to ask. What did you do to my brother, Feredin Blackcrown?"
Feredin's blurred face seemed to melt a little, a drip of gold sliding down his cheek. "Aldric? He was… uncooperative. His face, however, is useful."
"Didn't see that twist," Adam muttered, finally turning to get a proper look at the two cosmic beings.
"Three conceptual beings," Feredin mused, his voice gaining a metallic hum. "Order. Unknown concept. Existence. A trifecta of fundamental principles. This is more than we hoped for, Azrathiel."
"My children will feast well," Azrathiel replied, her gentle tone now laced with a hungry chill. "Their flesh will make strong homunculi. Their blood will birth new generals."
"My flesh? My blood?" Adam said, a sick, wide grin spreading across his face. "You think that's food for your kids? You're a sick woman. And I've got just the right cure for sick things."
He didn't wait for a reply.
Adam moved. Not at Feredin, but at Azrathiel. He became a blur of negation, a streak of erasure aimed at the Dark Matron.
Azrathiel didn't flinch. She raised a hand, and a halo of inverted light—dark at the core, white at the edges—bloomed around her. "Your strength becomes your weakness."
The halo pulsed as Adam entered its radius. His erasure field, the power that unmade things, suddenly flickered and reversed. Instead of negating the space around him, it began to solidify it, to over-create, trapping him in a rapidly crystallizing cage of his own distorted power.
"Predictable," Azrathiel said softly.
A golden blur shot past Adam. Lionhead. He didn't attack Azrathiel. He slammed a fist into the crystallizing cage around Adam. He didn't hit to break it. He hit to organize it.
The chaotic, runaway creation shuddered. Its wild growth stuttered, then followed a new, imposed pattern. It formed bars, then a door, then dissolved along clean, logical lines of failure. Adam stepped out of the collapsing structure, grinning at Lionhead. "Thanks."
"She turns your power against you. Do not use your primary concept directly on her," Lionhead said, his voice clipped as his system fed him tactical updates. "Attack the space she is not protecting."
Meanwhile, Alex had engaged Feredin. The King Without a Kingdom simply pointed a finger, and the marble floor at Alex's feet turned into a seeping, black-gold sludge that crawled upward, trying to dissolve him into the melt.
Alex didn't retreat. He pointed back. "Be."
The air around the sludge became more real, more solid, than the sludge itself. It was like pressing two opposing realities together. The sludge was forced into a defined shape—a puddle, then a tile, then a harmless, inert slab of discolored stone. Feredin's mask dripped faster.
"Annoying," Feredin muttered. He raised both hands. The very authority of the throne room—the concept of kingship, of command that had soaked into the stones for centuries—curdled and bent towards him. He was going to declare them dead by royal decree.
"Not in my house," Lionhead roared.
He didn't counter with power. He countermanded with law. He was Order. He was the structure upon which kingship itself was built. The usurped authority Feredin wielded slammed into the immovable object of Lionhead's innate dominion. The conflicting commands created a screaming tear in reality above the throne.
Azrathiel took advantage of the distraction. She clasped her hands as if in prayer. "From my womb, be born."
The shadows at her feet bled and bulged. Twisted, pale forms began to pull themselves free—homunculi with too many limbs and jaws, crafted not from clay, but from stolen fragments of power and life-force. They screeched, a sound that hurt the mind, and surged forward.
Adam looked at the charging aberrations and laughed. "Kids! I brought a gift!"
He didn't attack them. He opened his hand towards them and unmade the concept of their creation.
It wasn't destruction. It was revocation.
The homunculi didn't die. They un-birthed. Their forms reversed, limbs sucking back into torsos, torsos collapsing into the bleeding shadows they came from, the shadows draining dry into nothing. They were erased from the end of their existence to the beginning.
Azrathiel staggered, a flicker of pain crossing her serene face. "You… you undo creation?"
"I undo everything, lady," Adam said, already moving towards her again.
Feredin saw his partner falter. With a sound of tearing metal, he shed the melting face of Aldric. Underneath was not a face, but a shifting, hollow golden mask, featureless except for two dark slits. His form expanded, robes dissolving into wisps of corrosive, gilded mist. "Enough of this."
He spoke a single word, heavy with finality. "Kneel."
The word was a coronation of decay, a command for the universe itself to enforce their end.
The pressure was immense. The stone beneath them cracked. The air became poison.
Lionhead gritted his teeth, his bones creaking. He forced his head up. "I. Do. Not. Kneel." Each word was a law he wrote into the screaming air, holding back the cosmic decree.
Alex was beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder. "And I say you exist." He poured the raw concept of Being into Lionhead, reinforcing his defiance, making his resistance an absolute fact.
Adam, unaffected by commands meant for things that were, walked straight through the crushing pressure towards Feredin. "Your turn."
He reached for the golden mask.
Before he could touch it, Feredin's form dissolved entirely into the gilded mist, which recoiled and flowed towards Azrathiel. She opened her arms, and the mist flowed into a new, jagged portal that ripped open behind her.
"This world is marked," Feredin's voice echoed from the void. "The Regalia does not retreat. We recalibrate. Your concepts are noted. We will return with the appropriate… countermeasures."
Azrathiel gave them one last, chillingly maternal look. "You make such interesting children. I will craft special ones just for you."
She stepped backward into the portal.
It snapped shut, leaving the throne room in ruins, the corrosive mist fading, and the oppressive weight gone.
Silence, heavy and damaged, settled.
Lionhead was breathing hard, his knuckles bloody. Alex lowered his hand, his expression grim.
Adam stood where the portal had been, his hand still outstretched. He slowly lowered it.
"They're gone," Lionhead stated.
"For now," Alex said. "They weren't trying to win. They were assessing."
Adam turned, his grin long gone. "They know what we are now. And they didn't seem all that scared."
Lionhead walked to the empty throne, staring at the spot where his brother's face had melted away. "Aldric…"
"If this Feredin guy took his face, your brother is probably dead," Adam said, blunt as a hammer.
"I know," Lionhead said, his voice hollow. He turned to look at the twins. "Elizabeth. You said she's a target. Is she safe?"
"As safe as she can be with Becky watching her," Adam said. "But if these Regalia freaks are involved, 'safe' doesn't mean much."
Lionhead's eyes, hard and resolved, met Adam's. The old rivalry, the street hatred, was still there, simmering under the surface. But it was overshadowed by something bigger.
"Then we have a common problem," Lionhead said.
"how ironic, I still want to kill you though." Adam replied.
Alex looked from his brother to his oldest enemy, a weary understanding in his eyes. "The Night Regalia hunts Concepts. They just declared war on three of us. And they won't be coming back alone."
The three of them stood in the wrecked throne room, an unstable alliance forged in the silence after the storm.