The copy moved like a memory that had been polished too many times.
Every gesture was almost his.
The way it tilted its head.
The way its shoulders rolled.
Even the way it stood with its weight a little more on the left leg.
But the eyes were wrong.
Too smooth.
No tiredness.
No cracks.
No Lysa.
*You climbed so far just to stand where I can reach,* the King said through the double's mouth. *You could have run. You always run. Why stop now?*
Kairn laughed once, short and harsh.
"Because you followed," he said. "And you don't know when to let go."
The web around the plateau pulsed.
Kairn felt the lines slither along the stone, under his boots, up into the poles. The half-formed Gate behind the avatar shivered, tower-shape and relay-architecture flickering in and out.
If that finished, the King would be *here* in a way he hadn't been allowed to be since Kairn bit him.
No.
Not happening.
"Kairn," Lysa murmured behind him. "We can't let him sing from here. Cut fast, or he'll puppeteer everyone on this peak."
"I know," Kairn said.
He stepped forward.
The King's copy did the same, as if they were mirrors approaching each other.
The first chain hit like a thrown spear.
Invisible, but he felt it.
A command woven into the air.
*Stop.*
His joints locked.
Not his muscles.
The part underneath—the web the King had once laid through his nerves.
He heard the mine.
He smelled stone and dust and fear.
He saw himself younger, kneeling in mud, collar biting skin.
*Stop.*
He had obeyed that word a thousand times.
He had been beaten when he didn't.
He had been broken when he tried.
He had bit back anyway.
He found that moment.
That flash in the ribs when Lysa's beat had cut through, when he'd said 'no' and meant it in a way that changed something fundamental.
He grabbed it.
He shoved it down the chain.
*No.*
The order hit his refusal and buckled.
His knees wobbled.
He forced a step.
The King's eyes narrowed.
*You think you are new,* the avatar said. *You are nothing but a bad line in my song.*
"Funny," Kairn said. "I was thinking you're just a bad echo in mine."
Chains rippled out in a fan.
Not at him.
At the others.
He felt them like cords brushing past.
*Drop.* Aimed at Barra.
*Sleep.* Aimed at Joren.
*Turn around and walk away.* Aimed at Lysa and Fen.
"Lysa!" he barked.
She was already moving.
Her hands slammed against her thighs.
Her staff.
Her chest.
Her beat shattered into deliberate, chaotic noise.
Da-dum—dum—da—dum-dum—da—
No pattern.
No hook.
The chains slid toward their targets, hit her rhythm, and skidded.
Barra staggered, spear dipping, but didn't fall.
Joren's eyes went half-lidded, then snapped open, teeth bared.
Fen took one involuntary step back, then swore and stepped forward again, knives flashing into his hands.
"Get out of my head, you second-rate godsong," Lysa snarled.
The avatar's lip curled.
*You teach them to be discord,* it said. *You make them harder to arrange. Annoying.*
"Good," she said.
The Gate pulsed.
The air warped.
The King wasn't trying to push an entire body through yet.
He didn't have the leverage.
But he was forcing more of his *presence* into this sky, layering it over the peak.
The plateau flickered between mountain and tower, stone and chain.
If Kairn let that continue, reality itself here would be half-his, half-King's, and everything inside would be meat for the web.
He ran.
The avatar didn't.
It simply *was* suddenly where Kairn was going, distance collapsing like bad perspective.
One moment, Kairn was ten paces away.
The next, the copy stood an arm's length in front of him, grinning with his mouth.
Kairn's Brand flared instinctively.
Ash-fire burst from his skin, a shockwave.
The avatar caught it in a net of invisible chains, the flames curling and knotting into a pattern, muting, muffling.
Kairn felt his own power redirected toward him, back-pressure slamming into his chest.
He staggered, coughing.
*You bite with tools I made,* the King said. *You really believed I wouldn't learn from that?*
"Learn this," Kairn rasped.
He stepped *sideways*.
Not physically.
Inside.
He stopped pushing power out through the Brand.
He pushed it through Greenfold's mark instead.
Roots.
Sap.
Weight.
He flared wrong.
For a heartbeat, the plateau smelled like wet earth and leafmold.
The chains trying to catch his fire hit that and tangled, snagging on thorns that weren't supposed to exist in the King's design.
The redirected ash sputtered and fizzled.
Kairn drove forward.
He hit his own double like colliding with a wall of cold glass.
The avatar's hands closed around his wrists.
Chains crawled out of its fingers, trying to wrap his bones from the inside.
He let the dragon out.
Not fully.
Enough.
Heat exploded under his skin.
Scales flashed along his forearms, rough and sharp, shredding the chain-lines as they tried to anchor.
His own eyes met the copy's.
Ash burned in one.
The other, normal, reflected a web instead of a pupil.
He grinned at himself.
Then he bit.
He leaned in and sank metaphorical teeth into the King's presence sitting behind those eyes.
It was like chewing on lightning.
The avatar screamed.
Not with his throat.
With the air.
The Gate bucked.
The plateau shook.
Cracks spidered through the stone.
"Kairn!" Barra shouted.
"Hold him!" Kairn roared back, not sure if he meant the King or himself.
Chains whipped out, this time not as commands but as *weapons*—thick, heavy, lashing at his legs, his spine, his ribs.
He flared ash-fire defensively, burning some.
He let Greenfold's root push others aside.
He felt Null lurk, hungry, offering to erase whole chunks of the problem.
No.
Not yet.
If he let Null eat too much here, there might not be a mountain left for anyone to stand on.
The avatar shifted tactics.
It stopped trying to bind his body.
It went for his head.
Memories slammed into him—his own, twisted.
Lysa bound to a chain, singing the King's song while blood dripped from her lips.
Tam kneeling with a collar on, eyes empty.
Hale strapped to a tower, her hall burning below.
The King's voice murmured in his ear, soft as poison.
*You created all of this by breaking what you were told to hold. Every death. Every crack. Every road that bleeds. This is your fault. Stop fighting, and I will make it mean something. Stop, and I will take your guilt and file it into usefulness.*
He saw Farbridge under web-shadow.
He saw Greenfold's trees wrapped in chain.
He saw Mornspire as a full tower, his own body hung at the top like a warning.
Lysa's beat faltered.
Just for a heartbeat.
Kairn's grip slipped.
The King poured more images in, faster, harder, like someone shoving his head under black water.
He couldn't breathe.
He couldn't think.
He was drowning in *what-ifs* and *this-is-your-fault*.
Something hit him.
Physically.
Hard.
He hit stone.
His ears rang.
He realized he was on his back, staring at sky.
The avatar loomed over him.
Chains pinned his arms.
His chest.
His throat.
They didn't feel like metal.
They felt like promises and obligations and *you said you would*.
He couldn't move.
He could barely blink.
He felt the web reaching down.
Not just the King's thread.
The Gate.
It wanted to rewrite him.
To scrape out everything that said "no" and leave only "yes, my lord."
He'd been there before.
He'd crawled out once.
He didn't know if he could again.
The King leaned in, his own face lit from within by web-light.
*Last chance,* the avatar whispered. *Stop biting. Be my tooth in this sky. I will give you roads and you will walk them in my name. You will not have to choose. I will choose for you. Doesn't that sound like peace?*
Kairn's vision tunneled.
His lungs screamed.
His heart hammered.
Somewhere far away, he heard Lysa shouting his name.
Fen cursing.
Barra roaring.
Metal on stone.
He couldn't do anything.
He was pinned.
Helpless.
He hated it.
He *hated* it.
Hated the mine.
Hated the tower.
Hated the chains.
Hated the King.
Hated himself for ever having been small enough to kneel.
A hand closed over his.
Not physically.
Inside.
Lysa's beat slammed through him.
Not the careful, tactical rhythms she used to jam signals.
The one from the ribs.
The raw, defiant, "this is yours" beat.
Da-dum.
Da-dum.
Da-dum.
Her voice tore through the web-noise.
"Get up," she snarled. "We didn't come this far for you to join his choir again."
Greenfold's weight pushed with it, roots grinding against chains.
The dragon roared, offended that anything else thought it could collar *its* rider.
The engine hummed higher, data flashing through Kairn's nerves—a thousand micro-choices, paths, outcomes.
It showed him something.
If he stopped fighting, yes, the King would wrap him.
Use him.
Quiet him.
It would hurt less.
For him.
For a while.
And then everyone else would pay.
He chose.
He screamed.
Not a word.
Just a sound, ripped from his chest, carrying everything he refused to let the King file away.
He let Null bite.
Not at the mountain.
At the chains in his head.
At the part of the web that had used his own memories as weapons.
The Null doesn't cut clean.
It erases.
He drove it into the connect-lines the King was using.
He didn't just push the commands away.
He ate the pathways they rode.
Pain exploded behind his eyes.
For a heartbeat, he was sure he'd just lobotomized himself.
The King screamed.
The avatar jolted.
Half the chains pinning Kairn vanished.
Not broke.
*Stopped existing.*
Kairn's body convulsed.
He shoved.
Brand-flare, dragon-heat, Greenfold-root, Null-bite, all at once.
It was a mess.
It was not a song.
It was an *accident*.
It was his.
The avatar flew backward as if hit by an avalanche.
It slammed into one of the old signal-poles.
The crystal at its top shattered.
The web-lines wrapped around it snapped.
The Gate flickered, tower-shape stuttering.
The plateau buckled.
Barra grabbed a jut of rock and bellowed.
"Move!" he shouted at Fen and Joren.
They dove as a crack ripped across the stone where they'd been standing.
The King's presence flared in rage.
*You little nothing,* he roared, voice tearing sky. *You tear parts of yourself just to spite me! You will kill your own mind to deny me what is mine!*
"Yeah," Kairn gasped, dragging himself upright on shaking arms. "That's the point."
He pushed to his feet.
His vision doubled.
One of the copies showed a plateau with web and tower.
The other showed bare stone and poles.
He blinked until they mostly lined up.
The avatar climbed out of the rubble of the shattered pole.
Half its face was gone, burned away to show shifting chains underneath.
It looked less like him now.
More like what it was: a patch of web given shape.
Lysa stumbled to his side.
Blood ran from one nostril.
"You tore something," she hissed. "In you."
He couldn't deny it.
A part of his mind felt… blank.
Quiet.
Like a memory he *knew* had existed but couldn't picture.
He'd given Null real skin this time.
He'd paid for it.
"I'll fix it later," he rasped.
She grabbed his collar and shook him.
"You better," she said.
The avatar swung a hand.
Chains lashed out, not as invisible threads this time but as glowing links, thick and dense.
Joren threw himself into them, axes flashing.
He couldn't cut commands.
He could cut *manifestations*.
Steel bit through glowing metal.
The links shattered, dissolving into static.
Barra hurled his spear like a bolt of lightning.
It punched through the avatar's chest, pinning it briefly to a half-real tower wall.
Fen darted in low, knives stabbing for joints where chain met chain.
He wasn't cutting the King.
He was disrupting *shape*.
Every strike made the avatar's form blur.
Kairn staggered forward.
The Gate behind the avatar was still stuttering, half-open.
He could see flashes through it—not the old world, not exactly.
The web-core.
The place he'd have to reach later.
The King's true self writ there in lines and light.
If this Gate finished, it would be a door both ways.
He could use that.
Later.
If he survived this.
The avatar ripped itself off Barra's spear.
The wound closed instantly, chains knitting.
*Enough,* the King snarled.
The web around the plateau *tightened*.
The air thinned even further.
The world tilted.
For a heartbeat, Kairn's heart stopped.
Literally.
His chest clenched.
No beat.
No breath.
The King squeezed his *life* web.
He felt his soul, or whatever passed for it, start to slide.
Lysa's scream was distant.
Fen's curse faded.
Barra's roar became a muffled rumble.
He was dying.
Not metaphorically.
Not "down on the floor, wait for a heal."
His body had simply stopped.
The King leaned close in that near-death stillness.
*See?* he whispered. *One squeeze. I can stop all this noise. All this pain. All this weight. I can make it never have been.*
Time stretched.
Kairn's ash-eye saw the web.
Not just the King's.
His own.
The lines he'd drawn.
Farbridge.
Greenfold.
Emberwatch.
The hall.
Lysa.
Tam.
Sia.
Mar.
Barra.
Hale.
The kids in the mine he hadn't saved.
The people in Maereth's valley.
His father's rough hand.
His mother's laugh, faint and half-remembered.
If he let go, all those lines wouldn't stop existing.
They'd just go on *without* the knot he'd become.
The King offered erasure disguised as mercy.
Null was erasure too.
He'd just used it to cut himself.
Difference: who chooses.
The King's erasure came from above.
Null came from him.
If he died now, it would be because the King decided.
He refused.
With the last ragged scrap of will before his fading went all the way out, he shoved *Greenfold* into his heart.
Roots.
Weight.
*Stay.*
His chest convulsed.
Pain slammed back in.
His heart stuttered.
Then beat.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Lysa's beat crashed on top of it like someone banging pots.
Da-dum.
Da-dum.
He dragged in a breath that felt like being stabbed with knives.
The avatar jerked, surprised.
"You don't get to decide when I stop," Kairn rasped, voice shredded. "That's my job."
He wasn't strong.
He was barely standing.
But for the first time since the peak, the King looked… uncertain.
Not beaten.
Not afraid.
But off-balance.
Kairn smiled, bloody and cracked.
"Bad news," he said. "You're not the only god with a hand on this wire anymore."
He lifted his marked hand.
Greenfold's sap-light flared.
Somewhere far away, a Hall Stone hummed.
Somewhere else, a dragon opened one eye.
The engine spun up.
The Null lurked, waiting for the moment he'd let it eat more.
The next move would decide whether Mornspire became a tower or a grave.
He stepped into the avatar's reach one more time.