The world was dying around them.
From the fractured walls of the arena, winds screamed like the cries of a mourning devil. The last breath of Khial's sun had fled the canyon sky above, buried in roiling clouds of dust and blood. Sand became ash. Ash became glass. Everything trembled beneath the force of a calamity birthed by man, but animated now by something far worse.
Benjamin stood at the center of it.
His boots cracked the ground where they landed. The silver-gold shimmer of his aura pulsed in rhythm with his heart—that steady, defiant cadence that refused to break. His hair whipped around him, white and weightless, as his body crackled with symbols alive with resonance. Beside him, Atty flared his wings wide, a wall of shimmering feathers and divine muscle, his talons carving the sand to polished obsidian. They breathed together. Moved together. Thought as one.
Not enough.
Across the arena, Boyan hovered—but he was no longer Boyan.
His left eye, once bloodied, now glowed like a storm moon, split with lines of violet and rot. His right arm, once lost, was remade entirely in wind: translucent, coiling, alive with screaming air. His chest heaved. His breath carried the scent of iron and ancient fire. He smiled like a man who had seen the evil of the world naked and come back speaking in tongues.
"Malachros," Benjamin whispered.
Not quite. Malachros was within him, certainly. But Boyan had not broken. He had absorbed it. Transcended it. And now, he stood like Benjamin did: a fusion of will and spirit, of man and something more.
"Do you see now?" Boyan's voice cracked like thunder across the arena, his one working eye locked on Benjamin. "We are not enemies. We are twins divided by fate. You, a vessel of Atty. I, a crucible of Malachros. Together we carry the law—the truth of this world."
"You are deluded. You carry a curse," Benjamin replied. "You were baptized in decay."
Boyan laughed—short, not cruel. "And yet I endured it. You think your gift is pure? Then let me show you what a man can become when he does not fear his shadows."
He opened his arms. The wind howled. The dust swirled. And from the boiling air above him, darkness descended like oil.
Malachros was there.
It did not speak with words. It was essence, seeping into Boyan's soul like ink into water. Symbols, dark and shifting, danced across his skin, across his wind-arm, down his spine. A baptism of corruption.
Boyan shuddered.
Then stood taller.
His form changed. A crown of curved horns sprouted from his head. His robes burned away, replaced by armor formed from condensed pressure and roiling current. His body grew by inches, then a head, until he towered even over Atty. The wind around him was not simply air now—it was law given flesh, compressed and shaped by knowledge Malachros had whispered into his marrow.
Benjamin felt it.
So did Atty.
They had no choice.
Ben reached into Atty, into the bond deeper than friendship, deeper than blood. Transference was never just connection. It was unification. Souls not walking side by side—but folding into each other. Risking everything.
I trust you, Ben said.
Atty did not speak. He opened.
They burned. They tore. They fused.
The light burst from the arena's core like a second sunrise. The blast sent screams ricocheting through the ruined corridors of the canyon. Survivors clung to broken stone, their lungs tight with awe. The air stilled. The pressure dropped.
And from the center of that blinding, rising wind, a shape emerged.
Humanoid.
But also more.
A figure stood now where Benjamin had been, taller by a head. Plumes shimmered from his shoulders like regal banners. Wings not quite wings traced his back—not for flight, but expression, tendrils of golden-silver light that folded and moved with thought. His face was still Ben's, but nobler, jaw sharpened, eyes like suns split into galaxies. His hands bore talons of silver bone; his feet crushed glass into sand. Every movement left what seemed like afterimages, every breath carried the weight of purpose.
He had become something Khial had never seen once more.
"Let's end this," he said.
They moved.
Like thunder cracks. Like colliding worlds. Every step shattered stone. Every strike remade the battlefield. Ben's new form flowed like a weapon dreamt of by poets, a creature of martial rhythm, born of myth and memory. Boyan countered with sheer force, raw pressure guided by honed instinct, his wind-arm a cyclone of death.
Blow met blow. Neither gave.
Boyan roared. "You see it too, don't you? The world wants this! It needs destruction to be reborn!"
"Then you never understood it," Ben replied, voice echoing with layered tones. Atty's essence spoke beneath his own. "Creation is not destruction. It is surrender. Trust. Meaning from choice."
Boyan snarled. "You're still just a boy. Let me show you how gods are made."
They collided again, and the arena cracked beneath them. Pillars fell. Stone ruptured. Slaves and soldiers fled from the quaking perimeter, eyes wide with horror and awe.
Above, the sky bent.
Winds began to pull inward again.
Ben felt it—Malachros wasn't done. The curse was rising. It had latched onto Boyan completely now. And it wanted out.
Ben dropped low, slid beneath a tornado-kick of compressed air, and sliced across Boyan's ribs. Blood sprayed, hissed, burned the air with vapor.
"You're fading," Ben said.
Boyan laughed again. Then screamed. Not in pain—in release.
The wind collapsed.
Malachros surged upward. Like an inverted lightning bolt, dark light erupted from Boyan's spine. It took form, not quite body, not quite idea. A tendril of the great corruption, reaching to escape the flesh it had infected. To find another host.
Ben knew it instantly.
If it gets out— we die.
He rushed in.
His hand, taloned and glowing, slammed onto Boyan's chest—not a clean strike, but a desperate grapple, raw and scraping as the wind-arm thrashed to throw him off. This wasn't a calculated move. It was instinct, sharpened by survival and something deeper—a link forged through months of study, battle, failure.
Ben wasn't sealing anything yet. He was holding it in place.
Boyan convulsed, a guttural roar tearing from his throat as Malachros fought to surface fully. The glyphs of corruption shimmered across Boyan's body like a sickness made visible, writhing beneath the skin. The force of it rattled Ben's bones; he could feel Malachros pushing—pressing against the seams of the man's spirit, trying to erupt like a punctured lung.
Ben gritted his teeth, sweat mixing with blood. He dove into the Transference bond—not the clean unity he'd mastered, but something jagged, unstable, half-finished. His mind clawed through the fragments of knowledge he'd absorbed: pieces of Sagecraft, forgotten rituals, ancient bindings. He didn't have the luxury of perfection. He improvised, weaving threads of the Law of Life with sheer force of will, grafting meaning where none should exist.
"You don't get to leave," he snarled, his voice breaking under the strain.
A pulse—weak, but focused. Lines of gold crackled over Boyan's chest, not sealing but stapling, temporary chains forming from raw, living essence. Malachros screamed through Boyan's mouth, a sound like tearing metal.
"You think this stops me?" the voice spat, distorted and layered, echoing through the bond. "This is nothing but delay. You are the door. I am inside. I will wait."
Ben's muscles seized. He had nothing left—except resolve. He poured every ounce of light, every shred of Transference he could muster, into the half-formed chains. The glyphs struggled, some breaking, some holding. The wind howled, Boyan convulsed—and Ben locked eyes with him, seeing for the first time real fear in the man's expression as the chains tightened like a vice, forcing Malachros back into dormancy.
And then—
Silence.
The light faded.
Boyan collapsed.
Ben-Atty fell to one knee, panting. Weakened but alive. The fusion that had elevated them to something Itarim-like now pressed dangerously close to annihilation. Their bond quivered, unstable and raw, the line between two souls smeared into one blurred echo. This wasn't like their usual Transference—where Ben could inhabit Atty's senses or vice versa while remaining distinct. This was full convergence, an extreme of will and essence that, left unchecked, could have erased their individual selves forever.
It was a razor's edge.
With clenched focus, fragmentary techniques pieced together from absorbed knowledge, and—Ben sensed it—a fleeting, unseen assist from the Itarim who had marked his fate, they pulled apart. The golden-silver aura wavered, peeled back. Atty staggered free, collapsing with a guttural breath, feathers charred and ragged but intact. Ben tumbled forward, hands braced in the cracked earth, lungs heaving for air that tasted like ash and metal.
Suddenly, everything fell quiet—except for the pounding in his chest and the rasp of breath in his ears. The sounds of chaos blurred into a dull, underwater hum. His vision doubled, then tunneled. Shapes moved toward him: 71 and 98, his fellow slaves, their mouths open in urgent cries, their eyes wide with alarm—but their words were smothered by the rush of his heartbeat, distant and fading.
Somewhere at the edge of his failing awareness, Ben sensed Boyan's lingering power spiraling outward—not as a deliberate attack now, but as a ripple effect from the catastrophic battle. The wounded law of wind lashed out erratically, the pressure gradients pulling oxygen from the outskirts of the canyon city. Pockets of air thinned rapidly; whole districts began to choke, the unseen enemy of suffocation creeping into every crevice.
But the clash of titans had left a strange afterimage: a bubble of stability, where Ben and Atty's resonance lingered, forming an accidental sanctuary of breathable air within the arena's shattered heart. It was fragile but vital. Survivors—thralls, slaves, outcasts—dragged themselves toward it, guided by nothing more than instinct and the desperate hunger for life.
Not all would make it. Many already lay still, their stories ended in the sand.
Ben, blinking blearily, saw them coming. Saw the flicker of hope in eyes long emptied by despair. But his body had nothing left to give. His strength buckled, his thoughts splintered—and as his forehead grazed the scorched earth, darkness overtook him.
The people present saw something miraculous. The world blinked out. Ben's eyes closed.