The hallway sat in fog.
Anathema's mist moved slowly through the corridors, finding the fire and pressing against it, keeping it contained rather than extinguished a holding action rather than a solution, the kind that works until it doesn't. Somewhere below and across the ship, spells were still being unleashed in bursts that traveled through the hull as vibrations. The battle was far from over.
Two enemies. One situation. An alliance that neither of them had chosen and both of them were honoring anyway.
They felt the tremors when they came the deep, structural shudders that moved through the ship's frame from somewhere they couldn't see. Neither of them investigated. There were more immediate concerns, and they had enough trust in the people they had sent below to assume those tremors weren't the worst possible thing.
Anathema coughed.
The sound of it was wet and specific. Something dark hit the floor.
"How long can you keep this up?" Emerion asked.
"Not sure," Anathema said. His breathing had taken on a heaviness that hadn't been there an hour ago the labored quality of someone for whom breath had stopped being automatic.
"I see." Emerion looked at him. "The venom from the snakes finally caught up."
"You don't have to rub it in my face." Another cough. More blood.
Emerion said nothing after that. He knew that talking required Anathema to expend air he was already struggling to produce, and he knew that stopping wasn't an option the passengers were still being moved across those planks and the fire was still pressing against the mist from the other side.
He stayed quiet with the weight of having assigned these roles sitting in his chest, knowing that a better plan might have found a better distribution, knowing that he hadn't been the right person to make the plan and had made it anyway because nobody else was going to.
He watched Anathema work through the blood and the labored breathing with the focused determination of someone who has decided the work matters more than the cost, and found himself trying to reconcile this person with the boy who had drawn a sword on a child in a port market two days ago.
The difference was visible. He didn't know what had made it.
"Stop giving me that weird look," Anathema said, without turning around.
"What weird look? I was sitting here in silence." Emerion tilted his head. He hadn't been aware his face was doing anything in particular.
"You get creepier the more someone spends time with you."
Emerion considered this. He knew he could come across as awkward eighteen years of restricted socialization had consequences but creepy was a specific word that he found himself wanting to challenge.
"Creepy is a bit strong, don't you think? I would admit weird, but--"
"You may look harmless," Anathema said, with a sigh that contained its own kind of tiredness, "but you are something more than you let appear."
"What makes you say that? Is it because of our fight?"
"That's not the only reason. You are very unpredictable. One moment you are shy. The next you become some warlord commander." Anathema paused for breath. "It's unsettling."
Emerion stared at him. Absorbing the irony of receiving this assessment from Anathema specifically.
"I think it applies to you too, right?" he said.
Anathema's shoulders tightened slightly.
"Yesterday, you drew your sword on an innocent child," Emerion continued, keeping his voice even. "That was the reason for our fight. Today, you are pushing yourself past a snake venom injury to keep this ship from burning." He let the observation settle. "What changed?"
A pause that lasted long enough to suggest the answer was being considered rather than avoided.
"Nothing," Anathema said. "If the ship sinks, I die with it. I am doing this for my own safety."
The answer arrived with the specific flatness of something that has been assembled quickly to fill a space. His actions said something else entirely.
"It won't hurt you to admit you care about people," Emerion said. "You were really crying to see your friends again inside that barrier."
"Don't be stupid. I see them as assets. If I died there, they would be in the wrong hands." Anathema coughed again a deep, rattling sound and when he continued his voice was quieter. "After all, I am Anathema. Why would a curse care for anyone?"
Emerion looked at him.
"Anathema," he said slowly, testing the word. "Who would name their child that? It's not actually your name, is it?"
"It's none of your concern. Don't think we have become friends."
The fog shifted between them. Emerion let the silence hold for a moment before he continued.
"After we manage to save the ship... would you want to fight again?"
The atmosphere in the corridor changed by a degree.
"Don't be ridiculous." Anathema's expression made it difficult to read whether what he felt was disappointment or acceptance, or some combination of the two that didn't have a name. "Your sister took an Oath of Echoes from Rui."
"That's how she works," Emerion said.
Anathema was quiet, as though turning something over.
"You can fly," he said after a moment. "Your sister too. You have no reason to be here. Is this another genius plan of the Dawnveil family?"
Emerion's shoulders tightened at his family's name arriving in the conversation.
"We can fly, yes," he said. "But mana runs out. Without land in range, it becomes a problem." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Besides I don't know what my family is plotting. I'm here because I was helpless once."
A pause. He was measuring how much to give. "Maybe I'm still helpless. But not like before. So I know what it feels like."
Anathema looked back over his shoulder. The gaze was sharp and specific.
"Helpless, you say. Have you ever fought someone stronger than you to feel that?"
Emerion thought about his mother the wooden sword drills, the training sessions that ended with him unconscious on the garden grass. But that wasn't fighting to the death. That was something else.
"No," he said. "It's different. Helplessness can come from a situation one where fighting isn't involved. A situation where you suffocate in your own home. Where nobody cares what you feel."
He stopped, aware he had gone further than he planned. "We're not so different from animals, if I think about it."
"I see," Anathema said. His back was turned, making it impossible to tell whether the response carried mockery or something else. "So you have been in such situations."
"Yes. What about you? You were the one who brought up fighting someone stronger."
The pause that followed was long enough to change the quality of the silence. Then Emerion noticed something he hadn't seen from Anathema before a faint tremor in the boy's posture, barely visible, the kind that comes from something colder than cold.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine." The composure returned immediately. "Stop with that look. We are not friends."
"It's just human nature to care," Emerion said. "We're not friends. But we're not enemies either."
"Yet you called humans animals," Anathema said. "You contradicted yourself."
Emerion paused. Was he deflecting, or was there something genuinely true in it?
"I suppose," Emerion said, "you show care and kindness to a stranger because they haven't hurt you yet. With family with people close to you it's different. Familiarity gives people more opportunities to wound you."
"You really had a bad childhood to come up with that," Anathema said. His voice carried something that was almost, very carefully, not quite sympathy.
Emerion waited for a challenge or a question. Neither came.
Just silence.
Not cold. Not uncomfortable. Just the particular quiet of two people who have said as much as they're going to say and have decided that's acceptable.
"Are all nobles the same?" Anathema muttered. Not quite to Emerion. Not quite to himself.
Emerion's ears caught it. He didn't respond because he wasn't sure it was meant for him.
The floor shook.
Both of them registered it simultaneously a tremor, but not the one they had been feeling. Different frequency. Different source.
"Haha! Found you. A worthy opponent finally!"
The person who appeared seemed to materialize from the convergence of the mist and the corridor's shadows more than six feet tall, red hair wild and unorganized, the kind of muscle that comes from a life spent doing nothing else. The strange glow on his face caught the blue light of Emerion's mana and threw it back differently. The massive sword on his shoulder rested there with the ease of something he had been carrying since before he could remember.
Veryn.
Both boys turned toward him with the same instinct.
"Who are you?" Anathema raised his sword.
"Are you with the pirates?" Emerion asked. Something about this person registered as wrong in a way he couldn't immediately place not the threat exactly, but the scale of the mana radiating off him, quiet and enormous, the kind that doesn't announce itself.
Veryn's grin only widened at the questions.
"You sure have a lot of questions. But I am here to fight not to chat." He pointed his sword at the space between them, directly at the midpoint where both of them stood.
"Then you must be with the pirates!"
Anathema didn't wait. He surged forward, new mana rising around him, his speed hitting its ceiling.
Veryn's hand moved.
Not his sword. His hand.
He caught Anathema's arm mid-charge with a grip that simply stopped him and then, with the unhurried ease of someone completing a motion they had already begun, he swung in a full circle, Anathema still in his grip, and released.
The raven-haired boy went through the broken wall opening and out onto the deck below, his trajectory carrying him clear of the ship's interior entirely.
The whole sequence took less than two seconds.
Emerion stood perfectly still.
He caught Anathema at that speed with his bare hand. The thought processed slowly, the way things do when they've exceeded a certain threshold of possibility. And the mana coming off him I can see the flow. It's enormous. Larger than anything I've encountered in person.
"Forgive me," Veryn said, turning his sword toward Emerion now. "I didn't clarify at first. I'm not here to fight just anyone. I'm here to fight the strongest."
The strongest. Emerion's hands started moving before his decision caught up with them, raising toward Veryn by instinct. I'm not strong. Is this person a mercenary? Even if he is, how did he throw Anathema like that? Do I even have a chance here?
"I guess I have no choice," he said, mostly to himself.
"Wait." Veryn's voice stopped him. The man was looking at his hands with a focused attention. "Don't tell me you don't have a weapon."
"I--, no." Emerion lowered his hands slightly. "My staff was taken."
Veryn looked at him for a long moment. His expression went through something that wasn't quite consideration and wasn't quite judgment.
"I live by three rules," he said. "Rule One: never fight a woman. Rule Two: never fight the poor. Rule Three: never fight someone without a weapon."
Emerion stared at him.
Coming from a man in what could generously be described as animal-hide clothing, allied with pirates, having just thrown a fourteen-year-old through a wall the delivery of these principles was, to say the least, unexpected.
"I guess you'll have to break a rule tonight," Emerion said. His hands began to glow blue.
"I think you didn't hear me correctly." Veryn reached to his belt and produced a second sword. He held it by the blade the hilt extended toward Emerion, an offering rather than a threat. "I live by the rules. If I break them, what is there left to live by?"
Is this a trick? Emerion looked at the hilt. Why give me a weapon? But if I don't take it, I'm at an even greater disadvantage. And the mist is fading I can feel it. The control room won't hold much longer. I have to do something quickly, but can I actually fight this person and win?
He took the sword.
The hilt was unfamiliar in his palm different weight, different balance from his staff, different from the wooden swords of his training. Holding it brought his mother back without warning. The garden.
The wooden sword drills. The way she had never stopped the session until he passed out or found a solution. After she went into her mana sleep, he had never held a sword again.
"Perfect," Veryn said. He drew his own blade and took his stance.
Then stopped.
He was looking at Emerion's face.
"Is your wife pregnant or something?"
Emerion nearly choked. "What makes you think I have a wife?"
"Then what is that look on your face?" Veryn's expression was entirely sincere, as though this were a reasonable diagnostic question before a duel. "I want my opponent fighting at full capacity. Is your father or mother on their deathbed? If yes go be with them. I will find you when they pass, and we will fight then."
Emerion looked at him for a moment.
"You're funny," he said. The dry chuckle that came out was real. "When my mother went into her mana sleep, I didn't cry. I was relieved." The words came out thinner than he intended the shape of something that had been said to fill a space before he had decided what to fill it with. "I doubt I'll shed tears for my family."
Veryn's face changed.
"So you're one of those ungrateful bastards." The disgust in his voice was genuine not performed, not weaponized, just his actual reaction to what he had heard. "I will make you eat those words. But first--," he came back to his original question with the focus of someone who hasn't forgotten it "what's bothering you?"
"You're here to fight," Emerion said. His voice had taken on a defensive edge he hadn't intended. "Why does it matter?"
"Because I said I want my opponents at full capacity." Veryn looked at him steadily. "And just so you know I fight to be the best. Not for spite." He let the distinction land. "I will be the best swordsman humanity has ever seen. Mark it."
The conviction in his voice was the kind that moves the air. Emerion felt the floor vibrate beneath it and then realized, in the same moment, that the tremor wasn't the words. The mana radiating off Veryn had been building since he arrived, the presence of it pressing against the corridor walls, and what Emerion had been interpreting as structural earthquake was simply this man existing at full output in a confined space.
"So." Veryn's voice softened back to its version of patient. "What is it that's bothering you?"
Emerion looked at the burning control room behind him.
Ican't win this. Even at full capacity, I can't win against someone with mana pools that size. But I can't die without doing anything there are still people on this ship who need that control room functional. If I die, the plan falls apart. He exhaled slowly. Then I need to hold him as long as I can. And to do that, I need the one advantage I might have.
"There is something bothering me," he said.
Veryn tilted his head.
Emerion stepped to the side, clearing the line of sight between Veryn and the burning control room. "This fire. If you can extinguish it then I'll fight you."
A long silence.
Veryn looked at the burning room. At Emerion. At the room again.
Then he started laughing full and genuine, the laugh of someone who has been expecting a dramatic personal revelation and received something else entirely.
"Here I thought you had someone waiting for you at home," he said, still laughing. He collected himself, looked at the burning controls, and walked toward them. "Keep your promise."
He raised his sword. Something red gathered along the blade a dense, contained energy that drew the available light toward it rather than emanating from it, pulling rather than pushing. It condensed into a sphere shape, rotating slowly, and when he released it the orb moved like a small gravity well drawing the fire inward rather than suppressing it outward, consuming the flames by attraction rather than suffocation, the smoke and heat spiraling into the center of it in a narrowing column until there was simply nothing left.
The orb dissolved.
The control room was dark and damaged and no longer on fire.
Emerion stared at what he had just watched. The technique had solved a problem in a way he would not have thought to solve it, using a principle he hadn't known was available. He filed it for later and gripped the borrowed sword.
"Shall we fight?" Veryn's voice had taken on a different quality anticipation, but genuine, the tone of someone looking forward to something rather than someone going through a performance.
He closed the distance and moved behind Emerion. His guard was completely exposed. He didn't strike.
"You said you fight the strong ones," Emerion said, keeping his voice steady. "I'm not trying to negotiate my way out. But I want you to know I'm not the strongest here."
He drew the sword anyway. Took his stance.
"Don't make me laugh," Veryn said. "My instincts are never wrong." He moved.
Lightning. That was the closest word for it the speed collapsing the distance between them before the eye had finished registering his departure point.
Emerion didn't try to defend. He let out a breath.
"Let's begin."
The blade entered his right shoulder. His own blade entered Veryn's right shoulder simultaneously. They stood facing each other two swords, two wounds, the same exchange from different directions.
Blood from both of them reached the floor at the same moment.
"So I was not wrong after all," Veryn said. His voice had gone heavier, the amusement in it shaded with something more serious. "You really are the strongest on this ship."
"I'm not the strongest," Emerion said.
"Maybe you're right," Veryn said.
Emerion looked up at him.
"Because I have arrived on this ship."
The kick came from nowhere and connected with Emerion's stomach before he had finished processing the sentence. He landed several feet back, both swords now free as the distance resolved the mutual impalement with efficient cruelty.
Ididn't see that kick at all, Emerion thought, finding his feet. Not even a glimpse.
"I will destroy your noble arrogance!" Veryn's sword glowed red. Three crescent moon slashes left the blade in sequence the first connecting with Emerion's sword and pushing him back, the next two on their way.
He had perhaps three seconds.
ZALTREIGN.
He whispered it kept the output controlled, focused through the borrowed blade rather than his hands, the blue light traveling down the sword's length and meeting the incoming slashes at the midpoint. The collision produced an explosion that temporarily took the visibility out of the corridor.
When the smoke thinned, both of them were still standing.
"As expected," Veryn said, and he sounded delighted rather than frustrated. "You defended. But you have more than that, don't you?" He took his fighting stance. "What is your name? I remember worthy opponents."
This person is no joke. Emerion's mind was running two processes simultaneously the tactical and the philosophical, both of them active, neither of them complete. I can't take hits forever. But he moves faster than I can track. Countering attack with attack is suicide at this speed gap. So what do I have?
He looked at Veryn's stance.
Fully offensive. No defensive component anywhere not in the feet, not in the shoulder line, not in the grip. Even when he charged, the momentum was entirely forward. The speed makes it almost impossible to exploit, but almost isn't impossible.
If I charge first, he beats me to the strike every time. But if I make him come to me
"Come on," Veryn said, the amusement and mockery balanced in his voice. "Is your name too grand even for you to say properly? You nobles are all the same."
"What makes you think I'm a noble?" Emerion asked. The question was genuine Pristilia had read his hands, but this person hadn't touched him.
Veryn chuckled. "I have fought in many wars. I have slain many nobles. I know the difference by how they hold a weapon." He looked at the borrowed sword in Emerion's grip. "The way you hold that it's trained. It's given. A noble's hold."
Emerion looked at his own hands.
"So what's the difference? How does a commoner hold a weapon differently?"
The question made Veryn pause.
Something moved behind his eyes the specific consideration of someone being asked to articulate something they know without having put into words before.
"A noble learns a style," he said. "A commoner learns a reason. One fights to be skilled. The other fights to live." He let that settle. "A noble fights with the style they were given. A commoner fights with the life they are trying to keep."
The corridor absorbed the philosophy.
Technique versus survival instinct, Emerion thought, the pieces arranging themselves. Someone who fights to live overwhelms with everything they have brute force, desperation, no reserve. Someone trained to a style responds with that style. Which means Veryn expects me to block his charge with technique. The glow in his eyes came from somewhere below the surface. And if I don't--
"Will you tell me your name?" Emerion asked.
Veryn looked surprised by the return of the question. "Only if you tell me yours first."
"Veryn," the man said. Then, after a beat: "No last name. I was born a bastard."
Something in Emerion's expression shifted not quite a smile, something more complicated.
"I see," he said. "I'm Emerion. Just Emerion."
Veryn's eyes darkened. The veins in his hands found the surface.
"Are you ashamed of your parents?" His voice had found a different register not the combative one, something more personal. "They gave you so much. A name. A position. A life with no hunger in it."
"It's complicated," Emerion said.
"Complicated." Veryn said the word like he was deciding what to do with it. "So you are genuinely ungrateful. If I had been born in your position--" His grip on his sword tightened. "Be thankful you were born. Be more thankful you were born noble."
Emerion's knuckles went white around the hilt.
Thankful. The word found every open wound simultaneously. If only he knew.
"You think nobles have no problems?" His voice came out with more force than he intended. "You might think I was spoiled. You are wrong. You have no authority to judge me."
"You never faced hunger," Veryn said, the disgust in his voice genuine. "You never faced poverty."
"And you never felt hatred from your own people!" The words came out before the decision to say them. "From the ones you call family!"
"At least you had people you could call family!" Veryn's sword came up. "Your arrogance needs to be put in its place!"
He moved at full speed the corridor compressing to nothing between them in an instant.
This time Emerion was ready.
He was already hovering a few feet above the floor, the elevation giving him the axis he needed. He felt Veryn's charge arriving as pressure rather than waiting to see it as motion. Offensive stance. Full commitment. All the force directed forward with nothing held back.
Which means his defense is exactly where he put his attack.
Veryn's sword sliced through the space where Emerion's body would have been if he had stayed still. Emerion had already turned the borrowed sword coming around in close range, aimed with precision at the throat, the technique in the strike mixed with something more instinctive, less trained, the kind of fighting that happens when you have run out of time to remember your lessons.
Time slowed to the particular stillness of a moment that contains more than one outcome and hasn't resolved yet.
Veryn's expression seeing the blade arriving at his throat carried something Emerion hadn't seen on his face before.
Not fear.
Recognition.