Kyle lay on the ash-floor of his own sundered realm in the wreckage of his first armour.
It had surfaced from his skin during the long duel — drawn up out of him by the realm in its desperation to defend its prince — and it had manifested in the shape of the thing he truly was beneath the patrician damask and the polished boots: a dark plated carapace the colour of dried blood and colder iron, ribbed and angular and predatory, fanged shoulder-pauldrons flaring upward from his collarbones, a high-pointed crown of the same black-red metal rising jagged from his brow, his forearms gauntleted in curving blades that echoed the cruel architecture of bat-wings, his calves sheathed in greaves whose edges were themselves weapons.
A vampire-progenitor's regalia — summoned from his own flesh, lived in for longer than kingdoms.
The armour was now a grave.
Every cut Phei had opened on him remained open.
