They broke. The crowd breathed as one.
“You’re slower,” Kardoc said. “Too long among men and rules.”
“You’re louder,” Rakhal said, and turned the next blow aside so cleanly it looked like water deciding it was a knife.
They traded like that: fire for night, fury for restraint. Kardoc’s style was the same as when they had cracked knuckles on training stones as boys, only bigger now, crueler, fueled by a rage he wore like a crown. Rakhal’s was what the shamans hadbeaten into him with sticks and silence: spend nothing you do not mean to spend. Do not push when you can turn. Do not hold when you can bleed pressure off into the ground.
Kardoc laughed when Rakhal slipped past a hook that would have broken a lesser man’s jaw. “Mercy kills kings,” he said, hands bright, lungs hot. “It softens the spine and sours the blood.”
“Then may it kill me last,” Rakhal answered through his teeth.
Kardoc feinted high and went low. Rakhal read the shoulder, dropped with it, and Kardoc’s shin drove like an axe into his forearm. Pain flashed bright; Rakhal let it pass through, stored it, and paid it back with a heel into Kardoc’s thigh where the muscle would knot and burn. Kardoc snarled: delighted, vicious, and desperate, all at once.
The Pit tightened around them. Ragged stones smoothed under their feet, glassing in patches where Kardoc’s heat met Rakhal’s cold. The old ones had named this place for a reason. This was where Shadow rose closest to the skin of the world, where oaths could be written into stone.
Kardoc’s fire swelled. He came in with both hands lit to the elbows, each blow a furnace door slamming. Rakhal parried, gave ground, took ground back, and then Kardoc’s forearm hammered across his mouth and sent him to one knee. He tasted blood—copper, salt—and the Shadow surged like floodwater behind a broken weir.
The crowd roared. Hunger, awe, fear. He could hear Eliza’s breath somewhere above it, steady, measured, the thread in the weave that kept him in the right pattern.
Take him, then,the Shadow coaxed.Take him and be done.
Rakhal opened his fist into the dirt. He let the cold rise, but not to rule. He guided it the way he’d been taught on nights when the shamans set coals on his skin and saidhold.Darknesspooled around his hand, slick and alive, then ran up his forearm in a smooth sheath. He stood, and the ground answered, a low shudder that shook grit from the cliff face.
Kardoc’s grin flickered. He felt it too—the moment when restraint becomes a weapon.
Rakhal stepped in. He did not hit harder; he hit with less waste. He caught Kardoc’s shoulder and moved him, not with force but with angle, and Kardoc stumbled three inches—just enough to open his ribs. Rakhal’s knuckles sank into the meat over Kardoc’s heart, the cold ringing through bone to bone. Kardoc’s flame stuttered.
They locked eyes. For a heartbeat, there were no clans, no law, no thrones—only two boys under an old sky trying to become men before the dark ate them. Kardoc’s pupils were reduced to pinpricks in the molten light. “We were both made for this,” he said, raw.
Rakhal took his throat.
It wasn’t a choke; it was a claiming. His fingers closed around the burning tendons and did not blister. He drove Kardoc backward, step by punishing step, until Kardoc’s heels cut twin grooves in the vitrified dust. Kardoc clawed at his wrist, teeth bared, breath a furnace blast against Rakhal’s cheek.
“Do it,” Kardoc hissed, eyes blazing with a faith that had kept him alive this long—the faith that the world is a circle of violence you either ride or go under. “Prove you’re our father’s son.”
The words struck something deep and not even begun to heal. He had not seen their father die, only heard how Kardoc had made it happen. That knowing had rooted in him like iron driven into green wood—quiet, unyielding, alive beneath the bark.This is where you could answer it,the Shadow murmured.Set the balance right.
And become him,Rakhal thought.Not my father’s son—his shadow.
The blade was in his free hand. He didn’t remember reaching for it. The Shadow ran along its edge like ink finding a groove in paper. The crowd fell silent so utterly he could hear the tiny crackle of torches burning.
He lowered the edge to Kardoc’s throat.
The Shadow howled for the kill. It wanted heat quenched by cold, brother erased by brother. Kardoc’s pulse beat hard against the steel. Rakhal’s arm trembled—not with weakness, but with the weight of choosing which story would be told about them.
He saw the road that opened if he cut deep. It was straight and clean and ended in a throne piled on the skulls of those who opposed him. It would be easy. It would be efficient. It would be a crown that circled his brow like a chain.
Rakhal breathed. He let the Shadow pour past the point of the blade and into the ground, a tide redirected. He cut shallow, a clean line that broke skin and let blood well and made no attempt to sever.
Kardoc’s eyes went wide—not in fear; in a stunned, naked confusion that cracked through arrogance like frost through glass.
“You are broken,” Rakhal said softly, the words a mercy and a sentence. “But I will not be.”
The Pit inhaled.
Sound returned in a single rolling wave: gasps, snarls, a keening cry from somewhere on the east terrace drowned by a roar of approval from the west. Some leapt to their feet demanding death, hands outstretched. Others dropped to their knees.
Rakhal did not release Kardoc’s throat. He did not press the blade again. He lifted it, blood bright on the edge, and turned so the terraces could see.
