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And Demetrios was no exception, as he had gone very still. Though when he spoke, for the first time since I had laid eyes on this unknown warrior, there was something other than cruelty in his voice.

There was fear.

“No…” Demetrios shook his head, taking a step back. “No, this… this is not possible. You cannot be here. You cannot cross into this place… it is mine… that is the law of shadows…”

“The law.” Blue eyes flared as anger struck. “You speak to me of laws, standing knee-deep in everything you have stolen.” He spread his great, clawed hands, which were big enough to crush a man’s head on his shoulders. “I am the dark made flesh and given a crown. I am the master of every shadow that has ever fallen in either world, and you, boy, are a trespasser in my house, wearing my power like a coat you took from a dead man’s back. There is no law here but mine.”

And then the fight began. Although that was far too generous a word for what the new monster did to the old one. A reckoning was more like it. Because it was nothing like any fight I had ever seen.

Demetrios flung out his hands, and the shadows leaped to him, lashing across the dark in great whipping ropes toward the armored being. A dark knight, who didn’t so much as raise a hand. The shadows simply came apart the instant they drew near him, unraveling into nothing, dispersing like smoke before an open window. Something that happened again and again, every strike Demetrios threw dissolving before it could land.

The dark knight laughed, an awful, haunting sound.

“You think my own shadows would ever harm me?” He tilted his head. “Here… now let me show you what they can truly do.” He warned as he closed one armored fist.

Every coil of darkness suddenly turned on its maker. The shadows Demetrios had thrown, the shadows pouring off the walls, the shadows beneath my own knees… all of it surged toward Demetrios at once. It seized him and dragged him bodily across the ground, yanking him in a fast, helpless motion until he hung before the dark knight. Until the great armored figure barely had to move at all. He simply reached out a metal-covered hand, the whole of it like a single cruel gauntlet, and closed it around Demetrios’s throat, lifting him clean off his feet into the air as though he weighed nothing whatsoever.

“Now you can watch as I take my world back.”

As if just by thought alone, the world around us began to die.

I felt it before I understood what was happening. A great groaning shudder running through the stone, through the chains, through the very air itself.

I twisted to look, and all around us the nightmare was collapsing. The dark and ruined sky was caving inward. The distant edges of this terrible place were ceasing to be, folding away into nothing.

But that wasn’t all…

The figures out there, all the lost and wandering shapes of all those taken, were thinning as they went, breaking apart, dissolving into pale vapor on the wind like breath in winter. And the man responsible was being forced to watch as all he had built was crumbling to nothing before his very eyes.

“No… no… no…” Demetrios’s voice came out strangled, his hands clawing uselessly at the gauntlet crushing his throat. “No… no, you can’t… it’s mine… It’s MINE!”

“It was never yours.” The knight’s blue eyes blazed brighter. “Your reign of shadowed terror is at its end, little ghost. Your stolen power is no more.”

I watched Demetrios’s dead eyes go wide, the first spark of emotion behind them. I watched him understand at last that he had lost. With a snarl of pure desperation, he flung out everything he had. He drew every last thread of shadow left in that dying place into himself in one violent rush, gathering it around him like a cloak… like a door.

A way out.

“This isn’t over,” he choked out, even as the dark started to swallow him whole. His dead black gaze found the knight’s burning blue ones. “Do you hear me? This is not over, Shadow King… I will have my revenge, Mortheus!”

The name affected me and the rest of this dying nightmare with the weight of a being who commanded it. But what affected me even more was the title Demetrios had used…

He wasn’t a knight at all… he was a king!

In the first show of true anger, the king’s hand closed into a fist to crush the life out of Demetrios, but there was nothing left in it to crush. The shadows took Demetrios in the same instant, and a heartbeat later, he was gone. Vanished into the collapsing dark.

The great armored figure stood there for a moment with his empty hand still raised. Then he let out a low and terrible growl of frustration that I felt in the soles of my feet.

Demetrios had escaped.

Whatever else I understood of any of this, I understood that most of all. He had gotten away, and I had no idea what that would mean for any of us.

A thought that left me in favor of another threat, one more immediate than the last, as the towering king turned slowly to face me.

After that, I lost what little composure I had left.

I scrabbled backwards in my chains, hauling against the iron, trying with every fraying scrap of strength I still possessed to put distance between us. However, there was none to be had, and I knew it, yet I still couldn’t stop. I was, in that moment, more frightened than I had ever been in the whole of my frightened life.

It made no sense.