The silence between heartbeats stretched into eternity as the two versions of Kaelion faced each other in the tower's belly. The air tasted of static and forgotten words, clinging to the tongue like spoiled honey. His double's pristine robes remained untouched by the tower's weeping walls, the silver Arcanthus crest gleaming with unnatural brightness against his chest.
Kaelion's silver-threaded arm trembled, the archivist's filaments writhing beneath his skin like caged serpents. They whispered secrets in a language that made his teeth ache warnings about the crown spinning above them, about the tower's true nature, about the thing wearing his face.
The first attack came not as a physical blow, but as an unraveling.
His double moved with the precision of a scribe correcting a flawed manuscript, fingers plucking at the threads of Kaelion's existence. The summer afternoon when his father first placed a quill in his hand folded inward like burning parchment, the memory dissolving into acrid smoke. The scent of his mother's lavender soap turned to ash in his nostrils. The sound of his sister's laughter fractured into dissonant echoes before vanishing entirely.
Kaelion staggered, the losses carving fresh hollows in his psyche. The Godforge Core in his chest flared in response, black lightning arcing down his corrupted arm. Where his double erased, Kaelion rewrote transforming each stolen memory into something sharper, deadlier.
His father's guiding hand became the hilt of the Oblivion Sceptre, the lesson morphing into his first combat stance. His mother's scent mutated into the ozone tang of divine blood. His sister's voice reshaped itself into the battle cry she'd screamed while holding off the Pantheon's assassins.
The tower groaned in protest, its fleshy walls blistering where competing truths collided. Black tears welled from the cracks, each droplet containing a fragment of some long-dead scribe's final thought.
"Clever," his double admitted, examining a drop of liquid memory on his fingertip. The droplet squirmed before evaporating. "But you're fighting the wrong battle."
He snapped his fingers.
The Scriptorium shattered like glass, its fragments resolving into the pages of the Hollow Codex not the physical book at Kaelion's belt, but its spiritual essence. They stood now in a realm of infinite blank parchment, the air thick with the static of unborn laws.
Here, the double was sovereign.
He moved through the void like a composer through silence, hands conducting terrible symphonies from the emptiness. A law that would unmake sacrifice took form as glowing text before lancing toward Kaelion. A decree inverting cause and effect followed. Worst of all came an edict written in Kaelion's own blood "Kaelion Arcanthus was never born."
The assault would have ended him if not for his shadow.
The severed darkness flowed across the parchment like spilled ink, intercepting each lethal sentence. It absorbed the laws at terrible cost its form bloating grotesquely with each absorption, edges becoming frayed and unstable.
Too much, it whispered in his sister's voice. The weight of unmade laws, Then it burst.
The explosion hurled Kaelion through layers of reality. He crashed into the final battlefield the moment before creation itself.
No tower. No books. No flesh. Only the First Scribe's original sin.
They stood in the infinite instant before the first law was written, when all existence was potential without form. The air itself trembled with the terror of beginnings. Before them floated the First Scribe's tools a knife forged from "what might have been," an inkwell of unborn gods' blood, and a blank parchment that was also a mouth.
His double lunged for the knife.
Kaelion was faster.
His silver-threaded arm moved without conscious thought, plunging the Oblivion Sceptre into the parchment-mouth. The scream that followed wasn't sound but the absence of it, a perfect silence that unmade everything it touched.
The double froze mid-step, perfect features twisting in realization. "You wouldn't"
Kaelion whispered the syllable he'd learned in the well.
The world folded.
When existence reassembled itself, Kaelion stood alone in the crumbling tower. The Hollow Crown rested at his feet, its jagged points now dull and inert. Of his double, there remained only a lock of silver hair and the persistent sense that something important had always been missing.
His shadow was gone too. Truly gone this time.
But etched into the walls by some unseen hand was a final message,
"You were always the better monster."
As the tower dissolved around him, Kaelion reached down and picked up the Hollow Crown. It weighed less than nothing at all.