Micah crested the staircase, spear over his left shoulder. A massive pair of stone double doors stood before him, partially ajar. He reached out with this left hand, pressing it against the cold surface of the door before pushing.

It swung open easily, counterbalances letting it swing smoothly in the channel worn into the room’s marble floor. Micah stepped through into a large, well lit room. Along either wall were thick glass cases filled with enchanted objects. All of them were priceless, inscribed on the best materials available with a skill and care paid toward their runes that no spellcaster before or after could match.

None of that held Micah’s attention. At the other end of the room sat a large chair made of black metal that looked like it had grown up from the Tower’s floor. In it sat a young man with red-brown eyes and reddish, almost pink hair. He was wearing a white robe and slouched laconically atop the throne. A thin metal band sat atop his head, and he held an ornate scepter in his right hand while he propped both of his legs up on one of the throne’s arm rests.

He held the scepter up, swirling it once with a flick of his wrist. Wind rushed past Micah, whipping at his clothing and staggering him backwards a step. Behind him, the double doors slammed shut with a resounding crash.

The man sat up, frowning at Micah as he tapped the scepter on his knee.

“You’re late”

Micah stopped his approach when the other man spoke. He recognized his counterpart from somewhere, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. The man sneered at him, green light flashing in his red eyes while he waited for a response.

“I didn’t know that we had an appointment,” Micah replied. “If I did, I would have made a point to arrive on time. I apologize for any convenience my tardy arrival might have caused you.”

The man hopped up out of the throne, stalking two steps toward Micah before he stopped, arms crossed. He growled, a low deep sound that sent gooseflesh prickling across the back of Micah’s neck.

“The Pontiff I presume?” Micah asked. “Actually, is there something else I can call you? ‘The Pontiff’ seems a bit stiff and formal. I can’t imagine having a full conversation with you when I can refer to you only by your formal title.”

“Can’t you tell?” The Pontiff inquired, cocking his head to the side. “Even before the third prince came to me, I was told that I had a rather unique appearance. Surely you must remember me from our earlier encounter.”

“Sorry,” Micah said, shrugging. “You look a little familiar but I can’t place you. I don’t know if you’re someone I helped, someone that helped me, or a person that literally sold me a kebab in the marketplace.”

“I followed you,” the redhead sputtered. “Down the Leel River, across the Emerald Sea, and into Jakint. I raced you across the Grass Sea in order to meet you here, all to repay you for the helpless pity you showered me with, and you don’t even remember me?”

“I don’t know what to say,” Micah replied. “I’m sorry if I was mean to you or something. I try to be pleasant to strangers when I can, but it’s possible that I was distracted and had a bad day when we met.”

“I was on the Amelia,” the Pontiff continued, disbelief in his voice. “I was the one that summoned the Maarikava to attack you, both times. I was the one to disrupt your prophetic spells and torment you. It was me beside you the whole time, and despite all of that you seriously mean to stand here and tell me that you have no clue who I am?”

“You being incredulous about the entire situation isn’t going to change anything,” Micah responded. “Now, I don’t suppose that you’re planning on handing over the crown and the scepter as a reward for me making it this far?”

“That would be a pretty great dastardly twist,” he said hopefully. “I’m sure everyone would be surprised by that. It has a lot of potential.”

“I am literally disobeying a cosmic entity,” the redhead mumbled, shaking his head. “I am angering a being beyond comprehension in order to stage a showdown with you rather than simply returning the artifacts to it, and-”

The Pontiff stopped speaking for a second, closing his eyes and clenching his jaw as he tried to collect himself. When he spoke again, it was with an almost bestial growl, a bonfire of green flames springing into being behind him.

“AND YOU. DO NOT. EVEN. KNOW. MY. NAME!”

“I already apologized for that,” Micah replied. “Also, if you’re already doing something to annoy the third prince, you could always just hand the artifacts over. I really would prefer that to fighting. Just think of how annoyed it would get with you. It would be the perfect rebellious act.”

“ERYK SOLIBORNE!” the Pontiff screamed. Behind him the green flames burned higher, practically filling half of the throne room. “My name is Eryk Soliborne. The only reason I’m telling you this is so that my name will be the last thing going through your mind, followed shortly afterwards by this scepter, when I kill you. The third prince will forgive my impertinence if I remove you as a threat, a task that I will relish.”

“Talk is cheap, forgotten,” Micah responded with an easy shrug. “If you could actually do something about me, you would have before now. You’re only blabbering at me because you’re the same small and fearful person you were before you got these powers. You don’t know if you can beat me in a fair fight and you have to work up the nerve to strike a blow.”

Eryk screamed in rage, wings of green flame sprouting from his shoulders as he lunged at Micah.

Micah dodged to the side, or at least he tried to. Even with haste speeding him, the Pontiff was slightly faster. Dakkora’s scepter slammed into Micah’s chestplate and with a sound like a mallet slamming into a gong, he rocketed across a room, shattering a magically reinforced display case before bouncing off of a wall.

Almost immediately, regeneration went to work healing a broken rib and repairing the heavy bruising on his chest. Micah jumped to his feet, ignoring the stabbing pain in his chest as he quickly began muttering the words to foresight.

The Pontiff wheeled around, waving the scepter once. Broken glass sprang into the air as if suspended from invisible threads before coalescing into a triangle that dover toward Micah with viper-like quickness.

Micah raised his spear to deflect the shards only to cross his arms in front of his face and dive into the storm, barely warned in time by foresight before the space just behind him erupted into sickly green flames.

Glass plinked off of his armor, cutting slashes into either side of his face as it slipped past his guard, but other than a few hundred more hit points shaved off of his total, Micah was still fine and able to fight.

He settled into a combat stance, mouth in a tight line as he eyed up the raging Pontiff. It wasn’t lost on Micah that a few hundred hit points was enough to kill many warriors. Even Eryk’s feints came with enough force to flense the flesh from an ordinary man’s bones.

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Eryk’s crown crackled with silver light, and suddenly the air in the throne room began to smell like ozone. The ground everywhere around Micah began to grow with rainbow light as foresight screamed its warning at him.

Micah took one Gust Step forward before launching himself into the air a fraction of a second before a pair of lighting bolts spat from either end of the room toward him. The noise from the bolts’ passage almost deafened Micah, but even though both of the tongues of electricity played over his body, they did little more than tingle before the arced toward the floor, grounding themselves and carving a pace deep crater into the stone.

He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with smoky but clean air before spitting out a single command word and casting poison fog on Eryk. Roiling yellow smoke filled the room, obscuring Micah’s vision and hanging heavily in the air.

“Disperse,” Soliborne spat the word out, contempt dripping from his voice. Micah blinked once and his spell was gone as if it had never been there.

The Pontiff stood in the center of the room, untouched, his burning wings spread wide as he sneered at Micah.

Their exchanges had only taken maybe thirty seconds, but Micah was already sweating, covered in bruises and scrapes. He heaved for breath, body coiled tightly in a half crouch as he prepared himself to respond to Eryk’s next attack.

“Pathetic,” Eryk said, upper lip curled up in disgust. “I have all these thoughts and powers in my head from the master about how you have been chosen jointly by the gods, how you are the only one capable of defeating it, and here we are.”

He leaned over, spitting on the ground before fixing his gaze on Micah once more.

“You’re only powerful compared to the weak ants that lord their petty powers over the other insects that skitter over the surface of this world,” he continued. “The third prince is right. This entire planet is a den for weakness. It’s an affront to the natural order and chaos.”

Micah sprang into motion, not letting the Pontiff complete his monolog. Foresight would only last so long, and without it, Micah was all but helpless.

A pressure spear and a trio of air knives crossed the gap between the two of them as Micah moved almost blindingly fast. The Pontiff’s left wing swooped down, slapping the pressure spear out of the air as he simply ignored the air knives.

Eryk’s grown glinted silver, and all three of the lesser spells simply disappeared without a trace. He didn’t move his feet, simply flashing a predator’s grin at Micah as he shifted his scepter to two handed grip.

Micah threw himself to the ground, letting his momentum and the smooth scales on the back of his armor carry him under a swipe of the Pontiff’s wing. He stabbed upward, activating the airblade in his spear and aiming for an empty spot just to his opponent’s right.

Eryk feinted left before jumping directly into the path of Micah’s spear. A plate of green flame appeared in front of the thrust, absorbing most of its force. Still, Micah’s muscled bunched and pushed, punching the weapon through what felt like an arm’s length of solid stone.

The Pontiff grunted as the spear point entered his side, cutting through the man’s cloak and sinking almost a finger’s depth into his skin and flesh.

Micah grinned up at him, pouring mana into the neurotoxin enchantment. His spear seemed to pulse in his hand as it pumped its payload into the Pontiff’s body, a small but growing circle of red appearing in the other man’s white robe around the wound.

“Ants can bite,” Micah coughed the words out. Both his throat and chest burned like they were on fire.

Eryk screamed in rage, holding his scepter up high in a two handed grip. The Pontiff’s headband gleamed silver, and suddenly Micah lost all sense of the neurotoxin in the other man’s body. One second it was coursing through his veins, rushing toward his heart and lungs as it sought to strike a fatal blow.

The next it was gone. Like it had never existed.

Everything flashed in a rainbow of colors as foresight overloaded. There was no dodging Soliborne’s next attack.

The scepter slammed into Micah’s chest with the force of a meteor. Maarikava scales cracked and shattered, driven into his flesh like spikes from the weight of the blow. Micah’s eyes bugged out and his breath was stolen away as a half second later a wall of force slammed downward shattering the marble floor in a five pace radius circle around the Pontiff.

His heart thumped in his chest, blood gushing up through the gaps in Micah’s shredded armor as Eryk brought the scepter high again. The other man stopped, sneering down at his broken form with the weapon held high above his head.

Soliborne brought his right foot back, kicking Micah in the face. Against anyone normal, the attack would have broken a cheekbone, but it only snapped Micah’s head backward, bouncing the back of his head off of the Tower’s floor.

“Ants can bite,” Eryk mocked him, his voice sing-song as he kicked Micah in the face a second time, splitting his lip. “I’m sure it felt good to say that. Like the final line from a bard’s tale, just before the hero triumphed. This isn’t a feel-good story, Silver. Your spells and tricks might work on someone else, but I am simply too powerful for you now. You can cast as many spells on yourself as you want, but the minute you try to use your magic to alter the outside world, I can simply undo it with a thought thanks to the crown.”

“I have a satisfying line I’d like to deliver too, Micah.” A third kick caught Micah in the side of the head, blurring his vision. “Ants that bite? They get stepped on.”

Soliborne wound up for one fine kick, swinging his leg with all the force he could muster. Micah tracked the rainbow outline of the attack through double vision, lashing out with his left hand to catch the Pontiff’s leg by the ankle a moment before it could hit him.

He coughed, copper taste of blood heavy on his tongue as he grinned up at Eryk.

“The spear wasn’t the trick you should have been worried about,” Micah croaked out, eyes flashing madly as he mentally activated the Astria.

“No!” Eryk screamed, swinging the scepter downward toward Micah’s prone body. “You aren’t going anywhere!”

The weapon slowed to a crawl, stopping just above Micah’s shattered chestplate. Then, Micah felt himself being pulled back in time. Just as he was about to break free from the Pontiff, a burning green chain reached out from Eryk’s leg, lashing itself around Micah’s wrist.

Then the flow of time yanked Micah backward, Eryk in tow. As the events of the past minute undid themselves in an eyebllink, repairing Micah’s armor and healing his wounded face, he finally let himself smile.

The Astria couldn’t force anyone to travel back in time. In fact, despite Micah’s best efforts it couldn’t even bring someone willing back in time with him. That said, the third prince and its power were from a source outside of time. It had already traveled back with him once, and there was no reason to suspect that it would let him go if it thought it had him dead to rights.

It was simply a matter of getting Eryk mad and arrogant enough to be sloppy. Of course, Micah wouldn’t have been unhappy if the man hadn’t been able to stop the poison. Ending the battle without letting himself get abused like a featherweight in a heavyweight boxing match would have been preferable.

Time blurred faster as Micah found himself, walking purposefully backward through the hall of iridescent shadows Eryk screaming incoherently at him as he was dragged with.

Of course, Micah suspected that Soliborne had held back more in their fight than he had. That final attack from the scepter had confirmed it. Its strikes were unblockable, slamming waves of force into entire areas with enough strength to break bones and snap necks. If the pontiff had been using that ability from the beginning of the fight, things would have ended a lot faster.

The entryway to the all rushed up in front of Micah and he bit down on his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. Burying his will in the Astria he wrenched at the artifact, aborting his backward passage early.

The world snapped back into focus. Eryk and Micah were standing a half pace apart, both of them in the center of a ritual circle that burst into blue light the moment they appeared.