Cloak pinned to the ground by a slick dagger, the Harbinger turned. “Ah Carmon. I was wondering when we’d meet again.”

Carmon, his cloak of blades shifting like ocean waves in the night, growled, “Where was Roy sent?”

Recoiling in laughter, the Harbinger slowly held up his thin, deadly blade. “That’s all you have to say to me? After all these years? I figured our relationship was better than this, friend.”

A dark waft seeped from below Carmon’s cloak. He seethed, his blades reacting like drone ants to their queen. “We were never friends.”

A silent shockwave expelled through the ruins and rubble, clashing against the Harbinger. He tilted his sword, taking the brunt of the force before mechanically adjusting to an invisible force. He reached to the side, blocking once again, then his back, then again in the front. Each attack burst with green sparks and warning anger, yet the attacker had not taken a single step.

Carmon paused the assault, giving him just enough time to ask a question. “Where was Roy sent?”

There was no proper answer, only a question for a question. “How’s Annie?”

Dark clouds formed across Carmon Red’s brow at the mention of his dead wife, enough to make the Legacy of the Blade Dancer initiate the first true step of his technique. The prelude had already started and ended, an invisible telegraphed example of each strike. Now it was time for the echo.

With the same pattern as the first assault, Carmon attacked again, this time moving his feet and arms in rhythm. A beat drummed in his mind, calling him to each strike, to each step. An eternal song, having long been created by his Lord, ruled the battlefield, changing it to better fit a Dancer’s will.

First to the front, Carmon whipped his hand down, his cloak of blades following a hair behind. Then to the Harbinger’s side, the blades followed the command with ease. Behind was next, but this time the cloak added a step of its own, extending its reach by just a few inches. Parasitic weapon or not, the dance morphed as it went, altering ever so slightly.

The first step continued with a repeat attack to the front, landing Carmon eye level with the Harbinger. Emerald blood erupted, the Harbinger didn’t even try to evade or block. Hunks of skin fell, limbs detached, bones separated. Then, with a blaze of the Harbinger’s green halo, they weren’t. The man was whole, the man was undying.

“My turn—”

The echo cut off the Harbinger’s words, repeating the same assault once again. Front, side, back, front. The same wounds befell the man, except a new alteration – a short stab to the side. He didn’t notice, however, wounds not being something he really cared about. Green shone for a fleeting moment, then the man was back together.

Now, the first step concluded.

The Harbinger cleared his throat. “Now is it my turn?” He didn’t wait for an answer, quickly saying, “Yes, yes it is.”

Muscle and bone split, making way for an eternal emerald shine. Dropping his sword, the Harbinger yanked at the green, slicing open his torso and producing something far beyond a simple weapon. Jagged and crisp, straight but also curved, the weapon eluded to a sharpness befitting of pure rot. It didn’t need to stab, it didn’t need to slash, it only needed time to wither.

Thousands of insects came with the weapon, enough to cast the item in a barrage of movement. Beetles created armor, flies carried disease, centipedes and scorpions a toxic harmony between emerald and death. But then, when the weapon was fully torn from the Harbinger’s chest, it sang low and dreadfully.

A call, a declaration of solo combat.

Not holding the weapon’s handle, the Harbinger extended his arms perpendicular to his legs. The wound in his chest had already healed, creating much more than a dire smile across his lips. At his command, the weapon flew up, changing the overcast sky into a lightning storm of bugs and rot.

Carmon swallowed, commanding his cloak to react in a similar way. A dance, yes, but something beyond simple steps or attacks. His parasitic item took the form of a cloak, but that was not its natural state. Hundreds of blades connected to one another, morphing and converging into something that far exceeded the Harbinger’s weapon in scope and size.

Stretching like a lighthouse, Carmon’s weapon shed its wickedness for something sleek and sinful. A sword, one forged by the likes of an elevated blacksmith. Magnificent gray and silver, a highborn tool for a commoner swine, a tool for killing rather than ceremony or nobility. A creation tailored for a royal assassin, or rather, a Royal Inquisitor.

Carmon set his defenses, his parasitic weapon flying high overhead, matching the weapon drifting endlessly above the Harbinger. In his hand, the sword that had gotten him through life and death several times before. A trustworthy blade for when duty befell the most powerful of the Inquisitors looking after the Youngest Princess.

The Harbinger muttered something about “cheating,” and it still being his “turn,” but Carmon didn’t want for his own theatrics. The first step of his dance began with an invisible echo, one guiding the less experienced in a flurry of dance.

The strike connected from the sky, an invisible execution matching the sword that hung in the clouds. The ground dented with blood and gore, sundering the battlefield with a meteoric crater. Before the Harbinger could reconstruct his body, the second invisible attack came, this time a normal proportioned attack from a normal sized sword. It cleaved into a mush of green flesh, bowing out just in time for another attack from the sky to descend.

The crater deepened.

The step was short and sweet, a three-hit combination multiplied over two echoes. Carmon disappeared in a blur, hauntedly whipping his sword down. The motion moved his parasitic weapon, calling it to action. It fell like an arrow returning from being shot straight up, colliding into the crater and the Harbinger’s messy remains. Carmon appeared in the hole a heartbeat later, striking with his own hand while the massive sword retreated into the air.

Just as Carmon vacated the area, the sword recreated its previous freefall, deafening the area. Then, the second echo blazed, and the same three-hit combination of attacks happened again. The sky fell, a deadly strike happened, then the sky fell again.

At the end of the dance’s first step, not a sound came from the crater for a long moment, prompting Carmon to start the second step. It was much the same as the first, but with enough variation to not get bored. As the Blade Dancer pummeled the Harbinger in the hole again and again, the weapon made of rot and ruin hovered overhead, waiting.

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Something the imprisoned Undying Lord was quite good at.

With the momentary reprieve, Leland and Glenny circled around the battlefield, skirting the feathered edges of danger. They eventually arrived next to Sybil, who was entranced by the perfect bone statue.

A clear barrier of gray mana rounded the obelisk, a layer of protection from the cracked ground leading to the crater. Glenny entered unmolested, being more focused on his dad than some weird gray sheen. Leland hesitated at the boundary, inspecting it with the best forethought he could possibly imagine.

Obviously the dome was divine in nature, but not a radiant energy he was familiar with. Granted the list was short, he still suspected the Lord presiding over the statue to be far more obscure than not. Still, there wasn’t any hostile intent from the barrier, just the tired hum of protection. So Leland stepped through, finding no changes once inside.

“Sybil?” he hesitantly asked, finding Glenny off to the side staring intently at a green mass stitching itself back together.

Within moments, the Harbinger was fully formed, a power that was transferred to his clothing and thin sword. Above his cryptid eldritch thing of a weapon hung high, waiting, watching. He and Carmon then exchanged a few words, none of which the boys were able to hear because of the distance.

Leland shook Sybil, cutting off her enthrallment.

“Leland?” she flinched, her eyes as gray as a rock in a pond. “What—”

She cut herself off, the gray glow originating from her bones fluctuating. She cursed, closing her eyes and casting away Leland like he was on fire. She muttered a poem to herself, silently saying every other word or so. The words “luminosity,” “marrow,” “kingdom,” and “tribulation,” were quietly enunciated.

After the third iteration of the poem, the glowing stabilized and Sybil opened her eyes. She briefly regarded Leland, glancing at him like a stagehand peeking around a curtain. But that was just it, Leland didn’t matter right now. Not when she had to perform.

“Infinite stars, infinite children, hear my call, hear my needs. Unfold my will, I ask to become a Child, a Legacy. My name is Sybil Palemarrow and I humbly wish to bind myself in contract to you.”

Leland didn’t let his surprise show, especially the familiarity of the ending line. Instead he resolved his legs to stand firm, Sybil’s words causing the ground to shake.

“Sybil! What is this!” he screamed once the shaking doubled or even tripled.

As it seemed, Leland was not the only one with worry over the situation. Glenny gasped and retreated further into the protective dome and next to Leland.

“I’ve never seen my dad do this dance before,” he said, ingraining the memory into his mind, not for future practice or a tale to retell over drinks.

No, Glenny forced himself to watch as a means to an end. His dad pummeled and beat the Harbinger again and again, each time with more theatrics than the last. But the Harbinger didn’t seem to care, healing every wound like they were mere scraps. Frankly, studying his father’s movements was so that his mind was occupied and his fears and worries thwarted.

“Is that bad?” Leland asked, splitting his attention the best he could. He stole glances at Carmon, but the battle wasn’t important. Getting Sybil out of here was.

“It means he’s in danger.”

That did draw Leland’s attention, at least enough to set his mind into motion. He needed answers. “Sybil, you need to get out of here.”

“I can’t,” she muttered in between reciting the same off-putting poem as before.

“Sybil please! I’m not leaving without you, we need to g—”

“My mother is dying! I need to do this! Otherwise everything is lost!”

Like an egg, the statue began to crack. Gray bloomed from the seams, enough light and raw power to guide even the most blind individuals. The woman’s face eroded in seconds, giving way to a gemstone creation of silver and ivory. The sudden spark of color shifted the gray the statue created as well as the color burning in Sybil’s bones.

She coughed, a murky mess of bile, blood, and tiny bits of bone spilling into her hand. She tried to hide it from Leland, but she couldn’t. Not with the way she was staring at him.

“What Lord is this?” he asked, surprising the young princess. “It’s not the Lord of Bone.”

The question and statement hung for a long moment. “The Boneforged Monarch.”

Leland recognized the unusual title for what it was, the name of a Harbinger. The Toy Maker, the Light Architect, the Undying Army, Lords in their own right, but regaled with a name befitting of a murderer.

“The Lord of the Boneforged,” Sybil then said, not even realizing her slipup.

If she was being honest, the title meant very little to her. Vile Lords, while not unknown beings of disaster, were rather hidden in culture and knowledge. Epic tales of Lords were commonplace, as were tales of those who were evil. But the intricacies were lost to the mundane.

Sybil was no different, Aunty P. made sure to shelter her from such information for her young life. There was only one thing she needed to know and that was tradition. The Palemarrow line must make an offering to the Boneforged Monarch. Whether they would be accepted into her Legacy was up in the air. The only time in recent history where that acceptance had occurred was the Queen, Sybil’s mother.

And while Leland didn’t know the history of such a ritual, he understood the intent Sybil spoke. Lordly contracts were somewhat of a specialty of his, after all.

The statue continued to crack and fall apart, revealing the true face of the Lord’s shrine. Faceless, a nothingness beyond a will and a structureless glow, yet divine in nature. Gray, silver, ivory, whatever. The color was the least important portion of the Lord, for the simple fact that Leland and Sybil couldn’t look at her.

Leland had met several Lords at this point, even fighting one. But even then he could gaze upon the being, but then again, the Toy Maker had been harbored to a vessel.

Sybil fell to one knee, bowing her head before the Lord. She outstretched a hand—

Glenny grabbed Leland and yanked him to the ground, knocking them both out of the way of a towering crash. Emerald split around the protective dome, removing the sky like the boys were suddenly indoors. Bugs buzzed around the rot, swarming the protective energy looking for gaps.

“What—” Leland exclaimed, quickly going silent. While Glenny obviously didn’t trust the barrier to deflect such an attack, falling to the ground was the least of their worries.

The Harbinger stood firmly at the edge of the gray dome, crushed ground beneath his feet, and broken, Carmon lay across the way.

“Dad lost,” Glenny whispered, his tone mimicking that which he spoke with after finding out his mom died.

Leland could only think of one word. “How?”

Glenny wasn’t the one to answer.

“People like Carmon Red focus too intently on offense. They are too powerful for their own gain,” the Harbinger mulled. “Sometimes they miss the ant below their feet. Literally in this case. All it took was a single ant bite to put Carmon Red out of commission.”

Leland peered over, finding the statement to look true. Carmon’s veins were bulged green and black, the same pattern as Diana’s wounds. But luckily for her, she was portaled out of danger.

Behind Leland and Glenny, Sybil conversed with the Boneforged Monarch, a power wading past them like a tide against rocks. Even the Harbinger looked away, not that he truly seemed to mind a Lord in his presence.

No, the man simply stood slightly too straight, slightly too rigid. Now that he was close, the man looked unproportionally awkward. Arms too long, legs too short, back too flat. The man’s body was weighted yet light, full but thin. But such was the torment when one’s body was a sheath for a massive weapon and multiple colonies of bugs.

“You called Carmon ‘dad,’ I guess that makes you Annie’s son.”

Crimson red bent from Glenny’s hands as the Sightless King’s power forged to his will. “Don’t speak about my mother,” he seethed, just as his father had done moments earlier.

“I have no qualms with you child. I had heard rumors that the great Annie ‘The Chameleon’ Red had a child. How coincidental we are to meet here.”

“W-who are you?”

“Oh, no one special. Just a former Umbra assassin.”