Aril hurried along the stone corridors, magelight flickering in her wake.  

Whispers of wind words muttered at her from all directions, so many people were trying to tell her things or ask something from her that she tuned them all out.  

"What is he thinking?" she sighed and complained to the air, "I don't understand Batho anymore. "

She burst out into the open courtyard where a circle of hangers on were surrounding what was clearly the start of a fight.  Good, she had got here in time.  

The angry man in the center was facing down one of the knights.  Aril recognized him as the one who had been overly pushy at the ball.  As the Flower, she had been forced to accept all dance requests and this man had taken advantage of the privilege to the extent that she had to politely but firmly avoid him.  The knight, Rethas, was also one the better fighters in this country and the lords tolerated his attitude for that reason.  

And now this.  After disappearing without a word for two weeks, Batho had returned and before even talking to her, he was picking a fight with Rethas.  

Batho snarled at something the knight said.  Rethas sneered down at him.  

Then as Aril fought her way through the gathering crowd, her heart leapt into her throat.  They were separating now, counting out measured steps away from each other.  

An unofficial duel.  

"Don't do this!" Aril shouted, but she couldn't make herself heard over the din of the crowd.  There was no way Batho, with his poor command over magic, could win against Rethas, a full knight with a bevy of accomplishments.  All that awaited him from this duel was humiliation, and Rethas knew that.  He wasn't even bothering to draw the sword at his waist.  

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"Your magic is simple.  Almost too simple.  "

The star whispered to him in his mind.  Batho mentally shrugged, that was all he could manage.  

"Like we practiced, let us control some of your magic," the voice said again.  

His drain blade appeared in his hand, the best spell Batho could produce.  Rethas sneered again and summoned a bubble of disruption magic, then beckoned for Batho to come at him.  

Batho charged across the stones, even if he knew that a mere drain blade was nothing beside the full defensive bubble, but this time it would be different.  He had the star inside him and the star seemed to know a lot about magic.  

The drain blade struck the disruption shell and stopped, Batho's magic clashing against Rethas.  All was as expected, it turned into a contest of power, one that the weaker Batho could not win.  Rethas's sneer seemed to get deeper and Batho's anger mounted higher.  

Then something twitched in his lifeforce, the magic surging out of control.  For one moment, Batho was tempted to clamp down like he was taught to then he relaxed and let the star do its work.  

The drain blade moved suddenly, like a living thing instead of magic.  It bent back then hammered at the shield viciously before coiling on the surface, magic fighting against magic.  Rethas's eyes widened then his sneer returned as the shield stayed intact and unchanged.  

"It's not working," Batho thought.  

"It is.  We have found a gap.  "

There was another surge and Batho tried to hang on to his magic for dear life.  Gods, the pain!  The star drew on his lifeforce without care for safe limits, drawing down on Batho's power without asking at all.  His legs quivered and his eyeballs felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets.  

The effect was instant though.  The spike of power concentrated itself into a single pinpoint spot on the shield, cracking the uniform shell and pouring into the interior.  The blade reformed on the inside, connected through the keyhole to Batho on the outside of the shield, and flowered outwards faster than the eye could see.  The magic connection from Rethas to the shield was cut and his magic fluctuated wildly out of control.  

Then in the short gap before Rethas could reassert his will, the drain blade turned on the shield itself.  Batho hadn't even gotten over the backlash when he felt a new spell connected.  It was Rethas's shield.  The star had somehow coopted it.  

The power inside was so far beyond Batho's full power that he could hardly imagine what couldn't be done with it.  Rethas might be able to tear down entire city walls if they weren't enchanted!  And Batho knew that Rethas hadn't even exerted himself.  

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Rethas recovered admirably quickly and tried to blow away the shield that was now his prison.  The burst of magic in all directions tried to clear the shield but the star folded the shield into itself, absorbing the magic and refusing to contest it.  Rethas's omnidirectional dispel exploded onto the courtyard while the drain blade faced only a tiny slice of the blast.  

The blade was humming with energy, far more energy than Batho had ever controlled.  

"I see you've learned some tricks," Rethas snarled, finally drawing his blade.  The entire encounter had happened so quickly that the crowd was still wondering what happened.  

Batho saw the man's magic flash across his body and tried to distance himself.  But Rethas leapt meters into him in one bound, driving the blade downwards.  A last minute twitch from the star flung Batho aside and no doubt saved his life.  

The world rolled and bounced, his bones felt like they were breaking as he tumbled across the hard stone.  Somewhere in there, the star shot most of his magic upwards and missed Rethas.  Rethas tried his leap again, sending Batho into another desperate roll to avoid the thrusting sword.  Rethas being serious now, if Batho wasn't trying his best to avoid it, the blade might have taken a limb off.  

"And we have won," the voice said in Batho's head.  

The magic of the drain blade that everyone thought had missed deployed into a vast diffuse layer far above them.  Sensing the change, Rethas leapt back warily, putting up another disruption shield.  The voice chuckled and sent a magical signal upwards.  

Batho was still groaning sorely on the ground when a good portion of the sky seemed to dim.  As the courtyard plunged into dusk, Rethas was surrounded by a bright glare that threw off heat like a furnace.  His scream of pain as every portion of his body burst into flame instantly echoed off the walls of the castle.  

While Rethas was still trying to fight off that attack, the remanent of the drain blade in Batho's hand shot forward and pierced Rethas's head.  The flaming body tumbled to the ground mutely and the drain blade spell swung back around to return to Batho.  

The light bending spell above them faded away, the leftover magic also collecting down into the sphere floating above him.  

Only silence was left in the courtyard.  

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What... how...

Gibbering thoughts whirled around in Aril's head at the impossible sight of Rethas's charred body.  He had died too quickly for anyone else to react.  By all accounts, Rethas had been winning, and then suddenly he was dead.  Batho was still lying on the ground though and she threw aside all the other thoughts and finally rushed out of the ring of spectators.  

"Batho!" she said, dropping to a hurried kneel next to him.  Cut and scrapes decorated his body everywhere, even more bruises revealed themselves under her trembling palm.  The right wrist was also dislocated, painfully.  But that mattered less than the state of magical exhaustion, his lifeforce was going haywire.  

And no wonder!  He had burned almost his full power in less than a second when he broke Rethas's shield.  He groaned in pain as the backlash made itself felt.  

"Batho..." she muttered unconsciously as she flexed her own power, sending herself into him, stabilizing his drained magical pools and resetting distended vessels, all symptoms of forcing too much magic at once out of an untrained soul.  Had he wanted to win so much that he could endure the pain?  It must have felt like being burnt alive.  

Aril paused as her probes touched something.  Something foreign sat in his left hand, tied directly into his lifeforce.  Then with a suddenness, she was thrown out of his body, her senses cut and the lifeforce spreading through his body that was part of her burned back with searing magic.  

Gah!  She rocked back onto the hard stone ground, blinking at the second impossibility.  What was that?  No patient had ever thrown a healer out of their bodies in quite that way, even when they resisted the... darker skills of the magic healer.  And Batho was definitely not capable of doing this.  

Then she was aware of the crowd above her, chattering away.  There was six knights running over now.  Oh.  Aril's heart sank as she realized what was going to happen now.  

After all, duels weren't supposed to kill, even unofficial ones.