Udrebam’s night was colder than usual. Just as Reginald liked.

He breathed it in deep, felt each icy lungful send shivers and numbing fingers to run down his throat. An almost painful sensation, yet one that left him marvelously alert.

How he loved the city. How he relished in every step taken within its streets, every clacking resonation of heel against cobble.

Reginald kept his eyes wandering as he moved, drinking in the sights around him. Somehow, even after a decade and a half as organiser and overseer, he’d not yet grown tired of it.

The houses around him were tall and proud, though more humble by half than the ones he’d see in Jaea. Their make was immaculate, construction measured to perfection. Already worn slightly by age, the marks of time bringing a silent dignity as they stood vigil in the night.

Soon they shrank. Stories turning to yards, smooth stone becoming brickwork. Construction growing simpler and hastier with seemingly every step he took away from the city’s heart.

He smiled again. It was what he loved most about Udrebam, the fascinating transfiguration it underwent from a half mile’s walk in any direction as wealth waned or waxed. Evidence of the city’s youth, and the changing of an era.

Six centuries walking Mirandis had left Reginald weary and unflinching in the face of most it had to offer, no matter how magical or rare. And yet it was the mundane, not the arcane, that had brought captivation and awe back to his old mind after a such deprivation.

The streets shifted again, almost without his realising. Suddenly a far more familiar sight.

Wooden frames and primitive clays made up their walls, with ceilings a dozen feet high and windows covered by planks rather than glass. Beside the towering spawn of industry, the lower class housing seemed almost anachronistic.

I suppose I shouldn’t expect such structures to vanish just yet. Reginald thought.

He’d spent his entire life seeing them. Doubtless they’d last until long after factorisation had made its presence known across all of Mirandis. Revolution had a slow way of spreading.

Something shifted in the air. Sudden, rapid. Like heat rushing outward from a fire. It drew Tamaias’ eyes up, urging him to stare lengthways down the road.

They soon settled on the source.

A man stood fifty paces from him. Enormously tall, broad of shoulder and clad in clothing that would have fit a labourer well.

Dark-lensed spectacles obscured his eyes, and a feral grin stretched out wide enough that Reginald found himself imagining that flames danced in his hidden pupils.

Fear suddenly took root in him. He reached for his magic thoughtlessly, felt its touch in an instant and waited only a half second before it flowed into his grip.

Cutaris and Utalis answered his summons with a roar of exhilaration and a veteran’s resolve, slowing the world to a crawl and filling every cell of Reginald’s body with power enough to burn a lessar man from existence. His preternatural senses just barely focused on the charging enemy before he arrived, hand outstretched as he grabbed for Reginald’s throat.

The air howled at his retreat, turning sharp with the sound of flesh meeting flesh as he batted the man’s grab aside. He’d expected to feel bone break beneath his slap, instead the charging man seemed unnoticing. Stepping in, reaching out again and successfully snatching Reginald’s wrist with a viperous speed. He turned, swinging with a strength from the pit itself.

Udrebam vanished into streaks of colour as Reginald flew, striking the street and rebounding like a stone skipping on water.

His momentum dragged him onwards, dying only after his body had torn through a dozen of the slum’s smaller houses.

Pulverised mortar and splintered wood fell around him like rain as he stood. Air filled with innumerable stenches, rot and rubble. Dust and ruin. Chief among them a scent as familiar as it was wretched. Iron, tainted and visceral in his nostrils. Human blood spilled in excess.

He realised with disdain that the houses had been occupied.

The specacled man was moving already. Closing in on great bounds, legs carrying him impossibly far. Reginald readied himself to meet the rush, then was sent spinning again as the very space between them seemed to contract like a muscle and bring the enemy close.

Itamis.

He had time only for that single thought before hitting another row of buildings, this time continuing long after he brought them to ruin.

Twisting in mid air, he buried his feet in the cobbled streets. Brought himself to a grinding halt and tore two great furrows in the stone to do so.

When he looked up the spectacled man was gone. Reginald knew better than to wait for him to reveal himself.

He flew, siphoning Cutaris off and releasing it behind him as a stream. Propelling himself upwards and reaching twice the Crux’s height in moments. He didn’t stop there, continued as he searched. Knowing that an instant’s stagnency could mean death.

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Reginald reached out with magic, finding his attacker through feel rather than sight. It chilled his heart to witness the man’s power so clearly.

An Immortal. He thought. And a powerful one at that.

Then it began to close in, magic touching his senses like a desert wind and snapping him around to sight its wielder. Reginald knew where the man was long before he grew near enough to see in the night’s sky. He’d prepared himself before he was even that close.

For a second time the air twisted and shrank, yet Tamaias was ready for the world’s contraction. He splayed his hands, threw lightning outward and wove it into a streaking net of electrical fury. Its luminescence revealed shock on the spectacled man’s face just before he struck it, then the expression disappeared behind the sight-stealing flash of broiling energy.

For a moment, it seemed to make day of night.

Reginald didn’t wait for the glare to clear. He roared, the sound bringing a primal focus to his will even as it shaped the magic within him. Flames leapt out to meet the lightning, warped in pure force and crushed into compact spheres that detonated like a thousand grenados as they closed in from all sides.

Something shifted in the smoke his assault left, and Reginald threw himself back just as the man burst out of it. The world contracted, space snagging and slowing him enough that the lancing blow caught his shoulder.

Feeling left the limb, driven out by a strength to shock even him. The spectacled man’s grinning face followed the attack, forcing Reginald back with a fusilade of blows. Each landing against his guard like roundshot.

He dropped, flying downwards to flee. Cursed as his enemy caught him with a grab and sent him shooting off-balance. The snarling mystic was upon him before he could straighten up, Reginald loosed pure light as a distraction before fleeing upwards.

They fought across the skies like warring eagles, every drop of spilled blood becoming rain upon the city below.

Reginald’s magic struck him in every way he could make it. Great piercing icicles propelled at an arrow’s speed, scything winds sent twisting to throw the man off-course. Even vacuous absences of air forced into his breaths, aimed to starve his brain of oxygen.

It was all folly.

Flames barely singed the man. His nerves seemed not to register lightning. Skin proved superior armour against the magic-hardened icicles breaking on it. Time and time again he closed in, be it through warping space or simply powering through whatever counters were thrown before him.

His strikes were like a dozen weapons at once, shaped mid-flight and lengthening as was needed. Dodges came no less impossibly as the world shrank in whichever direction he moved. Over and over Reginald’s defensive measures were swept aside.

It brought the alien touch of an intruder in his mind. Unfamiliar, unwelcome. Stealing strength from his body and resolve from his deeds.

Fear. An old friend, estranged for half a century.

For the second time that night Reginald roared like a wild beast, Cutaris revelling in the animalism. He felt the air around them, clouds rubbing frictively against one another and flooding the skies with a static charge. Seized the electrical power with his own magic, then twisted and coiled it around him.

The clouds could never have spawned lightning on their own, he knew. But they didn’t need to. Large and voluminous as they were, the petty charges contained within proved deadly enough when concentrated.

Reginald hurled the stolen power like a pagan God of the skies. Felt it strike home in his enemy, forking outwards on impact like roots from a tree’s branch, then grinned at the sight of the man falling back towards the earth. Smoke trailing from his chest.

He landed atop a house, lay still and stagnant thousands of feet below. Reginald knew better than to assume his victory.

He felt the air around him, then tightened it with Utalis. Crushed it inwards with a pressure and force that left it denser than water. Denser even than stone. Then he let his thoughts seep further into it, felt whatever scraps of matter made up the gas straining against one another in his magic’s grip. Unseen forces desperately prying them apart.

Reginald stripped them away, felt heat begin to swell within the air. Compounded it with more of his magic, then began building power behind the mass to propel it.

His skin was already blistering by the time it was ready to launch. Reaction already self sustaining as it left his grip.

The fledgeling star grew as it fell upon the Demigod. Eating the air around it, drawing in precious matter for fuel and finding the atmosphere a glutton’s feast. It landed larger than a man’s head.

Light enough shimmered from the surface that an inept’s eyes would have been seared to uselessness were they to gaze upon it. Heat enough spilled from its face that iron would have been boiled to vapour at its touch.

Only when flames and death rolled outward along the ground below did Reginald spare a thought for the houses they washed. The people living within them. Most would perish instantly, he knew. As swift and painless a death as any dun could wish for.

But some would be on the edges of his attack. Too close to live, too far to evaporate. They would burn as any man did in fire. Slowly, agonisingly.

Guilt was a luxury Reginald couldn’t humour. He turned, flew at as great a pace as he could manage. The wind’s grating touch brought a strange clarity to his adrenaline-marred thoughts.

Tall, scarred, muscled as a bull and wearing dark spectacles. His attacker fit the description of Bob Danielz perfectly.

It birthed a storm of questions in Reginald’s mind, all too great for him to spare time for in the current crisis. If his life was in danger, and an attack by an Immortal butcher certainly meant it was, then his priority was to save it.

He headed for the city’s edge. Meaning to move as far as he could.

The pricking of his magical senses was too short a warning to act before he felt hands close around him from behind.

Reginald spun, filling his palms with magic and raising them to smite the new attacker. Felt thoughts leave him as a blow to rend mountains fell upon his face.

The assault was short and brutal, above all other things professional. Strikes landing swiftly against Reginald’s head, jaw and gut. Leaving him breathless, thoughtless. Helpless. The wind growled in his ears for an instant, and his mind cleared just barely in time to register their downward momentum before the stone’s embrace came.

His head settled a moment later, vision just barely after that. Reginald glimpsed the edges of a crater, realised he lay in its epicentre. Fathoms wide and yards deep. Its volume might have impressed him, had he room for any emotion besides terror.

Danielz, or the thing that had taken his face, stood over him. Grin still in place, unchanged by the vicious burns dotting every inch of him. Save the tinge of victory. His spectacles had been obliterated, drying against his face in streaks of molten metal and glass.

Their absence revealed eyes no lighter than the black lenses that had so shortly covered them.

The last thing Reginald saw was the raising of a boot. Then it came down upon his face, and the world’s light was stolen from him.