Titanus knelt before the Magus Melchior to accept his judgment. The maguses did not wear dragon scales, like the disciples, but they were marked in their devotion by the silver-steel horns that sprouted from their temples. Titanus, being the first disciple, and farthest down the road of transformation, was covered in scales. Even his face had been replaced by an imbricated mask of platinum and gold, and the only visible sign of his humanity was the mass of blonde hair that fell down his back like a mane.

“We have communed with the dragon,” Melchior intoned, “and in his wisdom, he has granted you grace so that the duel may go forward.”

The Path of Infinite Spirals came at a great price, but it was one that Titanus had been eager to pay. When a warrior accepted his first scale, he agreed to pledge his soul to the dragon who dwelled at the end of the world, and the spirit of a god became one with the spirit of a man. The dragon did not speak to them in words, they needed the maguses for that, but Titanus could feel the presence of a greater being with him always.

Fringe Town was unrecognizable from what it had been when they arrived there a year before. A village of low-level cultivators, transformed into a thriving hub, the foremost outpost in a war waged on the Blessed Lands. Thousands of faithful servants had migrated from Goth, braving the treacherous paths of Jigoku to find a home in what would become the heart of a new nation. Hundreds of buildings had been constructed or rebuilt, walls had been raised, and an entire forest had been converted into telemetry spires so that the dragon’s voice could better be heard by his followers.

The starlords of Fringe Town had resisted the change, but fully a third of the town’s population had been convinced to join the cause of the dragon. At first,Titanus had been amazed at how easy it was to tempt them to take sides against their own homeland, but he had since learned how little love of country factored into the decisions of cultivators.

These people were concerned with personal power above all else, and the residents of Fringe Town saw themselves as having been born under unlucky circumstances, forever barred from ascending to the true heights and honors they had been taught to crave. The Path of Infinite Spirals offered them everything they had been denied, and once they saw what the scales could do, they happily spat on the paths of their ancestors and the names of their former gods.

Titanus found it satisfying to see how easily the starlords could be enticed to destroy themselves. That way, more of his own people would not have to pay the dragon’s price, as he had. They could rely on the Middle Kingdom to taste the poison fruit and tear itself apart for more.

It was the Maguses who had given him the name Titanus. He had been Frederick, once. The memory was barely real to him now, like a story he had heard when he was young. He had lived with his family in a hamlet in eastern Goth, laboring under the yoke of a minor lord. It had been a hard life, but satisfying in its way. The faces of his brother’s and sisters were a blur to him now, but he remembered loving them.

Everything changed when the starlords attacked.

To this day, he did not know who they were, or why they had come, but they had worn stars on their arms, and come among his people like callous gods. They had taken whatever they wanted, and killed whoever resisted. One of them had spoken the language of his people, enough to order them about. They had stayed in the hamlet for a few days, resting from some terrible battle in the mountains, complaining about the thinness of the air. The local lord had sent a retinue of fighters, but they had been wiped out by a single man with a fat belly.

That was all Titanus remembered about him, how fat he was, and how impossibly strong. He’d stopped a charging horse with a punch, broken weapons and armor with his bare hands as easily as egg shells, and ripped the heads off of men like a farmer slaughtering chickens. It had been sport for him, just as what had followed had been sport. Titanus had tried to stop the fat man from hurting his sister, and he had been struck down as casually as one might wave away a fly.

He’d survived by mere chance, coming to his senses days later with a fractured skull, driven by thirst to crawl to the well and lay there dying amid the dead. His entire family had been killed by then, and the starlords had gone on their way, leaving nothing behind. He would have died from his injuries if servants of the local master had not come in search of the lost retainers. They had nursed him back to health, largely so that they could have a clear account of what had happened, but Titanus could not be given a place among the lord’s household. He had been touched by the starlords, and it was as much bad luck to keep him as to kill him.

The maguses had been called.

They were wise men, advisors to lords and kings, and keepers of mysteries. Titanus had been taken by them to be a servant in their city at the end of the world, a place at the westernmost edge of Goth where the land met the inner flesh of the world tree. The maguses were also called magicians, because they guarded the words and the rites of the magic that governed the world. He had heard when he was very young that a magus could even challenge a starlord with their magic, but he had come to learn that was not true.

Magic was costly, it required sacrifices of blood and life. Lords came to the maguses for blessings and enchantments to improve their standing among other men of power, but these gifts were often temporary, and payment was required in the form of servants and livestock.

Titanus had seen a boy his age have his throat cut in a ritual with the sole purpose of ensuring the edge of a single blade, an heirloom of a king, would never dull. One night they had fed him well, given him sacred oils to wash himself, and knowing what was coming, he had fled the city of the maguses for the hope of a cleaner death in the wilderness.

For days he had walked from the border of the city to the very edge of the world, a great, dark wall that rose up into the sky where the sun beetle made its daily journey. His feet had been bloody, but they had led him straight, and at the end of his strength he had come to a hole in the wall. It had been perfectly round, and reminded him of the work of a nest of carpenter bees that had drilled their way into the side of his parent’s home one summer. There was fresh sawdust beneath the hole, and it was large enough for him to crawl inside.

Thinking back, he did not know what had prompted him to enter. Surely, death in the jaws of some monstrous insect was worse than the death he would have received at the edge of a magician’s knife. But the other children had talked about what a death like that meant, how the magic would trap the soul of its victim, or else use it up, so that the one who died in that way could never be at peace. That was a nightmare worse than the one he had already lived.

Something had invited him into the hole, a sound, or a light. He could hardly remember it now, but he had crawled inside, and there he had found his destiny.

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Titanus had always felt that Melchior resented him because of his personal relationship with their god. He had been the one to be given the gift that would change their world forever, to find the husk of a dead dragon beside a single dark egg and bring it back to the city of maguses. They could not kill him then, because the egg had marked his hands with its darkness, and when the dragon was born, it spoke to him.

If only he had been a magus himself, able to understand the wisdom of the dragon and translate it for others. Images and numbers had been burned into his mind, and he had understood none of them. Magus Gaspar had been the first one to make sense of his visions, and begin the work of transcribing what would become the Path of Infinite Spirals. It was Gaspar who had given him a privileged place in the city, even if he kept him from the dragon after it was hatched.

By the time he was seventeen, the maguses had forged the first scale, and developed a ritual to fuse it with a willing subject. They promised him the strength of a starlord, and for once, the magician’s had not lied. In a matter of a few seasons, he had become a warlord, and then first among kings, and then king of kings in Goth. Others had been offered the gift of a scale, but none had taken on the burden as fully as he had before preparing to invade the Blessed Lands.

The dragon could not leave Goth. It could hardly travel beyond the city of the maguses without courting its own destruction. Something about this world poisoned it, and so his god was forced to remain there at the end. His connection to the dragon had to be supported with waystations, structures and artifacts that allowed its voice to be heard at vast distances. So their progress had been slow, and the mountains themselves interfered with its telemetry, forcing them to spend months in the construction of the grand waystation that had once been Fringe Town.

The time had not been wasted, however. Starlords had been recruited and trained, and even those who had been sent from the Middle Kingdom to quash them had been seduced. Their expansion was inevitable, and it would go on without him.

“I thank you,” Titanus said, standing so that he towered over Melchior. He had no love for this magus, for any of them, truly, but they were a necessary piece of the juggernaut that would one day grind the starlords and all that they had made into the earth.

“May the dragon’s luck be with you,” the magus said, though his eyes carried a very different message. Melchior would be happy to see him fall.

His challenger was waiting for him at the edge of the great spiral at the center of Fringe Town. It was there that the dragon’s presence could be felt most keenly. By outward appearances, Wen Lambo had not changed so much since joining the disciples of the dragon. The same square face and neat mustache, but beneath his robes was a lattice of the newest generation of scales. The maguses were always improving on the designs, which had become thinner and more intricate, requiring less of the rare metals that could only be shaped in strange forges at the edge of the world. He could no longer summon that silver blade of his, but he had acquitted himself well when the starlords of the Middle Kingdom had come to liberate Fringe Town, and he had been rewarded with a new weapon.

Wen Lambo’s new sword was seven feet long and a full foot wide, its edge inscribed with cultivation scripts empowered by blood sacrifice. He showed no sign of regretting the exchange. Starlords who forsook their old paths for that of the dragon were even stronger than the men of Goth who had never cultivated and merely took on the scales. Titanus was an exception to that rule, but he was getting old. It had been five years since he found the egg, and he could feel his body dying all around him.

Maybe starlords, who were said to be immortal, could bear the burdens of power longer. Titanus did not care. He had made his bargain, and he was glad for it.

“Do you have an answer?” Wen Lambo called.

“Your challenge is accepted,” Titanus said. “May the dragon’s luck be with you.”

“And also with you.” Wen Lambo raised his great sword in a salute.

There were dozens of disciples around the arena, and hundreds of the people of Goth who had gathered to see their king display his strength. Three Maguses were present to officiate, those who had known him from the beginning; Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar. It was Gaspar who rang the bell for them to begin, looking at him sadly as he did so, whereas Melchior wore a smug expression.

Their arena was a hundred paces wide, and Wen Lambo shot across it as if it were a single step. The great sword flashed, and Titanus deflected it with the back of his hand. He had never found he needed a weapon himself other than his double plated gauntlets. There had been no formal combat training for him, no martial arts, not as a farmer’s child or a magician’s future sacrifice, nor when he became the first disciple. He could not put the dragon’s language into words, but he could speak it with his fists.

He preferred to let his opponent’s come to him, and Wen Lambo seemed happy to oblige, lunging and retreating, keeping always just out of reach of Titanus’s unbreakable grasp. Titanus took steps toward the center of the arena, in no hurry to end the match. He had found that cultivator’s were used to being able to fight forever, and they had trouble correctly gauging the strain that scales would put on their bodies over a prolonged conflict. Titanus had learned to conserve his strength, not throw it away on flashy and unnecessary movements.

Wen Lambo was one of the few starlords they had managed to convert who had what they called a mana body, a transformation that occurred as a consequence of long term cultivation. It meant he was better able to withstand the burden of the scales, and the benefits of the Path of Infinite Spirals were even greater. In speed, he was an equal to Titanus, and his martial skills were more refined. The only disciple who surpassed him was a woman named Yuyu, but she had expressed no interest in a duel like this one.

There was no tradition in Goth of trial by combat, but it was a common enough custom in the Blessed Lands, and the dragon had approved. After all, it was the Maguses who were the real masters. The foremost leader among warriors may as well be decided by a duel.

They were both moving at speeds that made it impossible to think, or even to follow what was happening with the eye. Titanus was moving according to the rhythm of his path, trusting in the dragon’s wisdom to decide the outcome. Wen Lambo slid by him, the edge of his massive blade, scraping the scales under his right arm, and Titanus chose that moment to strike. He lashed out with his other fist, striking with the force of an avalanche and knocking the breath from his opponent. Wen Lambo spun through the air, landing lightly on his toes a dozen paces away. Seeing that his strategy was costing him more than his opponent, he chose to come in slowly, focusing on bladework instead of whole body maneuvers.

For the next few minutes, it was like a game between them, gauntlet tapping blade in an almost musical beat. Wen Lambo was growing frustrated, and Titanus felt as if his strength was infinite, until it wasn’t.

Something strained inside of Titanus, and his lungs spasmed. He tasted blood, and the spare fraction of a second that this cost him was sufficient for Wen Lambo to slip through his guard and bring his blade against his throat. He could have stopped there, his point proven, and his status assured. Perhaps sensing the role that chance had played in his victory, he did not stop his blade, slicing at a slight angle up under a small scale, severing Titanus’s neck nearly to the spine.

The first disciple lashed out even in the throes of death, hitting Wen Lambo in the chest with enough force to knock him out of the arena and into the crowd. Then Titanus stepped back, raising a single gauntlet to the ghastly wound as if he could hold it shut with strength alone. He felt barely any pain, the dragon spared his disciples that much. If they could feel themselves being devoured by the spirals from within, they would be less eager to take on new scales.

He could not speak. He could not even turn his head. A moment later, he was on his knees, and he knew that no one was coming to help him. The armor that covered his body was precious, and could be used again. The flesh within was not.

His only regret was that he would never be able to kill the fat man himself, but Titanus died knowing that he had been the one to bring a poison into the Blessed Lands from which the starlords would never recover. That was enough.