The Skathrith trembles.

  I feel it through the bond, a vibration that should not exist in a world without motion. The construct pulses against the stillness, its light flickering in rhythms that speak of strain. It does not accept what has happened. Does not surrender to whatever force has paused reality itself.

  It wails. It hungers.

  Something moves.

  The motion registers at the edge of my frozen perception, a presence descending through the white light with purpose that requires no haste. I cannot turn my head to track it. But I feel it approaching.

  A figure emerges from the frozen sky.

  He does not fall. He lowers, as if descending invisible stairs that exist only for his feet. Each step carries him closer to the junction floor with the measured pace of someone who has done this many times before. His silver torq catches the white light as he descends, metal gleaming against platinum hair cut short and practical.

  A Praeceptor.

  I do not recognize him, but he must be from the Mere. Perhaps he is the same Praeceptor who instructed me about the rules of the Rite of Primarch in that strange world, the one with stars as watching eyes.

  Now he descends through stopped time like a god visiting a world he has grown tired of tending.

  His feet touch the metal floor without sound.

  He stands among the frozen Optimates, among the suspended blood, among the silence that has swallowed everything except his movement. His posture suggests a teacher arriving to assess examination results. Calm and composed. Already knowing what he will find.

  His eyes move across the junction; they catalog the carnage, the frozen worshippers, the scattered bodies of those who fell before the stillness came. They find Talon's suspended head and hold there for a moment, expression shifting into something I cannot name.

  Something worn smooth by repetition.

  Then his gaze finds me.

  I cannot meet it, cannot turn to face him, cannot do anything but wait as he approaches, his footsteps the only sound in a world that has forgotten how to produce them. He stops ten feet from my frozen position, hands clasped behind his back, and regards me with the patient attention of someone who has all the time that remains.

  "Congratulations, Janus Ragnos. I am Praeceptor Ro Nassius."

  His voice carries through the stillness as if the silence itself parts to permit it. The words are formal, measured, delivered with the precise diction of institutional requirement.

  "You have become one of the two Primarchs."

  The statement lands without warmth, without celebration. He speaks as if reading from a script he has delivered one too many times before.

  "A distinction that will follow you for the remainder of your first year at the Mere."

  He pauses.

  His eyes move from my frozen face to the scythe-arm extended before me. To the organic blade still wet with Talon's blood. To the silver light that pulses along its edge despite the stillness that should have claimed it.

  "The Labyrinth has judged you worthy of acknowledgment. The trials have measured your capacity and found it sufficient. You have demonstrated the willingness to do what survival demands."

  Another pause.

  "These are the formal requirements of Primarch recognition. I have now fulfilled them."

  Something shifts in his voice.

  The institutional cadence drops away like a robe removed after ceremony. What remains is quieter, worn. The voice of a man speaking to himself in an empty room, rehearsing arguments he has already lost.

  "I opposed this, you know."

  He does not look at me as he speaks. His gaze has drifted to the frozen Optimates, to their fists pressed against chests, to their mouths frozen around worship they did not choose.

  "First-years in the Labyrinth."

  His hands unclasp from behind his back.

  "It changed nothing."

  He walks among the frozen students now, moving between their locked bodies with the ease of long practice. His fingers brush against a shoulder here, a frozen fist there. Gentle touches that the recipients cannot feel.

  "The Labyrinth was not built for you. The trials were calibrated for students who had already conquered Gorath Maw, who had rooted themselves in the second Hell and learned to weave the Tessyr. Students with years of training. Years of development. Years to understand what power costs before power was demanded of them."

  He stops beside an Optimate whose face is frozen in an expression of absolute terror. A boy, perhaps six years old, his bronze torq marking him as someone who survived the First Baptism but nothing more. His eyes bulge. His mouth gapes. He has seen something that broke whatever courage he possessed.

  "You were never meant to be here," Ro says softly. "None of you. Dularch Titus, in his wisdom, decided children could be forged faster if the fire burned hotter. That the ones who emerged would be stronger for having been tested before they were ready."

  He turns back toward me.

  "Perhaps he was right. You stand before me as Primarch. You have killed more in two months than most Optimates kill in their first year."

  His voice drops lower.

  "And I am here to congratulate you for it."

  The bitterness does not color his words. It lives beneath them, in the spaces between sounds, in the pauses that last slightly too long. He approaches me again, stopping closer this time, close enough that I could touch him if my arm would obey.

  "Becoming an Eidolon is not about strength."

  The words come slowly now, deliberately, as if each one costs something to release.

  "It is not about survival. Not about skill or determination or the willingness to do terrible things. Every Optimate who reaches the Collegium possesses those qualities in abundance. They are the minimum. The baseline. The foundation upon which something else must be built."

  He looks at my scythe-arm.

  "Becoming an Eidolon is about what you agree to become. What parts of yourself you sacrifice to the bonding. What remains when the Zarath has finished reshaping you into something the Hells can use."

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  His eyes meet mine.

  Or rather, his eyes fix on the place where mine should be able to meet his. I cannot move, cannot respond, can only listen as he speaks.

  "Many survive the early years. The trials. The Labyrinth. The endless competitions and cullings that reduce each class to a fraction of its original number. Survival is common enough. Expected, even. The Mere produces survivors the way the Balah produces waves."

  He steps back.

  "Few progress to Fourth Year. Fewer still reach the Collegium. Not because they lack the capacity. Not because they fail the trials that remain. But because the institution decides they are not suitable. That what they have become does not serve what the Eidolons require."

  Something changes in his posture.

  The teacher's stance softens. The authority drains away. What remains is a man approaching middle age, platinum hair beginning to show the first hints of gray, eyes carrying weight that decades have failed to lighten.

  "I failed in Fourth Year."

  The admission comes without prelude. Without explanation. A simple statement delivered to frozen air.

  "I completed every trial. Survived every culling. Demonstrated every capacity the institution claimed to value. And then I was told that my service would continue at the Conclaves. That my path to the Collegium had concluded before it began."

  He does not explain why.

  He does not justify it.

  The shame lives in what he refuses to say.

  Then the Skathrith screams.

  The sound cuts through me like a blade made of glass.

  A shrill, crystalline cry that vibrates against the frozen air. The note rises and rises, pushing against frequencies that should not exist, until the stillness itself seems to tremble.

  Only I can hear it.

  Ro does not react to the sound. His expression does not change. He continues to stand ten feet from my frozen position, hands now loose at his sides, watching me with an attention that has intensified without explanation.

  But he sees what follows.

  The frozen blood begins to move.

  It starts with the droplets nearest my position. Subtle tremors running through suspended crimson, vibrations that should be impossible in a world without motion. The blood shivers, shakes. Then, slowly, begins to rise.

  Thin red lines ascend toward the Skathrith.

  They move against the stillness the way water moves against gravity, defying laws that should govern them. The construct's scream continues, that keening note that exists only in my perception, and the blood answers it. More droplets join the first. The streams thicken.

  Ro's expression fractures.

  The calm he has maintained since descending through the frozen sky cracks along fault lines I did not know existed. His eyes widen. His breath catches. For the first time since he began speaking, he looks like someone who has encountered something unexpected.

  "No."

  The word escapes him as whisper.

  The blood accelerates.

  It flows upward now in braided streams, crimson ropes climbing toward the pulsing sphere above me. The Skathrith's light intensifies with each tributary that reaches it, silver-white radiance taking on faint traces of red. Feeding. The construct is feeding.

  The source becomes clear.

  Talon's body.

  The frozen corpse has begun to unravel. Skin peels away in translucent sheets, rising toward the Skathrith like offerings placed on invisible altars. The flesh beneath follows, strips of veins separating from muscle with the slow inevitability of ice melting in spring sun. Even through the stillness, the consumption continues.

  I feel it.

  Something deeper than either, something that exists in the architecture of my being rather than the surface of my thoughts. The feeding triggers recognition at a level I cannot access consciously. Pattern completing. Design fulfilling.

  My body responds.

  Even frozen, even locked in position by whatever force governs this moment, my flesh begins to move. I feel it happening without causing it. Veins tightening beneath skin that has begun to crawl. Muscles shifting in configurations that serve purposes I did not choose. The scythe-arm flexes against the stillness, organic blade reaching toward the ascending streams.

  Mouths form beneath the silver coating.

  They bud from my transformed flesh without pain, rings of teeth opening along the length of my arm like flowers blooming in poisoned soil. They open and close around nothing, tasting air, waiting for substance to fill them. The sensation crawls up my nerves like insects made of electricity.

  Ro watches.

  The recognition in his eyes has crystallized into something else. Something that looks almost like memory, the expression of someone seeing their own past reflected in a mirror they thought they had destroyed.

  "Stop."

  His voice breaks on the word.

  The feeding does not stop.

  Talon's body continues to unravel. More skin peeling. More flesh rising. The frozen corpse diminishes as I watch, matter flowing upward through crimson streams that have become rivers. The Skathrith pulses with each addition, light growing brighter, stronger, more saturated with the red of what it consumes.

  My arm extends further.

  The scythe reaches toward Talon's remains with purpose I did not provide. The mouths along its length open wider, teeth gleaming with silver light, ready to eat what remains. I am not doing this. I am not choosing this. I am watching it happen from inside a body that no longer asks permission.

  "We do not eat each other."

  Ro's voice has changed.

  The measured calm of the teacher has vanished entirely. What emerges is raw, desperate.

  "We do not eat each other!"

  He says it again. Louder this time. His hands have clenched into fists at his sides. His body has begun to tremble with tension that fights for release.

  "I survived."

  The admission tears itself from him like a confession extracted through torture. His eyes fix on the ascending blood, on my extending arm, on the mouths that open and close with hunger that does not belong to me.

  "We. Do. Not. Eat. Each. Other!"

  The third repetition carries everything.

  His hands rise.

  The motion is fast. His fingers spread, and I feel something shift in the air around us, a pressure change that speaks of power being gathered and channeled.

  Gorath Maw answers.

  The fire blooms. A sphere of controlled flame expanding outward from his extended hands, orange and red and white at its core, heat so intense I feel it before the flames reach me. The weave is precise. Calibrated. The work of a master who has spent two decades perfecting control.

  The freeze shatters.

  One moment the world hangs suspended. The next, reality resumes with violence that defies transition. What remains of Talon's head completes its fall, striking metal with a wet sound that will live in my memory forever. Blood droplets crash downward like crimson rain. The Optimates stumble, screams tearing from throats that were locked mid-worship.

  The junction explodes into chaos.

  Students scatter in every direction. Bodies collide in the darkness. The chant that called me Primarch dissolves into incoherent terror as children run from fire they cannot understand.

  The flames reach me.

  Heat becomes everything.

  My skin blisters before the fire touches it, moisture boiling in the instant before contact. Then the sphere closes around me.

  I burn.

  Skin blackens and peels away in sheets that mirror what I did to Talon. The scythe-arm chars, organic blade becoming ash that the flames scatter. The mouths that formed along my flesh close and melt, teeth dissolving into nothing. Silver light flickers and dies as the Skathrith's coating burns away.

  My body tries to heal.

  I feel the regeneration activate, the alien biology that has saved me before attempting to knit what the fire destroys. Cells divide. Tissue forms. New skin begins to emerge beneath the charred surface.

  The fire is faster.

  Each regeneration burns before it completes. Each new cell dies before it can multiply. The healing that allowed me to survive beheading, that rebuilt my severed head in moments, cannot keep pace with flames calibrated to prevent exactly that recovery.

  Ro knows what I am.

  Knows what I can do.

  Has built his fire to destroy me anyway.

  Through the flames, I see his face. The rage that lives there is familiar. I have seen it before, worn on features that looked nothing like his. Talon carried the same expression when he watched me consume Foden. The same refusal to forgive survival. The same hatred for the thing that reminds him of what he became.

  But deeper.

  Older.

  Ro has carried his longer.

  The Skathrith shrieks somewhere beyond the fire's edge. High, keening wail of something that feels pain without possessing nerves to process it. I cannot see Binah through the flames. Cannot reach her through the bond that connects us. The heat has severed something, blocked the connection that lets her move and act independently.

  The Skathrith is screaming for us both.

  I cannot answer.

  My flesh cooks.

  The sensation arrives in waves, each nerve reporting damage in sequence before the damage silences it. Fat liquefying beneath skin that has already charred. Muscle fibers contracting as heat denatures the proteins that give them structure. The smell of my own body burning fills what remains of my nostrils before those too are consumed.

  The fire intensifies, and my regeneration falters.

  The fire reaches my bones.

  I feel them char. Feel the marrow boil. Feel the skeleton that has carried me through six years of existence begin to collapse into ash that the flames scatter.

  At last I scream.

  Fire consumes the frame of my perception. The junction disappears behind walls of orange and white. Sound drops away. The world becomes sensation without reference, pain without location.

  I am dying.

  The Skathrith has withdrawn beyond reach. Binah has vanished. My body has become ash and flames. This is how it ends. In fire.

  Darkness gathers at the edges of awareness.

  It does not hurt anymore. Nothing hurts.

  The fire has become everything.

  There is nothing beyond it.

  Nothing except the darkness that waits to receive whatever remains of the thing called Janus Ragnos, and the torq scrawling symbols into a dying brain:

  Victorious.

  Opponent: Talon Ragnos.

  Conquered: Skathrith Claimed. Flesh Claimed. Blood Claimed.

  Energy Assimilated: +57 Units.

  I let go.

  The darkness rushes in.

  And then there is nothing at all.

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