Chapter 14: The Monster in the Mirror
Krazmakor hit him like a comet.
No preamble. No posturing. The Dragon Prince’s body crossed the platform in a blur of violet light and drove into Eshiren’s chest with an impact that shattered the timber beneath them. The platform disintegrated. Planks and nails and splinters exploded outward in a radial spray that peppered the cobblestones thirty feet in every direction. Eshiren’s back struck the ground. The stone cratered. A shockwave of displaced air rolled through the square, flattening the nearest Enforcers and driving the crowd backward.
Krazmakor’s fist descended. Eshiren caught it.
The collision between their hands produced a sound that wasn’t a sound. It was a concussion. A pressure event that cracked the cobblestones in radiating lines and blew the windows out of every hab-block facing the square. Krazmakor’s knuckles pressed against Eshiren’s palm, and the competing energies — violet gravity and golden law — ground against each other in a strobing, crackling disc of light between their skin.
Krazmakor was stronger.
The superiority was not marginal. It was the difference between a river and the ocean. Krazmakor’s Core-stage cultivation compressed his strength to a density that Eshiren’s raw, untrained power couldn’t match through force alone. The Dragon Prince’s fist drove Eshiren’s arm back. His shoulder joint screamed. The golden scars on his forearm flared white.
Eshiren kicked.
His boot caught Krazmakor in the hip. The impact threw the prince sideways, buying Eshiren a half-second to roll and find his feet. He came up bloody. His back had absorbed the cratered stone and left a pattern of cuts that stung in the cold air. The golden veins across his skin pulsed with each heartbeat, pushing light through the wounds, and the cuts sealed themselves in real-time. The healing consumed something. He could feel it. A withdrawal from an account he couldn’t see, paid in a currency he didn’t understand.
Life force. The Golden Magic was spending him.
Krazmakor circled. His movements were precise, drilled, the product of a lifetime of Academy combat instruction. Every step maintained distance. Every shift of weight preserved balance. He fought the way a siege engine operated, methodical and overwhelming, with no wasted motion and no exploitable error.
"You broke my Domain," Krazmakor said. His voice was level. Too level. The words were containers for something much louder trying to get out. "No one has ever shattered my Domain. Instructors failed. Father’s generals failed. The Academy’s finest failed, yet a slum rat with stolen magic succeeded."
He attacked.
Ice erupted from his right hand. A lethal lance of crystallised mana shot forward, so cold that the ambient air solidified into a sheath of frozen vapour. This projectile covered the distance between them faster than a plasma bolt, striking the exact spot on the cobblestones where Eshiren had just been standing. The stone froze solid. The frozen area spread in a circle of flash-crystallised mineral that turned the grey cobblestones white and brittle.
Eshiren was already moving. His draconic reflexes operated on a faster clock than his conscious mind, throwing his body left before the ice arrived. He closed the distance. Two steps. His fist drove into Krazmakor’s guard and the prince blocked with a forearm that rang like struck iron. They traded blows in a sequence so fast that the crowd saw only the aftermath — cracked armour, bloody knuckles, shockwaves that kicked dust into the air with each impact.
Krazmakor was better trained. Every strike followed a pattern, exploiting angles, testing defences, building toward a finishing technique that Eshiren could feel assembling in the rhythm of the prince’s attacks.
But Eshiren was faster.
His body moved in ways that defied his training, because he had no training. He fought on instinct. On blood. On the raw, inherited memory of creatures that had been killing each other since before the first sun ignited. His fists found gaps in Krazmakor’s guard that Academy technique left open because Academy technique assumed a certain ceiling of speed. Eshiren existed above that ceiling.
The problem was that the speed was pulling him somewhere.
Every hit he landed fed the bloodlust. The violent impacts vibrated through his knuckles, traveling up his arms to settle in the crimson space behind his sternum where his draconic instincts lived. A feral, predatory red haze crept into his vision, belonging to a creature that had stopped distinguishing between combat and consumption.
Break him apart. The Dragon Prince is weak and terrified of you. Shatter his spine. Consume his core.
Eshiren’s next punch missed Krazmakor’s guard and connected with his jaw. The prince’s head snapped sideways. Blood sprayed from his lip. Imperial blood. Dragon blood. It hit the cobblestones and sizzled.
Krazmakor staggered.
The crowd gasped. The sound was involuntary, collective, a single intake of breath from several hundred people who had just watched a Dragon Prince bleed from the fist of a boy who had been selling resin in the market three weeks ago.
Krazmakor’s hand found his jaw. His fingers came away red. He stared at the blood the way a man stares at a crack in the foundation of his house.
His composure broke.
"WHAT ARE YOU?"
The scream tore from him with a violence that stemmed directly from the catastrophic failure of his core identity. As a prince and a prodigy, he served as the heir to the most powerful creature in the galaxy. Bleeding was impossible. Stumbling was unacceptable. Feeling the small, writhing worm of inadequacy chewing through the base of his skull broke his mind.
The Prince unleashed his full arsenal.
The ice came from every direction. Lances, sheets, blades of frozen mana that materialised in the air and fired inward like the jaws of a closing trap. The temperature in the square plunged. The crowd’s breath crystallised. An Enforcer’s bio-armour cracked from the thermal shock.
Eshiren dodged the first lance. Deflected the second with a palm strike that shattered the ice into glittering fragments. The third grazed his shoulder and the cold burned through his skin and into the muscle beneath. He roared, driven by an emotion far worse than pain.
The bloodlust swallowed him.
He stopped dodging. Charging through the fourth lance, he let it break against his chest, driving crystallised mana into his flesh without caring. The red haze compressed the world into simple geometry. His brother was a target. The prince was a weak, pathetic obstacle who had shelled the slums, chained Senreno, and driven Lyalina into the dark.
Eshiren’s fist broke through Krazmakor’s guard and struck him in the sternum. The black armour cracked. Krazmakor’s boots left the ground. He crashed through the execution platform’s debris and slid across the cobblestones.
Eshiren was on him before he stopped sliding.
He grabbed the prince by the throat and slammed him into the stone. The cobblestones shattered beneath Krazmakor’s back. Eshiren straddled his chest, one hand pinning his neck, the other raised, trembling, golden light and crimson haze fighting for dominance in his clenched fist.
He looked down at Krazmakor’s face. The prince’s eyes were wide. The violet irises were ringed with white. His lips were bloody. His black armour was cracked and dented. For the first time in his life, Krazmakor looked like what he was underneath the cultivation and the title and the cosmic authority.
A seventeen-year-old boy.
Terrified.
Kill him. End it. He will never stop hunting you. He will never stop hurting the people you love. Break his neck the way you broke the Enforcer’s. It was easy then. It will be easy now.
His draconic blood screamed for the kill. Every cell in his body demanded it. The fist trembled above Krazmakor’s face, golden light and red fury spiralling around his knuckles.
Pinning his half-brother to the broken stone with murder in his eyes, Eshiren saw himself.
He saw it reflected on the prince’s cracked chest-plate. A distorted, glowing shape stared back at him. Burning eyes. Bared teeth. A fist raised to crush the skull of a beaten enemy. He looked exactly like the monsters from Senreno’s stories. A dragon who fell from the sky to burn everything and call it conquest.
I am not a monster.
His fist shook. The golden light surged. The crimson haze pushed back. They tore at each other inside his chest, and the war between them was not metaphorical. His heart stuttered. A genuine, physical arrhythmia, a skipped beat that sent a bolt of cold through his entire body. The Golden Magic was consuming too much. The account was overdrawn. His life force, whatever biological reservoir the Ohn-Thari power drew from, was running dry.
A second stutter. His vision greyed at the edges. His raised fist lost its tension. The golden scars across his body flickered, dimmed, flickered again.
His grip on Krazmakor’s throat loosened.
The prince saw it. The fear in his eyes vanished. Something colder replaced it, the calculating mechanism of a predator that recognises the exact moment its prey has exhausted itself.
Krazmakor’s hand came up and struck Eshiren in the chest.
The ice-mana hit him like a battering ram. The cold drove through his failing golden aura and into his bones. Eshiren flew backward. He hit the cobblestones fifteen feet away and rolled twice before stopping face-down in the square.
He tried to rise. His arms gave out. He tried again. His golden scars went dark. The light drained from his veins like water from a cracked vessel, and the ancient power retreated into the deepest part of him and went still.
Golden blood dripped from his mouth onto the stone. Where it landed, the cobblestones changed. The grey mineral brightened. The cracks sealed. A small circle of restored stone, no larger than a coin, pulsed with a faint, warm luminescence that the purge could not touch.
Eshiren’s face smashed against the freezing ground, his vision rapidly narrowing into a dark tunnel. Through that shrinking, blurry frame, he watched the Dragon Prince rise to his feet.
The Dragon Prince stood over him. Bloody. Cracked armour. Split lip. One eye swelling shut. He had been beaten by a slum rat in front of an occupied population, and the humiliation was a living thing in his expression, feeding on whatever humanity was left beneath the cultivation.
Krazmakor extended his hand. A blade of crystallised ice-mana formed in his grip. The edge was so thin it distorted the light passing through it.
"You should have killed me when you had the chance," Krazmakor whispered. "I would not have made the same mistake."
He raised the blade.
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