Envy had done more damage in a single exchange than he had managed in the entirety of the battle preceding it.

And he was just beginning.

The form he had assembled was not designed for any single purpose. It had been constructed entirely around the concept of sufficiency, carrying weapons of every form and nature layered into the same impossible structure, each one serving a function that the others did not.

The wings released a drifting haze as they moved, and anything the haze touched was pulled toward an eternal sleep, a descent into unconsciousness that had no natural floor and no guaranteed return.

The multi-eyes could see forward along the lines of possibility, reading the immediate future, both through time, fate, and echoes of reality.

The body itself had become a breeding ground for every conceivable plague, without exception. Each one was carried without effect on its host, transmissible through contact, proximity, or simply being within range of what was being continuously generated by the flesh that housed them.

The tentacle arms moved with the absolute conviction of things that had never missed a strike and could not, the impossible legend of a weapon that always found its target, given life and function.

And beneath all of it, the body itself was immortal in every sense that the word could be applied, not merely difficult to kill, not merely resilient, but constitutionally incapable of being ended by any means the world recognized as valid.

Each of these things was impossible.

Each of them was being paid for in real time, the cost extracted from the parts of him that constituted a coherent self, the madness moving through his mind the way water moves through a cracked vessel, finding every gap and widening it.

He had pushed himself past the threshold where recovery was certain. Past the threshold, the version of himself that emerged from this, if a version of himself emerged at all, would not be recognizable as what had walked into it.

The mind that had accumulated so much, known so much, built so much across a vast and consuming existence was being consumed in turn by the weight of what it was currently being asked to hold together simultaneously.

It was a price he had chosen to pay because the alternative was a price he refused to accept, so he fought and did so with every means available to him.

The worst thing was that he was not trying to kill it.

The realization had arrived sometime during the exchange, quiet and clarifying, cutting through the noise of the battle with the particular sharpness of a truth that had been present from the beginning and was only now being properly acknowledged.

Killing Dark might not be possible, and committing fully to an impossibility was not a strategy. It was a waste.

His actual goal was simpler and considerably more achievable.

Drown him.

Bury him beneath the accumulating weight of impossible might, layer the pressure on without relenting, drag the engagement out across enough time that the borrowed nature of Dark’s existence became the deciding factor rather than any single exchange of blows.

Because that was the truth of the situation, the one variable that cut through every other calculation and made it irrelevant.

Dark could not stay.

A being of that nature, that origin, occupying a body that had not been built to house it, existing within a soul that was already engaged in its own internal war between two incompatible occupants, could not maintain possession indefinitely.

The laws would not permit it. They would eventually assert themselves against the aberration of his presence in the same way that a body eventually asserted itself against a foreign object embedded within it.

And even if Dark could resist the laws, which Envy believed was well within the range of what that monster was capable of, resisting them came with a cost that had nothing to do with Dark himself.

The longer he stretched his stay, the more severe the consequences for the boy whose body and soul he was borrowing. Soul possession of this kind did not invite chaos into a being the way wielding impossible forms invited chaos into Envy’s mind.

It was not the same mechanism. But it was no less dangerous, and the dangers it carried were not optional.

Law poisoning. Soul imbalance.

Two consequences as unavoidable as any truth the cosmos had ever produced, applying without exception to every being that had ever attempted what Dark was currently doing, regardless of what that being was or how much of existence it predated.

No strength of will overcame them. No authority suspended them. There were no rules that could be argued with or negotiated around. They simply were, the way the oldest things simply were, patient and without malice and entirely without the capacity for exception.

Not even a mighty ancient horror could avoid them forever, so Envy had only to wait because the boy might be desperate enough to let an ancient horror possess his body, but not dumb enough to do it if it meant his own end.

Envy just had to outlast it.

’I will live,’ the thought formed in the churning, fracturing space of his mind, carrying the force of a declaration rather than a hope. ’I am Envy. The first Sin of existence. I am the Envy. I am...’

The thought trailed off.

Not because something interrupted it. Not because a more urgent thought displaced it, or because a pain sharp enough to demand attention arrived and took its place.

The vast mind that had been so much, known so much, and built something extraordinary from the wreckage of everything it had ever consumed and everything it had ever become, went quiet.

What remained was something that the silence had left behind.

Envy was already moving toward the next attack, the calculation forming in the fracturing space of his mind with the automated efficiency of a system that had learned to function without the direction of the self that had built it.

The plain blade of his hand would become a whip. Three natures woven into a single strike. The first is that it would not miss. The second is that it would cut not at the body but at the soul itself. The third was that it would pour into whatever it touched emotions of such magnitude and such unrelenting force that even the mightiest mind would find itself drowning in them, pulled under by the sheer volume of feeling before it could begin the work of resisting it.

His mind moved through the possibilities in the same instant, the dozens of futures branching outward from the present moment laid out before him in the clarity of pure calculation.

Not a true future vision, what he was working with was calculation alone. He had tested that against Dark and found it as useless as his law had been, the future itself declining to acknowledge the ancient horror the same way envy had declined, the same way every mechanism he possessed had declined.

And then everything went dark.

Not the darkness of the Domain, not the pitch void that had surrounded this space in the beginning. Just dark, the simple and absolute dark of an absence so complete that the word dark did not fully describe it, because dark implied the prior existence of light and the capacity for light to return.

This was something else.

One moment, his mind was present in all its fractured, diminished, still-functioning complexity, drowning in possibilities and attack patterns and the ongoing internal war against the dissolution of itself.

The next moment, it was not. Not gone in any way that carried the weight of an ending, not extinguished like a flame that had been snuffed, not silenced like a voice that had been stopped.

Just not.

Like nothing, in its purest conceivable sense. And even that example felt hollow when placed against what had actually happened, the comparison between the word and the reality as inadequate as trying to describe an ocean by pointing at a drop of water and saying it was like that, only more so.

Envy did not feel it happen.

One state simply ceased, and another, or rather the absence of any state at all, replaced it without the courtesy of a threshold to mark the crossing.

"Little worm." The voice that moved across the mirror ocean was calm and collected, carrying its familiar ease through a space that now had no one in it to receive the words except the one who spoke them.

Dark’s voice, addressed to nothing, reaching no ears, washing over the stillness of the fractured mirror surface with the particular quality of something being said because it wanted to be said rather than because it needed to be heard.

"I would have liked to enjoy this battle a little longer." A brief pause, the kind that held something genuine inside it. "Or more accurately, to enjoy this new world a little longer. To sit with the memories of this young self and find all the interesting, surprising things I did not expect to find there."

"But time is not my friend." Something moved through the voice that was not quite wistfulness and not quite regret, but lived in the space adjacent to both.

"Time has never been my friend." He exhaled slowly, the sound of it traveling across the cracked mirror surface to no destination.

Dark stood before the formless monstrosity that had been Envy, the black blade extended at shoulder level, its point having traveled past the neck in the single, committed arc that had ended the engagement.

The blade had gone through. The head rested on it now, balanced there with the particular stillness of something that had no further instructions to follow.

Envy torso held the position for a moment. The vast serpentine torso that had been the lower half of the assembled, impossible form fell and crashed into the mirror ocean below with the full weight of everything it had been carrying, the impact sending a web of fractures racing outward through the mirror surface in every direction at once.

The mirror fractured. The cracks spread and reached the edges. And as though the entire domain had been held together by nothing more than the particular tension of this moment, and the moment had now passed, the space around them began to come apart.

Slowly at first, then with increasing certainty. Like a house of cards after the lightest possible disturbance, each piece follows the example of the piece before it.

Dark watched it go.

"Good luck, youngster," Dark said, his voice carrying the warmth of something genuine beneath its lightness, addressed to the space where the boy’s presence existed somewhere beneath the surface of the borrowed body.

"You have a great deal of trouble still ahead of you." A small chuckle followed, private and unhurried.

"Then again," Dark said, as the domain fractured around him and the mirror ocean came apart beneath his feet in its spreading web of cracks, "trouble and I are old friends. We have always had a way of finding each other."

Dark closed his eyes. The domain was coming apart around him in its spreading, quiet dissolution, the mirror surface fragmenting in slow, inevitable pieces.

He stood in the middle of it and felt the end of the borrowed time arriving. He was ready to say goodbye, yet right then his eyes snapped open with urgency and alarm.