"I will go first," Alex said. "And I will be brief."

He looked at Leviathan with the same stillness he had worn since the moment the darkness had closed around them both.

"I remember the humiliation I went through because of you," he said. "Every detail of it. I have not forgotten a single moment." He paused, and something in the pause made clear that what followed was not the concession it might have sounded like.

"But I do not hold a grudge over it. Because I did take victory from right under your nose in the end, and I imagine that earned you a great deal of praise from your King." The sarcasm was present in his voice, the way a current is present beneath still water, felt rather than seen, entirely controlled. "So in a sense, we are even on that account."

He let the faint, almost-smile that had accompanied the sarcasm fade back into nothing before he continued.

"The only reason I am going to kill you," he said, his tone returning to the same flat, even calm it had carried from the beginning, "is because you are a cancer to this world. You have caused more misery than I have the patience to catalogue. And it is simply time to clean it up."

He said it the way someone says a thing they have thought about for a long time and arrived at without drama, not with anger, or with satisfaction, but with the same quiet certainty of someone taking out the rubbish.

"Just that?" Leviathan asked.

The question carried genuine curiosity beneath its mockery, the tone of someone who had expected a grander declaration and found the simplicity of what they received vaguely disappointing.

"I thought you would want to kill me for revenge. Or perhaps as a statement to my King. Or some other suitably petty reason." He tilted his head, his dozen eyes carrying the particular gleam of something about to enjoy itself. "Killing your teacher, perhaps. Or the attack on your family on the other side of things."

He let the words settle before continuing, his voice taking on the casual quality of someone recounting minor administrative matters.

"They did survive it, I should mention. My King made a point of punishing the idiot who went a step too far, at least where your parents were concerned." A pause, deliberate and weighted. "As for your teachers, well. One of them, perhaps both, should be dead by now. That was not a mistake so much as an intention."

His smile widened slowly.

"My mistake is that one of them should already be dead by my own hand. How I envy my brothers and sisters for taking that from me." The longing in his voice was real, which made it worse. "But to their envy, I am the one who gets to stand here with you. To play with you properly. To teach you your place in the order of things."

Alex’s jaw tightened.

It was the only visible reaction, a single, brief hardening of the muscle along his jaw, there and gone before it could become anything more.

The mention of his family touched something that had been buried deep and long, a memory that had once driven him to the edge of decisions from which there would have been no returning. He had silenced that memory over years of hard and deliberate work.

But his teacher being attacked. That was new to him, something he just discovered.

That was not a buried thing. That was present and immediate, and the darkness around him responded to it without being asked, deepening slightly, the edges of the Domain shifting in temperature in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

"Killing that old Gore Fiend and the Crimson Empress," Leviathan continued, his voice taking on the leisurely quality of a man laying out a plan he found genuinely pleasing, "are part of the welcome gift My King has prepared for you. Something to fuel your motivation. To ensure that when you eventually face my King, you come at him with everything you have."

He spread his arms slightly, the gesture almost generous.

"After all, you are the only individual in this world with sufficient potential to give my King a proper challenge. It would be wasteful to have you arrive at that moment half-committed." His eyes settled on Alex with something that was almost respect, filtered through layers of condescension.

"We need you angry. We need you to complete, and grief, properly administered, has a way of producing both."

Alex looked at him for a moment, his chilling gaze seeing through him.

"Good thing then," he said, his voice carrying the anger now without trying to conceal it, the evenness of his tone doing nothing to hide what moved beneath it, "that I am also prepared to offer your King a couple of gifts in return."

The darkness around him grew deeper as he spoke, not dramatically, not with the theatrical flourish that Leviathan favored, but with the quiet, absolute certainty of something that had decided what it was going to do and had no further need of announcement.

Leviathan looked at the shifting darkness, and something moved in his expression, brief and quickly suppressed, the instinctive recalibration of a creature that had just noticed something it had accounted for but was still caught by surprise.

He recovered smoothly, as he always did.

"Already done with the preamble? That is a shame." He adopted an expression of theatrical disappointment.

"I had planned to tell you about the civil war my brother is orchestrating within your little dying Domain. My King’s plans for the future. Your role in them, whether you find that agreeable or not." He made a poor imitation of someone pondering, the gesture deliberately unconvincing, a performance aimed at irritation rather than deception.

"And one more thing. What was it?" He clicked his tongue softly. "Ah, yes. One of your Domain Guardians, one of the loyal, trusted, foundational pillars of the Domain itself, has betrayed it." He watched Alex’s face for the reaction.

"Well," Alex said, and the venom in his voice was quiet and cold and precise, his eyes of the Ancient cutting through Leviathan with a clarity that carried no heat but all of the intent, "It is a good thing you will not be alive to watch any of it unfold."

The darkness around Alex twisted.

It did not explode outward. It did not surge or crash or announce itself with the kind of violence that lesser powers used to signal what they were about to do.

It simply moved, purposeful and deliberate, and from within it rose an ornate dark coffin.

It was bound in chains, layer upon layer of them, each link etched with characters that pulsed with a contained, rhythmic darkness, the seals pressed into the metal surface breathing slowly like something that had been held in place for a long time and remembered every second of it.

The craftsmanship of it was both beautiful and deeply wrong, the kind of object that communicated its nature without requiring explanation.

Even Leviathan went still.

The careless ease that had characterized every moment of his presence since the darkness had closed around them both fell away in an instant.

His posture dropped, shoulders drawing in slightly, weight redistributing, the unconscious shift of a powerful creature moving from predator to something that had just recognized a threat and was reassessing.

His dozen eyes fixed on the coffin with an attention that was entirely different from anything he had directed at Alex up to this point.

It was the attention of something that had lived long enough to know what certain things meant.

"I told you," Alex said, his voice cold and level and carrying the quiet of a door opening rather than slamming, the chains beginning to move, the seals beginning to come undone one by one.

"You should be careful what you wish for."