It watched Envy’s face as the name landed, watching the flicker that moved through those eyes, the doubt arriving first, the surprise arriving half a step behind it, the two of them colliding in an expression that Envy clearly had not intended to produce but had produced anyway.

"I am a being born in the chaotic times before the Universe had finished taking its form," it continued, its voice carrying the particular quality of someone answering the question he knew was coming. "When existence was still stretching its limbs, still morphing into the nature and structure it had been designed to inhabit. Before the laws were fully fixed. Before the framework held."

The silence that followed lasted only a moment before Envy’s voice broke it, barely above a whisper, the words coming out with the careful, reluctant quality of someone naming a thing they were not sure they wanted to make real by naming it.

"Primordial?"

"That is one of them, yes," Dark replied pleasantly, lifting one hand and beginning to count on the tips of its fingers with the air of someone going through a familiar list. "Primordial. The First Born. The Shapers. The Watchers. I have collected a few over the years. People do enjoy giving names to things they cannot fully account for."

It lowered its hand.

Envy did not refute it. Did not argue, did not reach for skepticism, did not do any of the things that a being of his experience and power might have been expected to do when presented with a claim of this magnitude.

He simply did not refute it, which was its own answer, and in the same motion, he turned and rushed for the sky.

The endless, stretching sky that formed the ceiling of this space, the boundary of the Domain, the edge of the pocket dimension that had been built to contain this confrontation.

He hit it with everything he had, reaching for the tear that would let him through, but the sky came down on him.

Not gradually, not as a force meeting his force, but completely and without negotiation, collapsing inward and pressing him downward.

He fell like a shooting star, driven down through the air toward the vast, clear mirror of the river below, the surface rushing up to meet him with the indifference of something that had been waiting.

"The little me went through such considerable effort bringing me here to help," Dark said from somewhere above, its voice carrying the same conversational ease it had carried throughout, entirely unmoved by the drama of what was happening below it. "I really cannot disappoint myself."

The impact sent the river surging outward in a massive ring, the mirror surface shattering into concentric waves that traveled to the edges of the space and reflected back.

"YOU FUCKING OLD MONSTER."

The voice that tore out of Envy was not the layered, borrowed voice of his assembled selves. It was something beneath all of that, raw and enormous and entirely his own, stripped of every performance and every stolen cadence. "I WILL TEAR YOU APART."

The river erupted.

Something massive tore through its surface from below, the mirror dissolving around it as it rose, water cascading from its form in curtains that caught no light and fell in silence.

A dragon of immense stature broke into the air, its body stretching a full kilometer from the tip of its snout to the end of its tail, each scale a slab of something that was not quite metal and not quite stone but carried the absolute density of both.

Its wings unfolded as it cleared the surface, spreading wide, and the vast space that had seemed enormous a moment ago suddenly felt inadequate.

The wingspan blanketed the sky from edge to edge, turning the expanse into something that felt enclosed, pressing in from above.

Against the sheer scale of it, Dark was a speck. A point of darkness against the backdrop of something that made the word enormous feel insufficient.

A tiny, almost microscopic point.

Dark looked up at it.

"The Descendant of Aurmír," it said, and there was genuine appreciation in the voice, the tone of something encountering a sight it had not expected and finding it worth acknowledging. It chuckled, the sound small and entirely unbothered beneath the shadow of a creature that could have swallowed it without noticing. "Excellent."

Its form streaked upward like a dark comet, accelerating from stillness to incomprehensible velocity in the space between one moment and the next, closing the distance between itself and the calamitous dragon with the ease of something that had decided the gap needed not to exist and had acted accordingly.

"I do have a bone to pick with that bastard," It said as it moved, the words carrying clearly across the distance despite the speed.

The dragon opened its gargantuan jaws in turn, and the roar that came out of them was not sound so much as force, a physical pressure that hit the space like a wall moving outward in every direction at once. What followed the roar was worse.

Crimson black lightning poured from its throat in endless, churning streams, not a single bolt or a concentrated strike but a continuous flood of it, pouring forth with the relentless generosity of something that had no concept of running out.

It drowned a third of the vast mirror river below in an instant, the surface that had been still and perfect and reflective becoming a churning mass of crackling energy, the river suddenly looking small against the scale of what was being emptied into it.

Dark moved through the rain with the ease of a fish navigating familiar water.

Not around them. Through them, finding the gaps with a precision that suggested less evasion and more that the lightning had simply not been permitted to connect with it.

The cerulean streams parted around the small dark figure, only for a massive claw with curved scythe-like fingers to descend from the left.

It came cloaked in haze and touches of blackened crimson, each talon so long and so sharp that reality visibly rippled beneath their edges as they cut downward, the fabric of the space around them protesting the intrusion.

The scale of it was incomprehensible at close range, each talon longer than most things had any right to be.

Dark brought the flat of the blade up to meet it. The force transferred through the block hit him in all its imencity, driving him backward through the space with unchalleged momentum.

He traveled with it until he decided not to and then moved, shooting forward into the armored chest of the dragon that rose before him like an impenetrable wall of black scale and ancient density.

The chest met the edge of the blade.

The scales parted like made of weightless, powerless smoke, and what followed was an endless pour of crimson red blood from the opening in a quantity that painted the sky red, and began cloaking the mirror ocean below.

Dark vanished into the vast being.

Lightning bled outward from the wound, droning out the blood, and a second later, only the lightning was left in its endless quality, as the dragon blurred.

Simply ceased to be what it had been, the form dissolving like it never existed, leaving in its place the small figure of Dark, droning in the cage of rampant lightning and an armored giant.

An armored giant, its skin the pale blue of deep water under ice, a single eye positioned at the center of its face, its body enormous and dense and wrapped in armor.

In one hand, it wielded a club of dark wood whose head was the size of a building. Its chest bore a wound that bled profusely, the blood running down the pale blue armor in dark red rivers.

The giant moved his club, and the distance separating the two just shrank like it was never there, the blanked wood coming down on the sphere of lightning, tearing it open and descending on Dark within it.

Dark’s form bearing the evidence of the exchange, thin cracks of lightning running across his neck and chin like the lines of a shattered surface, branching and glowing faintly against his skin.

"Kaqin," Dark said, his voice carrying a hint of happiness, the cracks of lightning across his skin already gone. "He owes me a pound of flesh as well."

He swatted the club aside with a casualness that was almost insulting, given the mass behind it. Yet the club was just a decoy, and the moment it shifted, the single eye of the giant burning in pale blue flames peared down in all its inhuman intensity.

The space blurred and multiplied, splitting into a million reflections of itself, each one a mirror bearing its own version of the scene, each mirror slightly different from the one beside it, and in every single reflection, Dark stood facing a different horror.

His mind fractured against his will, the assault forcing him into a million different fights, the only escape available being defeating each adversary, doing so across a million battles.

Envy moved to capitalize, turning his attention to the real body that stood frozen, but just as he stepped forward, the mirror closest to him darkened, and through it a man stepped out.

Clad in black, his abyssal eyes dropping on the giant below, the million mirrors around them already having succumbed to the darkness spreading from within.

The broad blade in his grasp moved in a single committed arc and cut into the giant’s single eye, the distance between them shirking once again, almost vanishing like it was never there, the strike clean, opening a long festering line across the center of that vast, pale iris, viscera marking the wound as the giant stumbled backward.

The giant blurred and vanished, as though it had never been there. In its place stood a being double Dark’s size. Twisted horns rose from a skull-shaped face with four eyes burning with fire that had no fuel source.

The wounds Envy carried were still present, still open, still bleeding. One on his forehead and one on his chest, both running not with blood but with wisps of flames, the wounds themselves appearing to be made of something that existed at a higher temperature than the body that housed them.

"Wrong choice again," Dark said. His figure was already moving, already closing the distance, already committed to the next action before the words had finished leaving his mouth.

"Larkamin messed with one thing he should have stayed very, very far away from." The blade descended in a dark blur, the comment still fresh in the air, "He needs to pay up as well."