The mirage pressed forward without mercy.
Was he really this strong back then?
Ivel laughed under his breath, already moving.
What am I talking about — I'm imagining this. Aren't I?
He wasn't sure anymore. The battle in his mind had crossed some threshold where it no longer felt like memory or invention — it felt like the arena, complete with the weight of the crowd's noise pressing in from every direction, the stone floor beneath his feet, the specific temperature of that day. He took a breath and steadied himself.
Calm. I have to be calm.
He kept moving, reading the mirage's rhythm the way he had taught himself to read everything — through repetition, through the body's memory rather than conscious thought. He had been honing this particular art for as long as he could remember. An illusive, almost dancing quality to his footwork, each dodge flowing directly into the next without pause, making him difficult to fix on, difficult to predict. The mirage swung projectiles and he wasn't there. It swung again and he was somewhere else entirely.
He closed the distance.
Inside the mirage's range now, close enough that the next swing had no room to build momentum behind it. It came anyway — a short, fast arc — and Ivel dropped under it and countered in the same motion, his blade cutting through the figure cleanly.
The mirage dissolved into droplets of water that scattered across the floor and were still.
Ivel straightened.
He activated the eye immediately, sweeping his perception outward in every direction — behind him, ahead, the space to either side.
Nothing.
Not behind me. Not in front. Could he be underground?
He turned slowly, reading the space around him with everything available to him. Something felt wrong — an absence where there should have been a presence, a quiet that had no business being as complete as it was.
Something isn't right.
Then he smelled it.
Rain. Clean and sharp and entirely out of place.
He looked up.
Above him, a sphere of water hung in the air — vast, its surface churning like a storm compressed into a perfect circle, waves folding over themselves in an endless loop, the whole mass rotating slowly with a kind of terrible patience. It covered most of the ground he was standing on. Its shadow fell across him like a held breath.
Were you really this strong to begin with, Vern of Storm?
He said it out loud, to the memory, to the mirage that had been a clone all along.
Of course it was a clone. Of course he was building that up the entire time. I should have known the moment it dissolved too cleanly.
The sphere began to descend.
Ivel looked at it and felt something he hadn't felt in a long time — the particular, clarifying sensation of a problem he wasn't immediately sure he could solve.
I don't even have time to dodge.
He watched it come.
Should I use my quality?
He almost did. The impulse was there, immediate and instinctive.
No. He pushed it back. The entire point of this was to rely on it less. That was the point.
He looked up at the churning mass of water bearing down on him and set his feet.
It's just water.
He tightened his grip on the sword.
Which means I can cut it.
He got into his stance as the sphere closed the last of the distance between them, and he swung — a full swing, everything behind it, the kind of commitment that didn't leave anything in reserve.
The water refused.
The waves didn't part. They folded around the blade and swallowed it and kept coming, the torrent indifferent to the sword and the boy holding it, and in the next moment the sphere came down and took him into it, the current pulling him up and in and under—
Ivel sat up in his room.
Cold sweat ran down the back of his neck. The ceiling looked back at him in the dark, still and completely indifferent to whatever had just happened behind his eyes.
He sat with it for a moment.
Right. He exhaled. It wasn't real.
He lay back down on the floor — not the bed, just the floor — and stared upward, letting his breathing even out.
"I suppose we did get that rematch after all," he said quietly, to no one. "Even if it wasn't real."
He laughed. A small, private sound.
After a while he lifted his hand and looked at it — at the insignia marked into his skin by something he still didn't fully understand. The same coils of stacked pyramids it had always been, unchanged and unreadable, keeping whatever it meant to itself. He had looked at it a hundred times and arrived at the same place each time — nowhere, with more questions than he had started with.
The eye was resting on his palm, as it often did when he wasn't actively using it — settled there the way a cat settles somewhere warm, with the complete absence of any explanation for why it had chosen that particular spot. There was nothing normal about having a third eye, he reflected. Not by any standard he was aware of, genesis or otherwise. But it had stopped feeling strange in the way that truly strange things stop feeling strange once they have been present long enough.
He looked at it properly for perhaps the first time in a while.
The iris was purple — the same purple as his own eyes — though the shade ran a little darker, a little deeper, like the same color seen through something that filtered the light differently. It was, he thought, genuinely remarkable looking, when he bothered to look at it.
The eye opened.
He felt the movement before he saw it — a shift in his peripheral awareness, something waking up.
"Thought you were asleep," he said.
The eye regarded him.
"I really ought to stop calling you the creepy eye," he said, more to himself than to it. "You deserve something better than that. Probably."
He thought about it.
The eye waited, with the expression it always seemed to produce — somewhere between aloof and faintly patronizing.
"Eye," Ivel said finally. Flat, simple, with the particular half-heartedness of someone who knows the name isn't inspired and has decided that's fine. "That's what I'll call you."
The eye rolled — a slow, deliberate rotation that managed to communicate a complete lack of enthusiasm with remarkable precision — and then looked away toward the window, as though disassociating itself from the entire conversation.
"You'll get used to it," Ivel said.
He looked at the window too. The sky beyond it was dark and full of stars, spread out in the same unhurried arrangement they always held, beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they have no interest in being looked at.
He stayed there for a while, he and the eye, watching the stars through the glass.
Then he closed his eyes, and thought of the next coming weeks.