Until then, Justin had been silent, though Narseh, reaching for him with his thoughts, knew he was conscious. Now Justin parted his cracked lips and said clearly:

"You sick degenerates. Used to screwing anyone in your vomitous gangbangs..."

"Look who’s talking now," Roxhana said with hatred. "All these years, he pretended to be almost one of us..."

"Not that, fool, don’t even dream of it," another Arya said coldly. "We, the lovers of ‘vomitous gangbangs,’ don’t sully ourselves with those we hate. But otherwise — you will know how she died, in detail." He turned to Khosrow: "Go find a couple of stakes for blinding. This is a military camp; there should be plenty. Don’t forget the hammer..."

The human body is sacred — it is a vessel for the soul. Arya don't even use physical punishments. And certainly, no Arya would inflict suffering for pleasure. It was not just their custom or law; it was the natural order of things, as immutable as gravity. Twins were always hungry and merciless, but even they were not cruel...

At least, that’s what Narseh used to think.

Only now did he fully grasp the Prince’s words: "If the war continues, we will only become monsters ourselves..."

"Ro... Roxhana," Narseh croaked. "Haven’t there been enough deaths today? You had a son. You know how hard it is to bring new people into the world."

"People, yes," Roxhana said indifferently. "But these are not people and never were. I’m sorry you chose the wrong side, Narseh. You could have fought with us for a new world. Instead, you’ll watch your defector friend die."

Khosrow returned with a hammer and two stakes. Two Arya, whose names Narseh didn’t know, stretched Justin’s arms out on the stone slabs of the courtyard.

Khosrow raised the hammer and said quietly:

"You will die very, very slowly."

Justin jerked his whole body like a fish out of water, as if he actually hoped to escape—but of course, it was futile.

The hammer came down.

Crunch.

Pain fractured through the palm, spreading through all the body like a lightning strike. Justin screamed.

Narseh gasped, clutching his left hand over his right. Calm down!.. It wasn’t his hand... it was intact... But it still felt as if every pain receptor in his body had been set ablaze.

Another strike, another nauseating crunch. Narseh realized that both he and Justin actually were about to vomit — a natural response to such trauma, his inner healer noted dryly.

"Feel it, bastard. This is how you execute people like us. Does it feel good?"

Another blow — the wrist cracked.

A retching spasm...

"Now the other hand," one Arya said matter-of-factly.

Narseh shut down his mind. He couldn’t take it anymore. He trembled violently. This wasn’t even healing — he couldn’t help his friend by hearing his agony.

"He’s still conscious?" another Arya asked with predatory curiosity. "It’ll be a shame if he blacks out..."

"No, he’s strong."

"Good. Then we move to the eyes. Pass me a stake."

"Wait, I have a better idea. We don’t need stakes," Khosrow said with regal arrogance.

He brought his hand almost tenderly to Justin’s cheek — but it wasn’t a human finger that touched his skin, but a black claw.

"Yes," another Arya whispered. "Yes... Let them know we can do with them what they can’t even imagine..."

The claw moved to the eye, excruciatingly slow, almost gently entering the corner — blood began to trickle down Justin’s cheek.

Narseh’s mind had long since shut down — now he closed his eyes as well. It was beyond his endurance.

At the last minute, there was not a single coherent thought in his mind. Only the prince’s clear voice, repeating like a litany:

"Everything will already be ruined — but in addition, I will lose you."

"I wouldn’t want to lose a friend..."

Unbearable.

Forgive me, Narseh thought helplessly. If only mainyu could reach such distances...

He pulled the last two rings from his trembling fingers.

Narseh’s parents had warned him since childhood that his arrogance would be his downfall.

When Prince Ardashir explained why the last rings should never be removed, under any circumstances, Narseh had believed him, of course — Narseh always believed him. And yet now — he had hoped for something... Perhaps for Mandana, that she might, regretting her betrayal, really call for help? But even if that were the case — no one in Eranshahr who could perform a teleport farn had ever been to Iron Pass; it would take them days to get here...

No. In the end, Narseh had, as always, placed too much faith in himself — that he could release his fravashi’s full form for just a moment and then have the strength to restrain, deceive, or trick that darkness...

Foolish. The rings hadn’t even clattered against the courtyard stones when he realized he’d made the greatest mistake of his life.

Anyone who had once given themselves to the Other Side could never again fully control their twin or reclaim themselves without outside help.

Narseh did manage one conscious act: his fravashi — not only fully restored but now twice as large as before — easily threw off the twin that had been about to gouge out Justin’s eye, slashing open its stomach mid-flight. What fell to the ground was no longer a fravashi but Khosrow’s lifeless human body. Yes, Narseh had truly wanted that.

But when his twin grabbed one of the Arya holding Justin down — an Arya who froze, unable to shift, or perhaps lacked the strength — and bit off the entire lower half of his body in one move, that was no longer Narseh. The second Arya managed to summon his fravashi, but Narseh’s twin kept growing, snapping its opponent in two like a twig, and then did the same to the tiny human body that had replaced it. Narseh tried to push his fravashi back, but he already knew he was helpless. All he could do was watch.

Next, it would tear Justin apart, like a simple piece of meat. Fravashi were always hungry.

The twin was triumphant, grinning, and delaying as if mocking Narseh. It was now enormous, like a hill, vast and black. Narseh felt as though he were tumbling, spinning into that darkness — falling, or perhaps rising. He knew: once his fravashi finished with the last living beings in the fortress, it would rush to the nearest village or city, tearing and devouring everything in its path. If they were lucky, Bizanth soldiers might stop it. So much for peace negotiations...

Roxhana, drained from the fight, had no strength left to summon her twin. Instead, she hurled her blue glass box with all her might against the courtyard stones. In the next moment, Narseh’s fravashi split her body in two, lengthwise, from groin to collarbone — it fell to the ground in two separate halves. But her final words, spoken with icy hatred, echoed in Narseh’s ears:

"Be damned. Damn all this rotten world."

The shards of glass scattered several steps away — some large, others mere blue dust... At the spot where the box shattered, something thick and black spread. Something that moved, constantly shifting in shape and size, like a fravashi.

Narseh suddenly understood what it was. It was what he himself was about to become: a fravashi whose human had failed to contain it, a fravashi that had already consumed an entire city and thirsted for more, trapped in a special vessel by the art of the Bizantines back when they still practiced magic, before they invented their suffering god.

Bizantines called it a larva.

Two colossal black figures — though the larva was far larger — began circling each other slowly. Would they fight, or would they together charge toward the nearest settlement to sow death and chaos? Would Narseh die or become a larva himself, caught by someone in a blue glass vessel?

But these thoughts felt distant and unimportant. Everything Narseh once called This Side was slipping away, growing smaller and less distinct...

He tried to cling to memories of reality, but it seemed increasingly meaningless. Was there truly a person named Narseh? Yes, there had been — but he was merely a moment, a speck of plankton in an infinite black sea, just a thought, no longer worth thinking... How simple it was to trade that life for another, a new world with different mountains and rivers, languages and customs, stars... It wouldn’t be Narse anymore, but what did that matter—a speck of plankton is no different from another...

Was there truly nothing binding him to that life, nothing worth returning for? He had wanted... He had wanted to fulfill his Prince’s will, to make the impossible dream of peace a reality, to protect those small people — the broken toys lying in a heap — but was there even a sliver of meaning in that?

This had all happened before, back in Juniper Land. So Narseh already knew the answer to that question: of course not, there was no meaning in anything in the scale of this vast, eternal nothing...

In that heap of bodies, something stirred. The corpse in the red dress Narseh had noticed at the start of the battle. It rose to its knees, then stood to its full height. How terrifying... Narseh now understood why he’d mistaken this man for a corpse all this time — he had no twin. None at all: neither the visible kind of Arya nor the faint indistinct shadow of the Bizantines who severed their connection to their fravashi. Just nothing. But still, he wasn’t dead, and Narseh belatedly realized who he was: the Archon, the monster Arya used to scare children.

He truly looked like a corpse, with his pallor and jutting bones, a cadaver with blood-red lips.

Both black shadows noticed him and got distracted from each other. They were so enormous — and the figure in red so small; either of them — the larva or Narseh’s fravashi — could easily rip off the Archon’s head like the cap of a bottle. But for some reason, they didn’t. Narseh distinctly felt a quiver in his fravashi. They... dared not?

And at that moment, the Archon, staring directly at them, said — perhaps very quietly, yet Narseh heard it clearly:

"Return to where you belong."

But no, he wasn’t looking at the fravashi: the Archon somehow managed to look directly at Narseh, as though he saw him through the boundary of the Other Side, through the entire thickness of time and lives Narseh had fallen through. What strange eyes he had, so light, and his hair was the same — he was almost colorless, like a ghost, in his red attire...

...

There was nothing. Absolutely nothing: no time, no space.

And then there was everything.

All the endless shifting dimensions of the Other Side and This Side seemed to merge into a single point, infinitely large and infinitely small. And Narseh himself ceased to exist — or rather, he became many entirely different people, men and women, as well as neither men nor women nor even people, who were all him at the same time.

He didn’t know how long it lasted because the very concept of time lost its meaning. He only knew that afterward — when the world, having ceased to exist, was reborn — there was This Side again, and the Other Side, and a person named Narseh, and his fravashi was also somewhere, not beside him but where it belonged: peaceful, unfathomable. And the larva from the blue box had vanished without a trace.

It was so quiet that Narseh could hear the night wind brushing over the grass in the steppe. He lay on the ground amid countless corpses — trembling, wounded, alive.

End of Part One