Chapter 137 The Last One Standing
They had been fighting for hours.
The morning crowd had eaten through whatever food they brought and sent people out for more and come back and the fight was still going, and the afternoon came in and changed the light in the arena and the fight was still going, and somewhere around the fourth hour people stopped talking between exchanges because talking felt like missing something.
Cain was bleeding from her side.
Azrael had a burn across his left shoulder that had taken his sleeve with it and the skin beneath was angry and red and he hadn’t looked at it once.
They came together again in the center of the floor and the sound of their swords meeting was different now than it had been in the morning, heavier, the bodies behind the blades carrying the weight of the day in every movement, and Lilith watched from the elevated box and felt the fight in her own chest the way you felt things that mattered.
The fire around Cain’s blade was lower than it had been.
She had been spending it all day and what was left was real but thin and Azrael knew it because he had been watching it thin for the past hour and he pressed forward now in a way he hadn’t pressed before, not harder exactly, just more certain, the certainty of someone who had been waiting for a specific moment and could feel it arriving.
Cain felt it too.
She stopped giving ground and planted her feet and the fire came up one more time, everything she had left in it, bright and sudden and fierce, and it hit Azrael’s light and the two of them pushed against each other at close range and the heat and the brightness spilled across the arena floor and the front rows leaned back from it.
Azrael didn’t move.
He stood in the middle of it with the light in his blade steady and his feet where they were and his face doing nothing, and the fire thinned and thinned and he stepped through what was left of it and his sword found Cain’s and the impact drove it from her hand and it hit the stone floor and skidded and came to rest against the far wall.
Cain stood without her sword.
She was breathing hard. Both of them were breathing hard. The arena was completely silent in the way it had gone silent at the end of the Lucian fight but deeper this time, fuller, the silence of a much larger number of people holding the same breath at the same moment.
Azrael raised his blade to her throat.
Cain looked at it.
She looked at him.
Not at the blade, at him, at his face, at the burns and the cuts and the exhaustion he was not showing in his expression because Azrael did not show exhaustion in his expression, it was simply not something he did, and she looked at all of it and something moved through her face that Lilith could see even from the elevated box, something that had nothing to do with the fight and everything to do with the centuries between them.
She reached up and pushed his blade aside with her bare hand.
Then she raised the other hand.
The arena came apart.
The noise rose and kept rising and Lilith sat in the middle of it and felt it move through her and watched Cain walk across the floor and pick up her sword and walk back to the wall without looking at anyone, and watched Azrael stand in the center of the arena with the afternoon light around him and his power fading and his chest moving.
He looked up at her.
She looked back at him and felt everything the look contained and didn’t look away from any of it.
Sera’s hand found hers.
She held it.
The High Council elder waited for the noise to settle before he spoke and when he spoke his voice carried across the arena into the quiet that followed the noise.
“Azrael advances,” he said. “The final challenge will take place tomorrow morning.”
Lilith sat with that and felt tomorrow arrive in her chest before it arrived anywhere else, solid and real and close, and she thought about five days of watching and everything she had built from it and the thing underneath all of it that Zara had named and she had always had.
Tomorrow.
She was ready.