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On the bed, lying in a nest of blankets, are the reustus, he stood over seven feet in height and weighed aspast a hundred But he was still stately and spry despite his girth That vigor he retained throughout our h his face has spoken on Core broadcasts over the last years, I see now that it was a ruse, and why he hides here in his seaswept citadel

Barely a third of the man remains

What does is emaciated and skeletal His arms have shrunken in on themselves, the muscle withered away The skin, once dark as onyx, is now loose and scabrous with yellow flakes, oozing pus into white bandages His once-bright eyes are sunken into his head, which is bald, the skin tight and dry like a thin layer of scale over his titanic skull Wires and fluid lines connect to thehis waste It’s as if he has been devoured from inside

“I wondered who knocked,” he murmurs His eyes—stained with a rotten yellow infection—watch ra us the battle outside “I thought it the Saud, finally come to reclaim their planet But now I see it ends as it should, olves” The sier The voice alone remembers the man It is drum-deep, defiant and proud, even trapped as it is in his wasted body, like summer thunder captured in a tattered paper lantern

For ten years we’ve been adversaries Have danced across the worlds in a never-ending duel Each ale of Luna, the plains and seas of Earth and Mars, then the Core orbits, till finally the sand belt of Mercury, where I took the planet and he broke my army Now all those vast theaters and the millions of men shrink down to thisisle, and none of it makes any bloodydamn sense

“Am I not as you expected?” he asks with a smile

“Let’s just cut his head off,” Sevro says

“Not yet”

“What are aiting for? This piece of shit needs to meet the worms”

“Not yet!” I snap Sevro paces around the bed in agitation

“You are precisely what I expected,” the Ash Lord says “The destroyer of a civilization too often rese tube and follows that up with a grotesque clearing of his throat “Iyou sooner—when you were just a boy who broke his Institute Had I opened my eyes and noticed you, what a world ould still have But I see you now Yes And you are immense”

It’s admiration in his voice It’s fa could understand this ive a command that kills millions? I s,he’s beco down the same broken road

This is not how I pictured our final confrontation

“What happened to you?” I ask “How long have you been like this?”

The Ash Lord ignores the question and searches my face “I see you kept our scar And our eyes Then what of the Red remains?”