My Taboo Harem!

Kyle attacked.

The realm capitulated for him in abject, worshipful surrender.

A mile of ossuary drifts in perfect concentric rings collapsed into fine grey ash as his weight passed from left boot to right, the ash hurled outward in a covetous, swirling ring while the realm itself cleared its great hall for the attending of its prince.

The continent-spine on the horizon shivered along its vast buried length like a thing in the throes of orgasmic dread.

The row of horizon-teeth bared itself wider by half an inch, as though the whole dead mouth of the world were readying itself to spit forth its favoured son and devour the intruder who had dared smile in its presence.

His right hand opened and from the red-black energy above him a blade remembered itself into his palm — long, thin, wickedly curved, single-edged, the metal so deep a black it supped upon the light around it and digested it whole.

The grip was bound in what Phei recognised at a single glance as human skin cured slow and cured long and cured by a craftsman who had known the body the skin had come from, who had flayed it while its owner still screamed.

The blade was summoned from the very core of the realm’s own slaughters, arterial red coiling along the edge the instant it cohered, the mist clinging to the flat, trailing from the tip in obscene lambent ribbons that writhed and fed and hissed with the voices of ten thousand forgotten dead.

Kyle did not traverse the distance.

Kyle refused the distance.

The ten paces between them surrendered on his behalf — the realm pulling the intervening yards inward and folding them out of existence beneath his crossing boot, so that his first stride ate four yards, his second devoured six, and the black blade was already arcing at Phei’s throat by the time his third footfall had finished being committed.

The strike came at the rate of stars dying.

Phei was not where it arrived.

He had shifted a half-step inward — a movement so small it barely qualified as motion, a slight repositioning of his weight onto the rear foot, his cheek unhurried as the mist-wrapped edge passed within a hand’s breadth of his jugular and kept going.

The blade bit empty air.

And the empty air bled.

A concentric shockwave punched outward from the unblooded strike — a ring of displacement expanding at the pace of water remembering its own surface, each succeeding ring dragging the red mist along in a brief outward-then-inward suck that tore screams from the bone-drifts.

Where the ring reached the nearest drifts, skulls stirred in their settled beds and rolled themselves an inch across the bone-powder as if dreaming of flesh.

Where the ring reached the middle distance a hundred yards out, a stacked drift of vertebrae jumped in unison and resettled in a new pattern of agony. Where the ring reached the continent-spine at the horizon, the whole ridge hummed at a frequency Phei felt along the enamel of his own teeth like a dentist’s drill pressed to the nerve.

A miss in this realm cost more than a landed blow would have cost in any other.

Phei did not counter.

Phei smiled.

Small. Private. Barely a movement of the mouth at all. Unhurried and entirely unimpressed.

Kyle reset his stance and threw a cross.

His knuckles this time, wrapped in arterial red energy like a prizefighter’s bandage, a ribbon of energy trailing the punch in a long hungry banner that hissed through the air behind his fist like the last breath of a dying god.

Phei slipped it.

A one-inch rotation of the head, his cheek passing the knuckle so near that the mist-ribbon feathered against his jaw and left a thin red mark there that faded before Phei’s breath had finished leaving his nose.

The miss detonated wider this time, because the strike had been wider — a great hungry disc of displaced air expanding outward, and three of the vertical femur-pillars in the middle distance toppled in slow mournful dominoes, their ancient settlings finally disturbed into conclusion with the wet crunch of bones remembering they had once been alive.

Phei smiled again.

Kyle’s wine-red eyes narrowed to slits of pure aristocratic venom.

“Stop doing that.”

The voice came sharper than the earlier composure had permitted. The red pupils constricted to vertical slits so fine they resembled the eyes of an eel in dark water.

He reset his guard, the energy around his hands thickening into something almost gloved, something almost armoured, something that screamed in protest at being forced to serve a prince who was being humiliated.

“The smile. The silence. You always did that when the rest of us were trying to speak to you. You would simply smile and not deign to respond. An insufferable little ornament of a habit. A charity case’s arrogance dressed up in a quiet mouth.”

Phei’s smile widened the fraction of a fraction.

Kyle lunged.

Jab — a short vicious left-hand probe, the knuckles wreathed in red-black, aimed at Phei’s temple with the force of a falling cathedral.

Phei slipped. The missed jab’s shockwave rippled the red sky above them into a long slow swell that bled fresh arterial mist across the bone-field like rain.

Cross — the blade this time, the glowing edge carving an arc at Phei’s ribs that could have opened him from sternum to spine.

Phei shifted a hip, let the blade pass, the wake of its passage so close to his flank that the damask coat of his own shadow seemed briefly to part around it. The missed cross punched a shockwave that caused the horizon-teeth to grind against each other in their vast dead jaw, and a plume of red-black energy vented from between them in a slow arterial exhalation that smelled of ten thousand years of swallowed screams.

Kyle followed the cross with a rising left elbow — mist-coated, savage, aimed at Phei’s chin with enough force to shatter mountains.

Phei stepped inside it.

Reached up with his left hand — unhurried as a gentleman stilling a curtain — and his bare palm closed upon the ascending elbow at the exact zenith of its arc. The strike stopped against his hand as though it had struck a cathedral wall forged from the bones of gods.

The red-black energy wrapping Kyle’s arm recoiled from Phei’s bare skin and curled backward along the forearm in a hissing panic, the realm’s own energy unable to bear the touch of something it could not name, could not devour, could not understand.

Kyle’s eyes widened in genuine shock.

Phei’s right hand — dagger held low at his hip — did not stir.

He did not need it.

Phei twisted the caught elbow.

One small clinical rotation — no more effort than unscrewing a stubborn lid on a jar of preserved agony.

Kyle’s shoulder capitulated with a wet inarticulate pop, the joint surrendering its socket in a sound so private it belonged in a sickroom rather than a battle. Kyle did not cry out — millions of progenitor pride held his throat closed by iron custom — but a thin, aggrieved sound escaped his nose, and the realm heard it.

The floor beneath Kyle’s backward stagger liquefied and the red pooled in a slow merciful cushion where his boot landed. Bones dissolving themselves into mist to catch the feet of their bleeding prince.

The ash-crust rising a fraction to soften the footfall. The realm, in one vast simultaneous reflex, volunteered its own substance to prevent Kyle from going to a knee.

He did not go to a knee.

But the realm had bent for him.

His dislocated shoulder reseated with a soft clicking chorus, each of the tiny ligaments settling back into place one after another like obedient courtiers returning to their stations, the arterial red mist racing up his sleeve to repair what had been unmade.

The crimson damask straightened itself with a self-conscious rustle. The lace at his cuff settled. Composure returned to his face as though it had been waiting outside a door for readmission, polished and perfect once more.

But a hairline crack had been left behind in the composure, and it would not quite mend.

He smiled. Less cleanly than before.

“You always were an eyesore, friend.”

Phei did not answer.

“Arrogant. Silent. Walking as though the world had incurred a debt to you for the simple indignity of your breathing. We could feel it. I could feel it. For long years.”

He lunged again.