Or'do heaved himself onto hands and knees, yet found his arms trembling, his heart gripped in the cold steel fist of fear. Devoured by rage, his heart a kiln, his eyes burning stars, Aleorn was driving back the Old Hunter, his iron fists ringing against Gehrman's forearms as if both were cast of steel in flesh's stead. His strikes painted great wavering ribbons of light through the air, soft bands that turned hard and cruel where they clashed with the First Hunter's parrying wrist or slashing blade. When the scythe had shattered, Gehrman had taken from it the smaller sword it harbored, and it was with this that he fended off his hateful adversary, its keen edge shining as if weeping tears of mercury, its planes glinting like twilit seas.

Both warriors moved in the sinister harmony of battle's lethal dance, the air a mire of blurred scythes where limbs became naught but phantom tendrils that hardened and coalesced only in those brief, fiery moments where steel and flesh clashed. Blazing flashes of light wept sparks across the withered grass, igniting small, glowing patches around the embattled pair, plaintive hands of smoke reaching heavenward, flinching in the wailing cyclone of their dazzling movements.

Or'do struggled to rise, felt his muscles glow with pain's numbing heat, and crumpled limp. For all his strength, for all his hate, for all his power, he could do nothing more than lay and watch as his comrade fought. He lived, yet soon enough, he would wish for nothing more than the cold embrace of the death his comrade spared him.

Across the way, Aleorn smashed aside another sweeping blow, two bands of light hardening, turning from blurred motion to a flare of blinding light that had not time to fade before the two were again moving, striking with the speed of lightning and the titanic force that birthed stars and sundered worlds. Pealing like doleful bells, Aleorn's molten fists danced through the air, his body shifting and twisting, the air around him speared by a thousand thousand blows yet he remained unscathed. Lightning flashed along his forearms, blazed through his body, burned from his very flesh like smoke from smouldering ruin. Like such ruin, even this brilliance was doomed to turn cold and dark.