Try as they might, they could not muster enough momentum to resist Apotheosis’ opening blow. The great arms descended in balled fists and broke the tundra asunder. Catapulted into the air, the duo flailed amidst a hailstorm that began to whirl around the titan. Lysander clicked his fingers and conjured a grappling hook. He caught it as he began to descend and whorled it over his head.

“Aim for the head!” Young Duffy screamed, oblivious to the very real prospect of crashing to a painful death.

Lysander threw the hook towards the titan’s chest. He loosened every muscle in his body for the impending jolt. The grappling hook chinked against the titan’s hide and skittered off, catching an edge just as Lysander started to roar with anger. Realising how lucky he was, the roar turned to a scream as he slammed to a halt mid-air and begun the nauseating swung down and through the titan’s legs.

“Aim for me!” Duffy pleaded, already falling and suddenly aware of his mortality. He flailed outwards to try and right himself, but the roar of the tundra’s snowstorm drowned away his protests.

Time seemed to stop. Regret came first, then hopelessness, then terror.

“Done!”

Lysander ploughed into Duffy and scooped him up, his swing carrying them both upwards and into clear view of the titan cleaving his fists from the broken earth. They hung for a few, clarion seconds. Their minds still twinned; they came to the same conclusion.

“Arden Janelle wouldn’t shit himself at this.”

Together, they vanished in a whorl of ribbons and re-appeared ten feet closer to the titan. They circumvented the rising fists and scattering boulders of ice with the guile of the Silent Swordsman summoned to their bodies through the Aria. Just as Lysander said, they had a power no god could muster: their friends.

“I still might!” Duffy vanished as the fist drew through where he was, spinning him mid-blink so that he re-appeared disoriented and off-course. “Definitely will!”

The young bard slammed downward onto the titan’s shoulder; the wind crushed from his lungs with the same force as the wit fell from his tongue. Lysander fared better, a third blink bringing him three feet away from the glowing rune on the titan’s chest. Duffy managed to scratch and scrape enough to gain a foothold, but Lysander’s broiling song came out of his lungs with thunderous force. He drew back his blade and drove it into the rune.

“Our lives are always intertwined. Our hearts are all as one. Our dreams will never die because, our family’s never gone.”

The words that had given birth to the bridge of ideas that connected worlds gave destructive force to the katana. Its broke hide of night and malice lost blood of power and promise. Arced bolts of crackling light shot skyward. Apotheosis arced back in pain, arms bent, and eyes hollow. Duffy felt hopeless turn to hope. Lysander felt the recoil of his actions rock his arm: the katana flew away, repulsed by the swell of power which erupted from the titan.

The icy heart of Berevar, for a moment, was illuminated by the radiance of a high summer sun. The orb that formed crushed the bed rock beneath the ice and sent quakes out across the wilderness. Their fortunes turned, the duo was sent haphazard out into the night air once again flailing in a storm of swords and profanity.