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“Y-you…” The White Serpent staggered as it forced its titanic body upright. It swallowed the scream building in its throat and somehow found the strength to speak. “You dare to say you will kill me, the one promised invariance from the dawn of all things…”
“Do you think I cannot?” Ketal asked it.
He smiled as he spoke, an easy, curved line as light as a shrug. The Serpent froze. In its eyes, where pride and arrogance had lived unchallenged since creation, something else settled. For the first time, the fear of its own death took shape.
Ketal leapt, and in a single breath, he stood atop the Serpent’s head. He clenched his fist. Aura gathered there, dense and bright and sharp, as if all the weight of the sky had chosen that point as its anchor.
The blow fell, and the sound that followed seemed to tear the very air apart. His fist crashed down onto the crown of the Serpent’s skull, driving its head deep into the earth. The ground split beneath the impact, and the Serpent’s massive body buckled before collapsing, its face buried in shattered stone and ice.
“Kaagh! Kaaaagh!” it screamed.
The sensation was like having its skull caved in and its mind crushed at the same time. It had never known such pain. In that raw, unfamiliar agony, its roar broke into ragged, high sounds that barely sounded like its own voice.
Ketal stepped down onto the back of its neck and pressed his heel there. He did not stamp. He simply leaned, and that alone was enough to hold the Serpent pinned.
“I did not kill you in the White Snowfield,” he said, “because it would have meant nothing.”
He spoke quietly, as if explaining a simple fact. He had possessed the authority to overwrite the world itself, even back then. If he had used that power,...
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