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There are many creatures that might be categorized as ghosts. Poltergeists, specters, shades, wisps… As a son of superstitious Faerghus, Felix has heard them all. Of every kind, there is only one he has ever confirmed to be real.
The human kind.
Alone in the great hall where saints once stood, a mountainous shadow of a man looms in the darkness of the witching hour. If the gloom could be pierced by human eyes, he would appear both more and less than human; cloaked by the thick murk of mist and misery, anyone would be forgiven for mistaking him for the last vestiges of the Church’s sanctity, unbowed.
Unbowed, but broken nonetheless.
And, like a knight of yore—though he would protest the comparison—another man, lithe and narrow, sharpened to a point, steps forward to exorcize him from this place—or, perhaps, to exorcize this place from him.
“Boar,” Felix Fraldarius says, aiming for anger and landing somewhere around exhaustion. “Let’s spar.”
The mountain shifts at last, the fragile moon catching his face in a weak, reflected beam. Dimitri does not look human, but he is.
Felix will make him remember that.
“So you too wish to leave me and join the ranks of the dead?” the ghost-king asks, his voice leaden, nearly monotone but for the abject despair that drips from every syllable. “Or are you here to exact payment for every sleepless night and skipped breath?”
“Don’t be stupid. Just stand and fight.”
Spear in hand, Dimitri lunges for Felix with teeth bared, snarling with rage as though he truly is the animal Felix has accused him of being. It was foolish of Felix to not insist on defanging this beast—Dimitri is at the height of his power and the base of his self-control, and though Felix hates to admit it, he is fearsome enough when he is holding back.
Still, Felix will resist him. He can. He must.
Where the Crest of Blaiddyd grants Dimitri overwhelming might, Felix will meet him with sheer endurance. Fraldarius’s descendants are not the Shields of Faerghus for nothing, so Felix will grit his teeth and outlast.
Blows do not ( should not) land half as hard on Fraldarius skin, after all.
Besides, Felix has learned how to hunger, how to play dirty in order to seize victory from the jaws of defeat. There are lines he will never cross, but there are fewer of them than he had ever thought there would be. A blow from Dimitri’s lance leaves him half-knocked over in the sand of the training grounds, and without a thought for fairness or chivalry , he casts a fistful of dirt into the eye of his king.
Dimitri stumbles back, a sound almost like a roar escaping from his snarl-stretched lips; this is the only way Felix can win. Maybe in another life he would be ashamed of these tactics, but the next strike goes wide, and all Felix feels is grim, momentary satisfaction.
“Come on, beast,” he goads, tasting copper from a lip he did not know was split. “I know there’s fury in you yet.”
He levels a slash at Dimitri’s chest; the boar retreats, if only for a moment. “So you do mean to die,” the boar prince rumbles, but there is more life to it than Felix has heard in years.
(Felix is familiar with his own brand of hauntings—when he’d feared Dimitri dead, he’d dreamed of him often, always distant, always talking as though Felix could never hope to reach him.
For all that Dimitri is a fool, Felix is right there beside him, following step by step.)
“Not unless I’m dragging you with me.”
And with every blow, the beast bleeds out, leaving something fallible and fragile in its place. It is not Dimitri—not yet—but it is so close that Felix can nearly taste it, like stolen sweets on his tongue. Felix revels in it even as the boar pushes him back—losing battles and winning wars, he thinks, and that can be good enough for him.
So even as the beast presses him back, striking once, twice, thrice in a fury of mangled growls and the clang and thwack of steel and wood, Felix doesn’t mind. He’d rather not lose—would rather stand tall and proud over Dimitri’s kneeling form, no matter how treasonous that might sound—but even if he does…
Somewhere deep in the core of himself, Dimitri is stirring at Felix’s touch, fraught with violent passion as it is. Anything extra is just a bonus.
The fourth strike catches Felix off-guard, and he goes down with a vengeance, landing on his back in a way that will ache something awful in the morning. No time to think about that now, though; he has to get up, else—
Else the boar will strike, pinning him down with the weight of his being, teeth bared and gleaming with spittle. This close, Felix can track each bead of sweat along the uneven coloration of his skin; can see the storm of emotions swirling through Dimitri’s gaze, even if he can’t pick any of them out; can see Dimitri’s lips, cracked and bitten and raw, faltering around his own anger.
On his back, Felix is nearly helpless. No matter his earlier bravado, the boar really could kill him.
He drops his sword and surrenders anyway.
The Tempest King’s swell of emotions ebbs into pure confusion. Though he’d adjusted his grip to keep hold of Felix, he still holds tight to his lance. One wrong move, and the boar might win, skewering Felix through until he lies bloody and ignoble in the dirt.
(It wouldn’t be a bad way to go, and that’s the worst part—even as far gone as he is, there is something magnetic about the heavy rise and fall of Dimitri’s chest, about the heat of his breath and his mouth, so close to Felix’s own.)
Dimitri’s lips part, then shape words that Felix can’t parse. No sound passes between them, but Felix can’t bring himself to speak, to shatter this singular moment.
Then, slowly, as if peeling each finger free is its own agony, Dimitri drops Areadbhar. “I yield,” he says, and his mouth presses into a flat line, white and fraught with feeling.
Dimitri, with every advantage over Felix, if only he’d choose to use them, yields. Despite everything that has shaped Felix, every hard edge and spiked wall he clings to so religiously, he cannot help the way those words make him soften in the boar prince’s grasp.
Unbidden, Felix feels his mouth curve up in something almost like a smile. “I win.”
If they were different people at a different time, he thinks Dimitri might have laughed at that. Instead, he stays there, thighs bracketing Felix’s hips, mouth softening as his eye meets Felix, and replies, “So you do.”
Even when Dimitri rises some minutes later, wandering off like he can’t understand who to be while his fury is stripped away, Felix thinks victory has never tasted sweeter.