DTT: Round One, Nowles vs Julian

In the frayed raiment of his prince robes, Julian looked like a corpse dressed in the banners of dead kingdoms.

Well, he was a corpse. He was the shadow of a once-prince, the ruin of a once-legacy, and the vestige of a once-human. The sole thing Julian felt that now made him, kept him together, was a lion’s honor.

He had died with an oath unfulfilled and a promise unkept. That, he knew in the rotting marrow of his bones, was why he had been shaken loose from the cold of his cairn. He had sworn to avenge his cousin. He had vowed to save Love. And what dead thing can rest until it accomplishes the goal it died for? What fading soul can truly disappear until their final tether is severed?

His honor, once a warm and living thing, had calcified over the decades, grown over his skin as a dark, frosty armor that now glinted with each labored step forward. And his every footfall, releasing a soft crunch from crushed bones underfoot, echoed a transformed royalty: a prince no longer of lost summers and bright things, but instead of the vengeful and perhaps, to an extent, hell itself. 

After all, his eyes burned towards the stranger facing him.

She was much smaller, bird-boned and petite, but what he could sense on her was as vast as history. She smelled of smoke, ashes, and rust. "You are like me," he rasped, words like gravel and stone, "a legacy. Gunpowder, smoke, factories." 

He reached down. From the pile of bones and tar below him, Julian's hand wrapped around the hilt of a blade and pulled it up, the blade jagged - dark as night - reflecting none. 

"A great honor, is it not, to die with such a fine pedigree?" He made a sound that closely resembled a bitter laugh. "It is a shame I cannot let you go further than this."

She said someone's name.

He did not remember anyone's except four letters.

He charged mercilessly, taking the full brunt of her attack to then retaliate in the same breath. 

“I was a prince once,” he told her, chuckling. “But we are so far from what we once were.” The distance spanned eons. He could never reach for those lost summers again, for the days encased in amber and daylight. Only grief remained. Grief, and the determination to keep his last promise.

She spoke like a firecracker: pop, pop, pop. It amused him, reminded him of some faces he couldn’t quite picture but felt what they were to him. Lost sisters, dead sisters. The dead remembered little.

What he could recall though was that the one in front of her was a separate entity from the girl he spent his last moments with. Whereas this person burned, his taker of his life flowed.

“Jules,” he told her. “Or at least I was. Who were you?”