“This place, this body is my demesne. There is nothing you can do to usurp me; my being is my empire, and not a single soldier goes unaccounted for,” Victor proclaimed.

A great tsunami of bone swelled up and crashed down behind him, forming into a boundless army of bone wrought knights and beasts that stretched out to the horizon, monochrome animating flame blazing within each of them.

“It makes little difference,” said the Second King, unbothered. “The Enantiomorph takes place regardless of which of us is victorious. Come, strike me down if you so wish!”

“I will be no puppet for your designs. If you thought to make a chosen one of me and wear my body for yourself, know that you have walked into the doom of your plans.”

The wizard laughed.

“That is not how prophecy functions, fortunately,” he said. “We are here because you fulfilled my prophecy’s criteria. Actions you took out of your own free will that made you my heir. Though… I admit that I nudged you in the right direction, or rather prevented you from being nudged in the wrong one.”

Victor had surrounded him with soldiers while he spoke, a fact that seemingly did not bother Koschei in the least. A dozen spears all pointed at him, and ten-thousand Devil’s Teeth had formed in the ground behind him, waiting to erupt and annihilate the old man’s thoughtform should he attempt anything. These were the moderate measures. He had his finger on the trigger of a metaphorical weapon of mass destruction, always ready to expel Koschei’s thoughtform outright.

“...Your interventions at the Deterrence Fields and in Agartha,” Victor guessed.

“Oh, it goes so much further back than that,” Koschei replied. “Your father, that fool, thought himself to be my destined heir, thinking that he could ensure that you would never be eligible if he raised you a certain way, yet he himself didn’t even have the arcane affinity to realize my Left Eye to be anything other than a pretty trinket. What a failure, Anton was. Had I not intervened here and there, who knew what ridiculous complexes he would’ve made you develop.”

“When else did you intervene? Speak, and speak truthfully, or I will annihilate you,” Victor said.

Despite Victor’s omnipotence within his own mindscape, despite Koschei’s entrapped state, the balance of power between them felt completely even to the younger man. The Second King requested: “Would you raise a chair for me, please?”

Victor willed one of his knights to enter the small circle within which Koschei stood, and with a snap of his fingers made it transform into a flaming chair. Koschei sat, resting his right leg on his left, monochrome flames rising between them.

“Three generations there may be between us, but your grandfather I am nonetheless. When your child-self sought control and stability where you had none, I taught you how to contain the rage within; how to hold it close and foster it into that magnificent sense of righteous wrath that you now possess. I was certain that you would learn it of your own accord, but… Why leave things to chance? All those times one of your parents didn’t notice you doing something they disapproved of, all those times your father conveniently got distracted and left you be, all those times a forbidden book fell into your grasp and somehow ended up right back in its place before you could be found out. I had no choice but to quiet down as you grew up, but by then, I needed not act.”

“Why tell me all of this? Why reveal your interventions in my life now?”

“Indeed. Why would I take the time to tell you all this if I intended to make a flesh-puppet of your body? To make a point, to monologue, buy time for some long-con trick, just because I haven’t spoken to anyone in seven hundred years? No. Well, perhaps that last one, at least partly. But… I have told you already; what will take place between us has only one outcome with small variations.”

Koschei stuck his staff into the ground, holding out his hands to his side, palms up. Blood poured forth from his skin and formed into faces, his own on the left and Victor’s on the right.

“Whether the ego of “Victor” or “Koschei” takes control in the end matters not. We will become one, and my prophecy will come to pass. Tian Feng, Xiān Dì, the so-called Divine Emperor, will see all his works destroyed, and we will have a direct hand in that downfall. Things have been set into motion which cannot be stopped, and I, for one, will gladly accept the outcome which you have grasped. In truth… I fear that if I took control, my own ways, into which I am inexorably set, would be my downfall. I would seek to capture Xiān Dì, torture him, I would try to make a slave of him, and inevitably, it would prove to be my undoing. So… I concede.”

Koschei shrugged, and his blood-constructs splashed onto his hands. He placed them on the chair’s armrests.

“Something eats at me.”

“Ask.”

Frustration flashed over Victor’s features. He held up his hand and manifested an image of the Left Eye gemstone.

“...Why is it called the Left Eye?”

The Second King chuckled, holding out his left hand. A wand took form in his grasp, a blue gemstone in its base.

“This is why,” he said. “If my staff was my Right Eye, then this was my Left Eye. Before you ask, I know not what became of the staff. Tian Feng destroyed it, that’s why I made the Left Eye to begin with.”

Another gesture. The wand became glasses of a sort, the gem set over the left eye, with a second, purple gem on the right side.

“I paired it with a second Antediluvian Gem in my final years, though I do not know what became of it. One of the many memories which have been lost to me over the centuries. Now…”

Koschei stood from his chair.