From darkness into darkness. The line between nightmare and reality had melted into darkness.

Phantasmagoria.

Calina blinked her way half-back to reality as she heard the sound of fatigued metal breaking. She saw Nickolai tumble to the floor. Then he and Maximillian leapt for each other, scattering curtain frames and flimsy tables on their way. As she pushed herself slowly upright, strange in her own skin, Dr. Ricks came to stand behind her. His hand on her shoulder would have been a bracing comfort yesterday. Now it pinned her in place. Shaking in his grip she could only watch the two brothers and their flames beat at each other.

When he broke through the restraints on his bed, Nickolai knew he had let himself change. He didn't care. He leapt at his brother with a snarl. The strength and brutality of this form were all that could keep him going now. Or maybe that was his own brutality: he was too raw, too furious to know the difference.

Maximillian, too, abandoned any pretext of calm reason. He charged, ducked, retreated. Nickolai's first swing missed. Maximillian threw a chair, which splintered on the sturdy wall behind him as he rolled away. Nickolai came up scalpel, which he bloodied between Maximillian's ribs before it was knocked from his hand. Then they were at each other's necks again.

They were silver and black to the world, but for them the world was nothing. They did notice, if only for a second, when the roof of the townhouse was ripped off.

In the heat of their battle the demon had risen above the city. A thundercloud of ash was spreading overhead, pouring out of the cathedral ruins where Nickolai's indiscretion had rekindled a blaze. Tongues of flame stretched down to flit between apartment buildings and glass-walled offices. Cement seared and wood siding caught fire. The blast that had knocked down the roof scorched the lower level of the hospice, lighting more flames; it carried with it a dark, trickling laugh that stuck like greek fire.

And the brothers fought on.

A woman peered out of her shabby rented room when she heard the first screams. She had grown wary of such sounds--the last few months had taken her past many of them--but this time there were so many voices. What she saw was the end of the world.

Fire and ash rained from the sky, and for one terrible moment all she could think was, Pompeii was at least preserved.

But then she saw the roofs of a row of townhouses shredded to the winds she forgot all that. She took this room only on the strength of that window, and the small hospice that could be seen from it. With no further pause Lydia threw a wet scarf over her head. Covering her mouth, she ran out into the firestorm.

Some say the world will end in fire, In the heat and the ash the words tripped merrily through Calina's mind. Just the words--her memory of reading them seemed, like the rest of her, very far away.

Some say in ice.

Every time her world had ended, it had burned. Her father's fever had burned. The storage shed had burned. Her sight had burned. What would an icy death feel like? She coughed, then staggered as the grappling brothers slammed into a wall. Dr. Ricks' hand on her shoulder tightened, held her upright.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

Desire was the beast raining fire from the sky, or so she thought. It was the fire that was ending the world. Its taste for their fear fueled its flames. She shuddered.

But I think I know enough of hate

to say that for destruction ice

is also great, The brothers fighting, the city burning, and evil laughing: Calina could not bear to see it. So, for the first time, she turned her second sight inward to escape. She saw, then, that within her chest beat the heart of a sun.

And would suffice.

She would suffice.

She'd never hated anyone before. But when she tried hating Dr. Ricks she found that it was easy. She carded from her memories the years he had spent treating her father's chronic seizures, and then her own. She saw again his look of puzzled concern, and added to it the stalking patience that lurked behind her now. She gathered up her hate and cast it at him like a seething net.

Ricks did not freeze.

His cold hand on her shoulder blackened first. He drew breath to scream but the char reached his throat too fast. Then he was nothing but ash.

Ashes to ashes, Calina thought. Ice may suffice, but hate cannot fight fire when it is fire itself. She looked up and out of herself again, at the laughing monster that burned above her. She could see it pulling on the city, spinning their woes into itself and growing. Then her heart skipped a beat, her breath caught, and she knew her part.

The brothers were at opposite ends of the room now, eyeing each other over a mire of bent metal bedframes and glittering needles. They panted, bled, and gathered their strength. Calina crossed to where Nickolai stood. He didn't face her, but even so she could see his eyes flashing black and dangerous.

She laid three fingers on his arm and leaned up to his ear. She spoke over the hiss of his skin burning, and his hair curled back from the heat of her words. "Only willing blood can bind it, Nickolai. You'll know when." Then she was gone, leaving him with only three red streaks on his arm and a blistering cheek.

Calina climbed through a wrecked window out onto the roof of the hospice--what was left in a rim around the collapse. The heat pulsing in her heart was too much for her body, and too soon. She watched it fall. She rose then as a tangled thermal, a distortion on the air. Rising towards the monster, she shone.

It looked on her with approval, thinking its destined ally had come at last. No voice whispered to it, so things were before--it found the taste of victory too wonderful. So it held out a hand.

Calina took it. When she touched its claws she knew its name. She felt her own fire blaze up at the knowledge, expand. Some say, I say, the world will end in fire. For a moment she could feel the force with which she would erupt and consume the earth. Then she smiled, spoke its hidden name, and pulled inward.

The world went dark. Light and sound were extinguished, sucked in by the force of one collapsing point that bent the smoky air.

You'll know when, she had said, and Nickolai knew. So when Maximillian raised the ragged-edged pole in that instant, Nickolai lay still. Willing blood, his fists clenched. Willing, willing.

But then Nickolai saw his brother's eyes flicker, and suddenly his enemy was Max again. In his one clear moment Max turned about and, horrified, understood. Max spared one last look for Nickolai, who had not been alarmed until he saw the apology there. Wait, Nickolai tried to shout, heaving to his feet. But it was done.

Maximillian's--Max's--blood already ran across the floor.

Nickolai crawled towards his brother. It was his cry that brought sound back to the world. The last of his anger spent itself in smoke-filtered light onto stained, slippery linoleum. There was no trumpet blast, no final charge for him. So he wept instead.

That was when the hungry fire on the ground floor found where the respirators and oxygen tanks were kept.

The explosion that rumbled through the old building seemed small and muffled in the city's quiet. The sky began to clear as fires reaching up from the ground were no longer met by like in the air. Water was sprayed and curtains were beaten. The dark thing knew it and raged, though it could hear nothing. It was wrapped around with a tear in space so small it barely existed. Its universe was again infinitesimal, and it was once more in it alone, feeding on itself in the dark.

It could wait. And it would.

He heard someone scrabbling through the rubble towards him. One attempt at turning his head convinced him to lie still. Maybe I am lucky, and dead, he thought. But soon the pain clawing at his face and side convinced him he was alive.

"Max! Nick!" A woman's voice croaked, frantic. He started: he had forgotten the searcher. She was moving farther away.

"Here," he coughed out before he recognized Lydia's voice. Then he froze under his burns. Maximillian's love--and Max is dead--God, what will I say?

"Max!" An anguished shriek. She's seen him, she's seen him, Nickolai thought. His body lying next to me. But somehow it was his hair shaking hands smoothed back. "What happened?" Lydia's voice asked. She sounded so desperately calm, she might have been saying anything.

"We fought. He was not himself. And then--a fire--"

"Shh," she said. "It's over, it's over. You're bleeding--your eyes-- It'll be okay. A doctor'll be here, just a minute--"

As Lydia spoke he saw someone, the only shape not blurred and dark in the smog. Calina. Nickolai thought she had been trapped with the demon. "Where?" He asked. Where is it? Where were you?

"Caught," she whispered back, like a crackle of hearthfire. "Send him back or let him free: seems that was my father's choice, or my many-times-grandfather-s choice. Now it'll be my brother's and his children's." She drifted sadly to one side. "I might have liked to be an aunt," she said.

"Where now?" Nickolai asked.

"I lost the living part of me, burning out my fire." Calina's light-limned faced turned away from him. "I think I'll go watch ice cracking on the sea." Then she fell back through the thick smoke, and vanished.

He did not know Lydia had missed it until he realized she was trying to answer his questions to Calina.

"Max," her voice was raised in repetition. "Your brother. He's dead." He wanted to tell her I know, I saw, but she was still talking. "Nickolai didn't make it. Max, I'm so sorry."

Nickolai was pulled up in her arms before he could make sense of what she'd said. He reached out to feel for her, to find her face, needing to tell her that fate had made a mistake and the wrong twin had lived. The one with nothing to live for.

It was too late. Medics fell upon them now, pulling him away. They held him still to bandage his head, telling him they might be able to save a little of his sight. Lydia stood by to hold his undamaged hand, promising him it would be all right. Every time she used his brother's name his fingers twisted in the gritty remnants of the hospital gown Asriel had assigned him. It was a twin to the one Max had worn. And his face a twin to Max's, too. Except now Maximillian's was mangled under concrete and metal, and Nickolai's own banded temple to temple with fire.

"I'll take care of you, Max," Lydia murmured under the rush of yelling and sirens. "Just stay with me a little longer."

His hand tightened in hers. He could not refuse her, the one soul left in the world. He would tell her his name tomorrow. When all the fires were out.

Yes, tomorrow.