31_days | 5 March - Yu-Gi-Oh! - "The Course of Conquest" [Zork]

Title: The Course of Conquest
Day/Theme: 5 March 2007 / I am nothing, you are wind and devil and God
Series: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Characters: Zork, Thief King Bakura
Rating: PG-13

The thief crawled from beneath stones that had crushed him, and pushed them aside though they crushed him still. He didn't know or care why he didn't feel it; he'd won the Millennium Ring, and now all he needed was to live to the end. He was unaware of the shadows that licked at the air around him and pulled his body onwards, beyond its capabilities. The darkness poured from the Millennium Ring in a deluge that had been long held back, threading itself into the thief's body.

Then came the moment that made him truly understand what the contract between the shadows and the gods meant. There was the entrance - the darkness pulled and pushed the thief further - the former pharaoh's tomb was finally behind him - and then his exhausted heart gave up and stopped beating.

Ahead of him: The world.

The darkness from the Millennium Ring surged ahead, too wild to stop - and he did not want to stop it. He would have screamed, hysterical with the brightness, the grinding of his cracked bones, the weight of air. The body could only moan as its eyes were clubbed by the depth of colour in orange stone, yellow sand, impossible sky.

The body wanted to fall, unable to draw in the heat-baked air. The foolishness of mortality shouldn't distract him, but the darkness eating at the edges of sight refused to be banished--

Zork Necrophedious released his tenuous control of the body and fell back to the conduit of the Millennium Ring, and from there to the familiar, numb darkness of his domain. He released the memory of breath and let another take its space - that of the thief.

His servant was a spark at the end of the body's fingertips, curling around the Millennium Ring. He was a voice screaming in the void. "Dead! I'm dead. Now! Here!"

The thief was crying. Perhaps it was the memory of pain in the broken body. The thief was also laughing; now that Zork had seen the world, he understood laughter.

"Not yet," he said.

The thief's spirit soared and crawled as the proclamation hit him, and barged through the darkness to find the power it came from. "I have a Millennium Item! It can't end here!"

All the thief's pride, strength, madness, and ambition sharpened into desperation that struck Zork Necrophedious with the strength of all the sky's shades. He took hold of the thief's spirit, and even in the midst of familiar darkness it was as if he held a piece of the vibrant world outside.

"End, Bakura? No, not yet," Zork Necrophedious said.

He drew the destruction out of the body's broken bones and lacerated skin so that they knitted back into a whole. He lashed Bakura into the body with tendrils of shadow to the sounds of screams and more laughter. Bakura's spirit filled the edges of his body and almost overflowed - Zork drew him back and squeezed his heart to pump the blood out, and released it to beat on its own.

Bakura panted huge breaths, dragging himself across the threshold of the tomb with elbows and knees. The gulps of air became words, and Bakura dipped his head in dizzy genuflection beneath the blinding white sun, his old fierce pride turning away from himself to become piety.

The denizens of Zork's domain had whispered to Bakura from the seal hidden below Kuru Eruna since childhood, and yet this was the first time that he'd heard Bakura pray.

A demon could not become a god, but from this moment Zork Necrophedious knew that he would conquer until no one could tell the difference.

Bakura grinned into the sand. "Not yet," he whispered.

"Soon," they swore.