The Extra's Rise

The moment Luna's terror and desperation flooded through our bond, every rational thought fled my mind. There was no time for planning, no weighing of risks, no map in my head of the distance between us. Only a single imperative pounded through my chest: reach her.

"Daddy!" Stella's voice chased me as Grey burst off my skin like a storm breaking out of clear sky. The power answered raw instinct, not finesse. It gathered in a choking pressure and then unspooled, thinning the world until distance felt like a rumor.

I didn't answer. I couldn't. The bond thrummed—taut, golden, unignorable—and I locked onto it the way a drowning man locks onto air. The Grey belonged only to me; no one else could pull at reality the way it let me, no one else could make the horizon fold and the ground forget how to be beneath a body. It scraped through me in hungry sheets as I forced it to obey.

"Arthur!" Rose's alarm chased Stella's, a heartbeat late. Sound stretched into a filament and snapped. The chamber vanished.

Wind became color. Color became heat. The continents beneath me smudged into horizontal strokes as if some impatient painter had dragged a brush across the earth. The Grey rang metallic in my bones, demanding fuel, burning through it, and I fed it more without care for cost. I rode the bond like a rail, leaning forward into a speed that felt less like motion and more like deleting the space between two points.

Mountains flattened into shadows. Rivers braided into silver wire. Cities became glimmering punctuation marks I skimmed past and forgot. Somewhere, the Western Continent fell behind, and the air shifted—warmer, salt-tinged—telling me I'd crossed into the South. The bond tugged a hair to the left, then steadied, and the ancient presence I'd felt once before lifted its head in my memory.

Tiamat.

I tore through a last membrane in space—too fast, too rough—and reality snapped back with an ugly thunderclap. The crystalline cavern accepted me like a thrown stone accepts the floor. I hit hard, momentum stealing my footing, boots screeching over living gemstone until I ground to a halt on the polished plane.

"Luna!" My voice bounced off facets and returned thinner, higher, impatient with me.

"Arthur?"

Not the bright bell of a child. A deeper, steadier voice, musical but tempered. I looked up and my breath fumbled. The young woman approaching carried Luna's soul in her gaze, and that did more to steady me than any words. Amethyst hair spilled over her shoulders like a fall of liquid light, each strand catching the cavern's glow and throwing it back in iridescent pieces. Her eyes were gold—my old, familiar stars—set in a face that had lost its infant roundness for the clean lines of late adolescence.

"Luna?" I asked, even as our bond pulsed yes, yes, yes through my ribs.

"I'm sorry," she said quickly, worry and embarrassment curling together in her tone. "I didn't mean to frighten you. I was… overwhelmed during training, and the emotions bled across the bond more than they should have."

The loosened fist around my heart finally closed. I took her in properly—taller than before, frame slight but not fragile, a quiet force in how she held herself. The change wasn't cosmetic; power breathed from her skin like warm air above a sunlit road.

"Your human form has changed," I said, relief flattening the edge in my voice. "You look—" I stopped before the word beautiful, heard myself, and didn't take it back. "—strong."

"Growing stronger," said another voice, velvet over steel.

Tiamat emerged from the deeper dark of her lair the way a meaning emerges from a sentence: inevitable once it is seen. Midnight hair fell straight to her waist, framing a face that could have been carved to teach sculptors restraint. Her eyes—crimson, patient, and deeply amused—took me in with that particular kindness of hers that never let you forget it was balanced on the lip of something terrifying.

"Radiant Dragon," I said, bowing even as I tried to pretend I hadn't just cratered her home with a poorly braked entrance. "Forgive the… dramatic approach. I felt Luna and—"

"Chose immediacy over prudence," she finished, amusement flicking like a wingtip through her voice. "I sensed you half a world away. Only you rend space in quite that fashion, Arthur Nightingale. Effective, if… extravagant."

I managed a rueful breath. The Grey still prickled in the air around me, discharging in faint lines that crawled across stone. "It did what I needed."

"I know," Luna said softly. She'd come close enough that the warmth of our bond layered with the warmth of her nearness. "I should have shielded better. It was—" She swallowed. "It was the sealing."

My spine tightened. "The memories?"

Tiamat's nod was crisp. "Her strength is chained to her past, as yours is to your choices. To reclaim one, she must confront the other. Trauma does not evaporate because we wish it so. It must be looked at until it cannot look back."

"I can handle it," Luna said, the words steady but not stubborn. She didn't pretend it didn't hurt. She didn't pretend she wanted it. She only acknowledged it. That, more than anything, told me how far she'd come.

"Is it safe?" The protective edge in me lifted its head regardless. "If it pushes her into that kind of distress—"

"It is necessary," Tiamat said, not unkindly. "Safety is not the highest good. She trains in my care, and I will not let harm root where growth should. But I will not insulate her from pain that shapes her into herself."

I let out a slow breath. The Grey stilled enough that my skin stopped buzzing. I looked at Luna again, seeing not only the pain but what it had purchased: presence, balance, a greater steadiness in the light I always felt from her. "You do look beautiful," I said, the word fitting this time as a fact, not decoration. "And stronger than ever."

A flush warmed her cheeks, but she met my eyes with a poise only she could pull off. "Thank you. Tiamat says when you reach mid Radiant-rank, the seal will loosen more and I'll be able to wield pieces of what I was."

Tiamat folded her arms, watching us as a teacher watches a lesson she has taught take hold. "Your bond obeys principles of mutual enhancement. As Arthur advances, Luna remembers—and as she remembers, she can return power and clarity to him in forms that will matter. You amplify each other."

"A symbiosis," I said. The word felt right in my mouth.

"Yes," Tiamat said. Her gaze sharpened. "Which brings us to a different necessity."

The tone change nudged my attention into focus. "I'm listening."

"How have you been training?" she asked. "Be precise."

"Technique, resource control, the pathways you outlined. Testing edge cases, then stabilizing them. Pushing capacity up without leaking too much." I paused. "Sparring when I can."

"With whom?" The question came mild and merciless.

I hesitated. The answer had been tugging at me for weeks. Saying it out loud made it too solid to work around. "No one. Not at the levels that matter."

Tiamat inclined her head. "There it is. You have reached a threshold where your ecosystem fails you. Your raw progress continues, but your combat learning curve has begun to flatten, not because you lack will or insight, but because you lack stimuli equal to your present weight."

"I've noticed." I forced a smile. "It's hard to chase discomfort when everything around you breaks at your warm-up."

Even saying it felt arrogant. It wasn't. It was simply the math of it.

"You are, at this moment, stronger than almost anyone on this planet," Tiamat said, not the least bit impressed by the claim she had just made for me. "Even Lucifer, for all his talent and momentum, sits beneath your current ceiling. That should be pleasing. It is instead a problem."

The words hit with more loneliness than pride. I had aimed at survival. Power had been a means. Standing this high on the mountain, the air thinned in ways no one warned you about.

"Without resistance," Tiamat continued, "you cannot test your instincts. You cannot sharpen your reactions beyond the predictions you can already make. A dull knife looks like a good knife if it only ever cuts warm butter."

"So what do you propose?" I asked, though the answer had already gathered, obvious as a storm on an open plain.

The corner of her mouth lifted, not quite a smile and not quite a baring of teeth. "I am stronger than you, Arthur Nightingale."

Luna straightened, excitement sparking through the bond like hail on water. She understood. My pulse steadied and then climbed.

"You want to spar," I said.

"I want you to attack me with everything you have," Tiamat corrected, and now the smile was there, bright and terrible. "No courtesy. No hedging. No mental governor slowing your hand for fear of damage. The more honest your attempt to break me, the cleaner the information I can return to you."

"Here?" I glanced around the cavern—the living crystal, the veins of light running like nerves through it, the impossible sense of age.

"Here," she said. "This place was not made to be admired. It was made to endure. You will not get a second opportunity to strike at me like this soon. Do not waste it."

I rolled my shoulders, forcing likelihoods to one side in my mind and stacking only certainties. The Grey answered my breath, not yet surging, but rising, the way a tide rises over wet sand. It tasted of static and storm rain. I let it run along my arms, under my skin, into my bones, into the quiet black of my center.

"Won't I—" I began, and stopped. Old habits. The worry wasn't about damage now; it was about control. The Grey could answer panic as easily as intention. I had arrived on panic. I could not fight on it.

Tiamat must have read the pause; she reads a thousand pauses a thousand ways. "You will not shatter anything that matters," she said. "You will not hurt anyone you ought not. And if you fail to control yourself, I will control you for you."

"Comforting," I said dryly.

"True," she said, and somehow that was comforting.

Luna's fingers brushed my wrist. The contact was light, but the bond pulsed—a steady drum. I looked at her, and she nodded once, a small, fierce thing. I nodded back. The protective urge in me didn't go away. It just folded into something more useful.

"Before we start," I asked, "your training—how far?"

"Far," she said simply. "I can support more, hold longer, reach deeper. And I remember… pieces. Not everything. Enough to anchor the rest when it comes."

Tiamat added, "She will be more help to you in this fight than she could have been a month ago. Consider that as you choose what to show me."

Message received. No half-measures. No rehearsal moves. Show my hand and let her show me the holes in it.

I pulled in a slow breath. The Grey condensed, not around me, but into me, threads running from thought to muscle to bone to the shape the world took around my ideas. Space flexed, then settled. The earlier recklessness washed out of me and left a clean, bright edge.

"Inefficient," I said, almost to myself, thinking of my arrival.

"Yes." Tiamat's tone made the word neither praise nor censure. "And now you will practice efficiency under pressure."

I planted my feet on the crystal floor. It thrummed faintly under my soles as if the lair itself had a heartbeat. The vast chamber glittered—pillars like frozen lightning; ridges of gemstone that caught the light and sifted it into rain across the far wall; the ceiling arching high enough that even an ancient dragon could unfurl without clipping a wing. If she wanted a place for me to be honest in, this was it.

"When do we start?" I asked, and the Grey's hum tightened, a string tuning to pitch.

Tiamat's smile settled into something both maternal and predatory, a curve older than empires and as patient as tide. Power gathered around her without gust or glare, the way heat gathers above stone that has sat all day in the sun—quiet, immense, undeniable.

"Now."