The Extra's Rise

Tiamat yawned, catlike and unhurried, and stretched her arms until the delicate bones of her shoulders clicked. The lair's crystal lights caught in her midnight hair and ran along it like water.

'How intriguing,' she thought, lips curving. She had not meant to push that hard. She knew exactly how much she'd allowed out—no more than a calm tenth of herself—yet even that had been too much for the moment. The problem, if it could be called one, was simple.

Arthur Nightingale was stronger than he had any right to be.

In the last few months his edge had thickened and his timing had grown clean, the way steel sings when it has been tempered correctly. His fight with the Second Calamity—Gideon Ironmaw, the steel-devouring terror with the laughter like millstones—had carved away hesitation and left behind a ruthless sort of clarity.

'He's sitting at a bottleneck,' Tiamat measured, eyes softening as she watched him. 'But not for long. Mid Radiant-rank is close enough to smell. When he steps through, ten percent won't be polite anymore.'

Arthur lay unconscious on a smooth shelf of living crystal, the Crown of Twilight a faint dusk-glow above his brow. The Grey had bled out of the air around him and gone quiet, leaving only the echo of what those new wings had done to distance. He would have bruises—not because she had hurt him, but because his body insisted on keeping score. She would mend those if Luna left any for her.

Tiamat's gaze flicked to the qilin girl. Woman, now, in this shape; the lines of her face had leapt forward a decade since she first arrived in the South. Luna sat with her legs folded to one side, Arthur's head resting on her lap. One hand cupped his jaw. The other spread a wash of Purelight over his sternum in lazy, steady waves.

"Do you have to heal him like that?" Tiamat asked, voice dry with amusement.

Luna's shoulders twitched. She did not move the head from her thighs. "This is optimal."

Tiamat made a small sound that might have been a laugh. "Optimal for circulation. And for feelings."

Color rose in Luna's cheeks. The Purelight did not falter. "He is more comfortable like this," she said, trying for clinical and getting only halfway there.

'I thought you'd grown colder,' Tiamat mused, still smiling. 'But you are still so soft.'

She lowered herself onto a low ridge nearby, stretching her legs out and leaning back on her palms. The lair hummed its approval of rest. In the quiet you could hear Arthur's breathing settle into a slow, reliable rhythm.

'As expected,' she thought again, this time tasting the weight of it. As expected, he had surprised her. As expected, he had taken the hints she'd scattered months ago, found the doors, and made new ones where none existed. Those Grey wings—pages of refusal, not feather or flame. World's Edge—a clean ring of truth. The way he had let the Pond of Tranquility bloom without fear of admitting he needed a breath. The way his CQC had stopped being tricks and become lines.

As expected, he had been more special than any Nightingale in history.

She sighed, but it was a happy sound, the sound teachers make alone after a student breaks a limit. "Arthur Nightingale," she said aloud, not to wake him but to set the name in the air as applause. The crystals echoed it back as a chime.

Luna's fingers brushed Arthur's hair back from his brow. The motion was small, more reflex than decision. Her golden eyes were clear and focused, but there was a warmth in them that had not been there when she first walked into this lair in a child's shape.

"Do you see Julius in him?" Tiamat asked, because it was a question that had been sitting behind her teeth for a long time.

Luna's eyes dimmed at the name, like lamps turned down to protect fragile glass. Old pain shifted under her ribs, the kind that becomes part of your posture no matter how tall you learn to stand.

"No," she said simply. "Arthur is not Julius."

Tiamat nodded. The answer pleased her in the exact way she'd hoped it would. It did not erase the memory that rose at the name.

Julius: the human boy who had strode into her lair without permission or plan, only purpose. A talented monster, yes, but also honest in a way that had cut straight through centuries of her careful distance. He had died young, because the world is cruel and because some stories eaten by fate never get the third act they deserve.

'You were rude,' Tiamat told the memory softly. 'And bright. And too brave.'

"History won't repeat," Luna said, half to herself. Her hand moved over Arthur's brow, Purelight stitching sleep into something kinder than unconsciousness. "Not this time."

"You got closer to him than I thought you would," Tiamat said, reaching out to pat Luna's head with the easy affection of someone who had seen generations rise and fall and still made time for hair. It was not condescension. It was family. "I usually notice when you drift."

"I didn't notice either," Luna replied, lips quirking at her own expense. "At first… I wanted something different. I did not want another one destined to be Emperor of the World."

"That was your own innate desire," Tiamat agreed. "Not anything I nudged. I am meddlesome, but not in that."

Luna looked down at Arthur's face for a long breath. He looked younger asleep, which was untrue and also not a lie. Lines of worry evacuated in rest. The set of the jaw softened. The mouth forgot how to be brave.

"I realize how much he means to me," she said, the words small and bare. "I have gone mad, haven't I?"

"No." Tiamat shook her head. "Some people carry gravity. They bend paths just by being alive. That magnetism, that madness, that charisma—call it what you like. Julius had a measure of it. Arthur has more."

"Arthur is madder than Julius ever was," Luna said, not to diminish the dead but to be accurate about the living.

"Arthur has suffered more despair than Julius ever did," Tiamat corrected gently. "So he is willing to do things Julius wasn't. There is a difference between madness and a decision to survive." She paused, then added, "And a decision to make sure others survive with you."

Silence settled, pleasant rather than heavy. The lair's light shifted to a warmer hue, like late afternoon even though the lair did not acknowledge sun. The faint red line Arthur had drawn on Tiamat's wrist—his best cut—still lay there like a hair. It pleased her more than it should have.

"How were his last moments?" Luna asked. She did not have to say Julius's name. A thousand years takes the need out of some sentences.

Tiamat looked at the ceiling for a time that could not be measured by seconds. 'Do I tell you the color of the light? The way his mouth refused to despair? The joke he made, terrible and perfect? The fact that I could have reached and did not, because my limits used to be called rules?'

"Luna," she said finally, voice a soft line. She did not add more.

Luna nodded once and let it go. She had learned how to care without picking at scabs until they bled new blood. She returned her attention to the man on her lap, and the Purelight deepened by a degree.

Tiamat leaned forward, studying the glow. "You changed your weaving," she observed. "Less force, more breath. Good."

Luna tipped her head. "He will wake with a headache if I push. The Phylactery Meridian absorbed the worst. The rest is only… persuasion to sleep."

Tiamat's mouth twitched. "Erebus is an excellent nuisance."

"He has good instincts," Luna said. "He will be difficult when he decides to be."

"Undead kings usually are."

They let quiet do the work for a while. Tiamat listened to the like-silk sound of Arthur's breath. She watched the dream-muscle tick across his jaw as some phantom argument in his head reached a verdict and was shelved. She cataloged what to teach next: how to harden the Pond without slowing entries, how to load Stellar Cascade without lighting every warning, how to keep the Wings' pages from wrinkling under clean domains.

"Be careful, Luna," she said after the silence had finished stretching. "Not because he will break you. Because you will break yourself in trying to carry too much of him."

"I have been careful for a long time," Luna answered, and this time there was a wryness in it that didn't belong to children. "Being careful is my second worst habit."

"What is your first?"

"Forgiving."

Tiamat laughed, a bright sound that startled a few crystal facets into chiming. "You picked a good man to practice on."

"I did not pick him," Luna said, eyes soft. "We met and I belonged to him immediately. I am only now learning the shape of that belonging."

Tiamat tilted her head. "And if he chooses paths that salt your old scars?"

"He already has." Luna's fingers traced Arthur's temple, not quite a caress. "And I chose to stay. That is the point. Care is not a prize you win once. It is a daily trade."

'There she is,' Tiamat thought, fondness washing through her like warm water. 'The little qilin who used to argue semantics with storms.'

"You know," she added lightly, because heavy things should not be allowed to breed unchecked, "he is going to be impossible when he wakes and realizes you gave him a lap pillow."

Luna's blush returned, fiercer. "Again, this is optimal."

"For circulation."

"And comfort," Luna said, chin up.

Tiamat held up both hands. "I concede to the expert."

They both watched Arthur for a while after that. Tiamat's mind drifted to the way his Grey had felt when those wings opened: not a color or a force, but a decision. It was a rare thing to see on a human so young, outside of disasters and saints. She thought, not for the first time, that the world had thrown him into a furnace and the boy had decided to be a blade and not slag.

'Do not do it again,' she told the world mildly. 'You will ruin the temper.'

Arthur stirred.

It was the kind of movement most people miss—the throat working, the fingers remembering how to be hands, the eyes testing light under closed lids. Luna's Purelight thinned to a hush. She did not stop; she merely stepped out of its way. Tiamat sat forward, elbows on knees.

Arthur's eyes opened, unfocused for a breath, then finding the ceiling, the glow of the lair, the contours of Luna's hair spilling like amethyst over his shoulder. His brow furrowed in the considering way that meant his mind had woken before his body.

He tried to sit up and made it halfway before Luna's hand on his chest asked him, kindly, to wait. He obeyed, which told Tiamat more about his condition than any spell.

"Easy," Luna said, voice low. "You are safe."

Arthur blinked, then looked at Tiamat. His mouth tried for a grin and managed it, even with the residue of blackout still fogging the edges. "Did I… lose a round?"

"You lost the last three exchanges," Tiamat said, deadpan. "But you won my attention, which is worth more."

He let his head fall back to Luna's lap with an exaggerated sigh. "Then I will count that as a draw."

'Of course you will,' Tiamat thought, and smiled.