The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort

The bell tapped once, and the sound ran along the rib like a fingernail on glass. It wasn't loud. It was thin and precise, the kind of sound a careful person makes when asking a locked door to speak up. Thalatha stilled before the echo finished, stopping the air in her chest as if breath itself were a noise. Her hand rose with the smallest economy—two fingers, not high, not dramatic. The line captains didn't need drama. They needed a fact that could travel from knuckle to knuckle. Rims answered with a hush. Elbows settled. Even the lich crowns dimmed a shade, as if embarrassed by their own glow.

The Lux Anchor obeyed without being told. It sank to a rind, a ghost circle clinging to the far wall, brightening and fading in time with the vault's inhale-exhale. A breath that behaved. The little light made everything honest—edges, cracks, old lacquer, dust. It also made them small. No lanterns. No names. They listened for the room's second heartbeat the way soldiers listen for rain on canvas.

Her ribs remembered the shape of his breath from the fall. That annoyed her. It also helped her hold still. She put that fact in a pocket labeled later and focused on the bell.

Mikhailis's jaw tightened like he was hiding a coin under his tongue and didn't trust himself not to spend it. Counter-breath means trouble. We pick the direction. We don't let it pick us. His eyes stayed level, the joke folded up and placed out of the way.

A thin, square whisper wrote itself across his lenses.

<Three weak bios behind stasis shells at thirty-one, forty-four, and sixty degrees. One moving in counter-breath. Confidence: 0.62. Recommend withdrawal to higher shelf. Leave listener.>

Thalatha didn't need the numbers; she felt the wrong cadence in the floor. Still, the script eased the muscle behind her left eye. She signed two short cuts of the wrist. Withdraw.

Silk spidered a burr-listener against the crack in the dais, set it like a seed where the sound had been cleanest. Slime dusted the spot with a matte lick that killed every glint. In the Lux rind the burr vanished, a tidiness so perfect it felt rude. They stepped on the Anchor's exhale and froze on its inhale. The vault's breath became law, and obeying the law made courage cheaper.

The climb to the higher shelf hurt in all the old ways. Ribs grew close like ladder rungs, intervals just wrong enough to insult knees. Iron taste hung in the air the way old tools smell after rain. Cedar waited under the iron, dry and patient. The Brake Choir below murmured a slow organ note that set her molars humming. She wanted a protocol on paper with clean boxes and stamped approvals. All she had was Rodion's strip, her palm-grammar, and the habit of being obeyed by people who would die if she stuttered.

No one spoke. She kept it that way by the shape of her shoulders.

Bad company lived below. The thought wasn't poetry; it was inventory. She wrote the rules in her head as she always did when fear tried to go for the hands.

No metal chatter. Speak with fingers. Breathe to the strip. No pride shots. The chair stays because it holds my voice up where the line can see it.

She still hated the chair. Sitting in battle felt like an insult, like being pinned in a sketch. But when she took the seat, skulls watched her hands instead of their own deaths. That result was worth the bruise to pride. The chair was not a throne; it was a megaphone that didn't need her throat.

"Stealth mode," she whispered. It was only one word. She allowed herself one word.

Silk and Slime went first like patient ground crew. Matte paths slid out, darker than the floor, so dull they drank the Lux rind and gave back nothing. No shine, no scuff. Hypnoveils pulled their mantles just enough to ruin silhouettes, not minds—fog that made edges polite. Tanglebeetles hurried along ribs and left a ladder of soft rungs, silk sunk into bone like stitches. Archers unstrung and nested their bows in wraps so soft a ghost would envy them; stringing would wait for contact. Scurabons checked sickle backs with a little clack that sounded like knitting needles in a quiet kitchen.

Mikhailis rolled a pale sleeve from his belt pouch. It looked like a pillow had decided to be useful. The material crawled with a slow intelligence, crept over his bracer, and settled itself in every bite and gap until the armor became a soft idea. He pressed another sleeve over a squeak-prone joint on the chair until the squeak forgot how to be loud. He tucked a third along the edge of Thalatha's thigh plate where leather kissed iron just a little too honestly.

"What is that," she muttered without turning her head.

"My marshmallow body," he said, tone halfway between proud and sheepish. "Gel-proxy. Deadens clinks. Lets us do cloud impressions. Also helps wedge you into miracles when we need to vanish."

"It has a stupid name."

"It does." His mouth tilted in a small curve he didn't give to many people. "It works."

He loves it when you play the mean teacher, he told himself, and put the smile back where it belonged. Jokes were for rooms that didn't listen this hard.

The Lux Anchor breathed in and poured a thin silver rind on the stone. They waited like guilty children. The Anchor exhaled, and they went—quiet, quick, in a line that knew where its knees were. The spindle walkway complained under them, a long bow groan, the sound of something asked to hold one more story than it had promised in its youth.

<Step on exhale. Hold mid-gait on inhale. Resonance eels below at four and eight o'clock niches. Sound discipline strict.>

Mikhailis didn't nod; though the urge ran down his neck like a tickle. We heard you, he thought back. We are not playing jazz today.

Reflected glints began to drift along the wall like minnows in a black river. It would have been beautiful if beauty had not been a hazard. Thalatha raised a fist. Stop.

Mirror-gnats entered the Lux rind, greedy prisms on insect legs. They gathered around old Seraph shards still leaking handsome lies. One landed on the Anchor's edge and brightened, testing the light the way a fly tests soup when it hopes no one is home. Another flitted across a skull's cheek and left a little comet tail of captured brightness. The skull did not move. Good skull.

"Mask all light except the Anchor," she breathed, barely giving the air a job to do.

Silk whispered over lantern lenses. Crowns flattened to worklight without being told, dim halos with no interest in being impressive. The Anchor continued its slow pulse—widen on inhale, shrink to thread on exhale. They moved only on the exhale. On inhale, they held a sculpture's discipline. Thieves in a church, that was how it felt: not shame, but the careful politeness you owe good architecture.

A shard click somewhere to their left made the Lux rind tremble the width of a hair. Mikhailis eased closer, not crowding, not drifting off. Twice he pre-answered her hand sign before she finished it. A shield rim rose half a finger without a scrape. A spear butt found the right notch instead of the shiny wrong one. She did not like being read. She liked that nothing had to be repeated. Both truths sat hot in her chest like neighbors who refused to greet each other.

She hates being anticipated, he reminded himself, and she loves being spared a second motion. Be helpful, not clever. Don't make her look at you for it. He pushed his focus back into his hands where it belonged.

A mirror-gnat, bold as a pickpocket, landed on Mikhailis's glove. The gel sleeve did its quiet job; the little prism found no purchase, slid, and took itself elsewhere with a huff that was mostly a trick of the light. He thought—not for the first time—that Rodion's marsh was the ugliest miracle he'd ever worn.

<Reinforce chair joints left quadrant. Micro squeak detected last step.>

He pinched a strip of marsh free and smoothed it over the joint with a motion that looked like brushing a wrinkle out of a sleeve. The chair exhaled into silence.

The higher shelf pinched. Ribs leaned in, making a slow crush that would not hurry. Thalatha cut the air with two fingers and sent the chair column sideways by a body's width. The formation flowed around the adjustment like water teasing a new riverbank. No bump. No hiss. She watched the line captains absorb the change and pass it on until even the last bow knew which foot belonged first.

They listen, she allowed herself. They listen because we made listening cheaper than cleverness.

Mikhailis's breath fell into the vault's timing like someone who liked being told what to do but would never admit it out loud. On the Anchor's out-breath we're ghosts. On in-breath we are pictures on a wall. Simple. Boredom is safety. Be boring.

He lifted two fingers to the chair back and flattened a tiny strand of frayed silk so it wouldn't rasp against a rivet. The move saved a sound no one else would have heard until a predator did. Thalatha saw the correction without looking and let the quiet approval live only in her shoulders. He felt it anyway. It made his stomach go light the way a good shot does when you do not have to brag about it.

Ribs creaked somewhere beneath. The sound came up through the soles and through bone, a small reminder that everything here was old and patient and tired of being asked to be a floor.

The mirror-gnats multiplied, fed by spilled light. A small cloud gathered and drifted, a shimmer herd trying to become a weather. The Lux rind quivered but held its manners. One gnat brushed the edge of Thalatha's gauntlet and sparked. She didn't flinch. Flinching is a language rooms understand and abuse.

<Warning: reflected flux increasing. Recommend movement only on exhale to avoid cumulative glint.>

"We are,"