The Extra's Rise

I never liked kneeling. Too much theater, not enough leverage. But I'm on my knees now because I deserve it, and because this headstone carries a name I don't get to say out loud anymore.

Elara.

The stone is colder than my hands. The paper flowers someone left here move even though the air is still. I feel him before I see him—weight on the world that wasn't there, then is. Nightingale.

Good. I wanted him to be here to watch.

My mind drags me backward whether I want it to or not.

The moment he smiled, I knew I was going to die.

Not because he showed teeth. Because the world around him changed its mind. My Nirvana and Abyssal flames were a certainty; everything burns if you're stubborn enough. I threw them anyway—purple-white spirals meant to erase a city block.

He held up a hand and my power turned into petals.

Not "blocked." Not "countered." Just… not fire anymore. A garden fell around us. Trees with books for leaves. Flowers with stories in their veins. "Mythweaver's Garden," he said, like the name of a place should be allowed to rewrite physics.

I screamed and punched and bled and he let me. Every time I built heat, butterflies. Every time I tried to be clever, the rules changed again. He wasn't posturing. He wasn't angry. He was past both. That's the part that hurt.

"You loved her," he said, and then he broke my ribs.

He wasn't wrong.

When the killing blow came down it stopped on a black rose. Not a trick of shadow. A flower that ate light and made it taste like silk and iron. A voice slid out of it, soft as poison. Not yet, young Nightingale. This story requires a different ending.

The garden flickered. He pulled his hand back, eyes narrowing, trying to feel a thread that wasn't his. The rose became a door. I fell through it because I had no choice, because my story was bought and paid for by a woman who thinks in knives and prayers.

The door took me to a room under the city where the air tasted like old blood and chalk and choices I wasn't brave enough to make.

Her Holiness Evelyn sat on a stone chair and looked at me like a problem she had already solved.

"You failed," she said.

"Yes," I said, because I'm a liar, but not about that.

"You lived," she added, which wasn't completely my fault.

"Yes."

"Get up," she said. "Then get better."

So I did.

Back in the present, my fingers press into the top edge of Elara's stone. My other hand stays open on my knee. Don't startle the Redeemers. Don't give the Saintess an excuse to draw light through my skull. I can feel Arthur's gaze like a hand on my shoulder. He says stand. I stand. He says leave. I don't.

"I loved her," I tell him, because it's ugly and true.

"You killed her," he answers, because it's uglier and still true.

He's right. He usually is. That's the problem.

Three years is a long time to stay afraid. I used all of it.

I learned every page the Fallen Flame keeps locked. Not the showy rites they use to recruit children who want to glow. The buried math. The pressure cuts. The way to pull heat out of stone without leaving your fingerprints behind.

I held Abyssal fire in my mouth until my gums bled. I slept with Nirvana embers under my tongue until I could wake without choking. I watched a line of ink draw circles I couldn't admit I wanted to step into, and I didn't step, because I needed a power I could carry outside a room with chalk on the floor.

I let them break my channels and rebuilt them knotted, so when someone tried to turn my flame into butterflies again, the knot would catch the trick and feed it ash.

I learned a new language in a salt vault favored by the Tidewalkers before we killed them—their pressure songs aren't ours, but pressure is pressure and a flame that can hear is a flame that can refuse.

I wrote seven oaths on seven bones. Not blood. Ink, ground from old soot and regret and something Her Holiness gave me without telling me the price. Each oath cut away a cowardice. First: I will not bargain with elation. Second: I will not apologize to my hands. Third: I will not pretend I was tricked. Fourth: I will not speak her name to make pity the point. Fifth: I will not take the small victory if the large failure still stands. Sixth: I will not ask the wrong people to forgive me. Seventh: I will not forget that I loved her.

Elara, I didn't write. That one doesn't get ink.

When I ran heat through those bones, something new woke up along with the old.

Not Nirvana, not Abyss. Those are colors. This wasn't a color.

I call it Requiem Ember because everything needs a name and that one makes the inner zealots shake. It doesn't burn matter first. It burns outcomes. It eats the path a thing is trying to take. If someone decides my fire is butterflies, Requiem makes the decision combust. The butterflies can exist somewhere else; not here.

I trained it until my jaw ached. I failed a hundred times and woke in salt on stone to try again. I imagined his garden every night until my teeth hurt and fed that memory to the ember until the memory stopped tasting like fear and started tasting like fuel.

Because he was always coming back stronger. Of course he was. Heroes make a living out of doing impossible things while people clap. I had to build something that didn't care about applause.

Not to beat him. I'm not stupid. To stand upright when he looks at me like a problem that learned to read.

The hum under my knees is mine. Not a bomb. A bell. Six coins under six stones around her grave, set shallow with care, tuned to weight and heat and a voice that remembers how I said her name when I still believed good things couldn't die.

I brought a bell to a grave because grief is a better pry bar than rage if you have the hands for it.

He hears it. Of course he does. His blade murmurs in its sheath and I hate that it has a voice, hate that I envy the way it likes him.

"Don't," he says.

I'm already doing it.

The coins answer one by one. No fire. No light. Just a pressure change that makes the night tilt in place and a sound a gate makes before it becomes a door.

Not his gate. Mine.

I built this pry over three years and seven oaths and the kind of practice that leaves you with cracked lips and a throat full of smoke. I built it because facing him as I was then would be a mercy killing.

I press my palm flat on Elara's stone and let every lie I've ever told burn out of me at once.

The world folds like paper right above my head.

Not platinum-silver. Not his pretty doors. Mine are black iron edged in chalk and ash. They smell like wet matches and old promises. They're ugly. They suit me.

The Gates of Transcendence don't owe anyone anything. They ask one question: Are you ready to be crushed into a shape that won't run?

Three years ago I would have run.

I don't run.

The iron parts a finger's width and the night roars in. Heat, then cold, then the absence of both. For a heartbeat I see her in the space between—violet eyes, that museum smile, patient and too kind. It hurts like truth. I let it.

Requiem Ember lights in my ribs, small and absolute, a coal that eats the path where fear would walk. Nirvana wraps it. Abyss feeds it. The seven oaths stack around it like ribs.

I push.

The chalk line snaps. The iron yawns.

Every channel I own catches, not like fire, like a gear finally finding teeth. Power lands in me the way a verdict lands. Not joy. Not relief. Fit.

High Radiant isn't bright. It's heavy.

The pressure throws dust in a ring without lifting a single petal someone left at her stone. The Redeemers' lanterns shiver and then steady. The Saintess will feel it wherever she is and hate it. Good. I want her to.

I stand without my knees arguing about it. The stone under my palm is warm now. My hands don't shake.

"I told you I'd burn them all," I say, and this time it isn't theater.

He stares at me. He's still stronger. He will be stronger again tomorrow because that's what he does.

But for once, I didn't ask the wrong person to forgive me.

For once, I brought my own door.

I open my right hand and the new flame shows itself. Not purple. Not white. Not black. A color your eyes don't know where to put. It doesn't lick. It writes.

Requiem Ember.

"Watch me," I tell the stone. Not him. Her. "I'll pay for it."

The graveyard hum rises, the six coins finish their last note, and the iron behind my teeth stops tasting like fear.

I look up at him and smile in a way that hurts my face.

"Round two," I say.