The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort

"Nothing fancy," he told himself. He wanted the mask. He wanted to climb it like a fool and pry until the secret came clean. Later. Later, when the jar is safe.

The Juggernaut's arm set lost agreement. For a breath there were four arguments instead of a choir. Hooks yanked. Blades sliced. A trapped link begged. A shoulder tried to be clever. They didn't hunt the head. They hunted that breath.

The wedge slid out again before greed could claim feet. The line reset to quiet. The room had to learn them twice.

On the next stutter, the elvish seam in the wall answered.

It was a tiny sound in a loud life, a harp string plucked under a sheet. Mikhailis's mouth went dry. He didn't move. You don't startle birds when you want to see them.

Rodion's voice came in his bones, gentler than usual. <Amplitude spike at siphon pause. Bio-signatures align.>

"They're gardening the cage," he said, not meaning to say it out loud. It was the only picture that fit: patient hands turning small soil in a too-small box, keeping roots alive by stubborn love.

Thalatha's eyes flicked to the seam and back to the line. "Or holding the lid shut from within." She didn't sweeten it. She never did.

He pointed with two fingers to the ring mouths where the bile ran toward that faint thread. "Mark those two mouths. No over-spawn into that river. Herd them away while we keep pressure on the head."

"Understood." She adjusted two shields by a finger each to turn bodies where they needed bodies to fall. Her touch gave the room a new slope.

"Fine," he said. "One surge. Tiny." He hated the word surge. It tasted like pride. "Liches, you get one clean heart each. Spend it on archer velocity and shield re-knit only. No glamour."

Crowns dipped in a brief, unanimous nod. Hands moved as if on a clock. The strip pulsed brighter for half a minute, a green tide stitched to the beat.

"Sky, drown the talkers," he said. "Ankles, bite twice as fast. Spears, stab and step—don't get greedy."

Arrows filled the air without feeling like a storm. They simply were there whenever a jaw wanted to sing. Three Skullcasters went down in that tide. Their runes rolled important shapes on the floor for half a heartbeat. Silk put tiny bells over each without ceremony, like covering hot pots before leaving a kitchen.

Hounds stopped being threats and became furniture that hated the room. They were pushed where they made the worst traffic for their friends. Wight halberds lost nerve under petty truth at wrists and knees. A big fighter can survive hate; it is pettiness that makes him go home early.

The Juggernaut had to spend a cycle freeing a chain from a stitch instead of dictating the next slam. That was time. Mikhailis put it in his pocket and tried not to count it twice.

His heart tried to climb into his teeth again. He made it sit.

<Rush window closed. Surge complete. Gains retained: arrow sky time increased, shield-rim cohesion plus fifteen percent.>

"Thanks," he said to the strip, to the beetles, to the patient bones. "Don't say I never take you anywhere nice."

<Noted.> The tone held a dry little edge. He liked that Rodion did not flatter.

The seam did not sing again. But he felt it listening the way a room listens when you choose not to lie inside it. The sense of witness made his neck hairs stand.

Rodion's strip went thin, then widened, as if breathing with the walls. <Correlation: Juggernaut command aura is synchronous with siphon pauses from the seam. Hypothesis: shared governor. Node is not only a battery; it is a brake.>

"If we kill it wrong," he said, almost to his tongue rather than to anyone, "the brake fails."

<Consequent scenario: the box behind the elvish seam dumps into the node's throat. Uncontrolled.>

He tasted bile. "Great."

Thalatha didn't move her eyes from the wedge. "We still have to win."

"We will," he said. "We just won't do it with a hammer."

He lifted his hand so the wedges could see and set his voice steady, not dramatic. "No kill-rush. We cradle the limiter first. Then we take the head."

He felt the tiny resistance you always feel when you tell fighters to stop reaching for the obvious glory. Fingers tightened on hafts. A bow creaked. Then the resistance eased. They had been doing small things on purpose for long enough that this made sense.

"Three steps," he said. He ticked them off with his thumb. "Detune the floor. Starve the choir. Hinge the boss."

Slime went to work like a fussy mason. More thin wedges in places where tiles wanted to sing. Frost traced them white. Ember signed them shut. Mothcloak brushed outer ring runes with a single soft stroke so they remembered rain instead of fire. The Sky squad kept jaws ducking. Silk's thimble-bells bagged any loose rune that had the wrong idea about growing up. Scurabons owned the boss's right elbow; every time it tried to be proud, they were petty. Hypnoveils lifted honest doubt like a mirror and set it in front of arrogance. Tangles cut chain leverage at the last link and only the last link so the arm kept lying to the shoulder.

Thalatha's two-finger grammar saved more lives than brave speeches. A shield that would have drifted did not. A knee that would have locked stayed soft. A spear that would have bitten too deep remembered to pin and let the next spear take the bite.

One beat at a time, the room believed in them more than it believed in itself.

The Juggernaut came in again with the usual scissor and a spiteful flourish to remind them he was still the loudest man at the party. They did not argue. They denied. They absorbed. They held.

"Door," Mikhailis said only when the hinge existed. The wedge slid into the gap as if the floor had imagined it. First rank pinned; second punished without greed. The boss adjusted, but bad knees do not unlearn in a minute.

The hook-hand swung to block for the first time, not to snare. A spear pegged the hook to the floor—not deep, but true enough to turn muscle into embarrassment for a breath. Mothcloak brushed the bind-rune near the antler again. The blur took. A hairline fissure ticked across the stag skull like a crack in old lacquer.

Inside the crack, for one tiny second when the mask could not lie, he saw it: a plate of living wood, still green somewhere under the bone, with warden script braided through like veins. Not dead. Stolen. Pressed into a thing it did not choose.

His breath made a word on its own. "Ah."

Thalatha heard the shape if not the meaning. "What?"

"We're not fighting a monster," he said, voice so low the stone had to lean in. "We're fighting a stolen promise."

Her jaw tightened, then softened. She swallowed the anger down into a place she could use. "So we return it clean."

"Exactly." He felt the hope and fear share a chair in his chest.

The Juggernaut felt the breach the way a trapped man feels a loose nail. The antler threads flared like a net throwing itself at the sea. The mandala's mouths all opened in one breath. Not a wave. A choir standing up together.

Rodion did not raise its voice. <All rings awakening. Decision branch: sever filaments now, or cradle limiter and ride the surge.>

He could cut. He could be brilliant. He could put his hands on the mask and tear until the song broke.

Small doors, he reminded himself. Many locks.

"Cradle," he said. "We ride it."

His left hand made a sign he had never used in public, a private letter written with fingers. The wedges shifted into a pattern they had practiced in a room with less air and more chalk. Shields overlapped in a strange blossom—petals set to catch weight without cracking. Spears angled so points would only bite when rims kissed, not before. Silk threw a low dome, not a hard shell, something that would flex like a good lung. Slime drew a ring no one could see but everyone felt in their ankles, a soft fence telling feet where to stand.

Thalatha looked at him then, really looked. Not a soldier's scan. A person's decision. She didn't smile. She nodded once, deep in the neck, and became the hinge the pattern needed.

The choir rose. You could feel the air thicken, like a storm swallowing its own horizon. Even the lamps seemed to hold their breath. The antler threads spun wide, then narrow, like a mouth testing how much sea it could drink.

They stepped in time.

"Don't be stylish," he said, because if he didn't say something light he would start praying out loud. "Just be right."

The first impact came like a drumstick on skin. The second like two palms together. The third like a heart agreeing.

The world came down to the size of a drum, and the drum was theirs.