I kept my hand an inch from the glass door and breathed. Four in, six out. The air tasted like perfume over stone. Lust on the surface. Something straighter, stronger, and far older underneath. Empyrean Order.

The moment you say the name, the room stops pretending not to listen.

"Arthur," Valeria murmured along my forearm, her voice bright but sharp, "you're making the face you make right before you decide to pick a fight with a building."

"I'm remembering," I said.

The threads of compulsion in the walls brightened, singing in a unified chorus. The ridges in the ceiling picked up a soft, insistent beat. The glass door before me fogged, and the word flashed again, polite as a guillotine.

KNEEL.

I didn't humor it. I let my own breath be the only rhythm that counted in my bones, and my step the only vote my body cast. The command searched for a hinge of fear or habit to grab onto. It found none. The fog thinned. The glass cleared. Under my hand, the jamb ticked again—a faint salute, patient and tired.

"Julius," I said, because names matter, and this one was the key.

The tower answered. The entire room changed its mind about what it was. The walls pulled away without moving. The ceiling didn't lift, yet the air sat higher, cleaner. The cloying perfume of Lust's power peeled away from the architecture like old, sun-rotted wallpaper. What remained was brass and cool stone and the clean, steady hum of things that like being on time. The threads of compulsion faded, replaced by lines you only see if you've stood on rooftops at dawn—street grids and sight lines and the tidy, engineered spine of a city that has learned perfect posture.

Valeria whistled, a low, appreciative sound. "He made the inside of a place sit up straight."

A balcony slid into existence from the far wall, the way a half-forgotten memory walks into the middle of a conversation and everyone intuitively makes room. It was made of polished stone, with a rail worn smooth by hands that had carried plans, not weapons. It wasn't grand. It was designed. Its view wasn't of a skyline, but of the idea of one—lanes, flows, and the complex intersections where arguments would happen, unless someone who loved the city enough got there early to keep them from starting.

Bootsteps, measured and quiet. Not loud. Respect doesn't need to shout.

He wasn't shining. He wasn't glowing. He simply arrived like a conclusion you can't argue with. Julius Slatemark looked younger than the portraits make him. Not boy-young. Decision-young. His hair was the color of late wheat, his coat built to carry a city's weather, with no jewels or chains of office. The famous Slatemark Mark on his brow was faint as a scar you forget you have until it aches in the rain.

His eyes were not kind. They were not cruel. They were the calm of a man who has counted to the end of a problem and then started over, just to make sure he didn't lie to himself the first time. He stopped a pace from the rail and set one hand on the stone. The rail accepted the hand like it had done so a thousand times. The air around him did what air does around people who have been obeyed by storms and by streets: it waited.

"Well," Valeria said into my mind, her voice bright but very, very small, "that's not terrifying at all."

Erebus didn't speak. He didn't need to. His silence felt like a recorder being set on a table. History was happening.

I looked at the man who had taught the world to count power without flattering it, who had defined the mana cores so a child could know what they were reaching for, who had written the steps when the sky was still trying to be a poem. The man Luna had chosen first. The weight the Slatemark name borrowed from and paid back, every single day.

A hundred things crowded behind my teeth. Questions. Thanks. Complaints on behalf of all the people crushed by the weight of a perfect system. Jokes I would not tell, because jokes are air and this moment was stone.

I breathed. Four in, six out.

He turned. The world did not shiver. It aligned. The balcony became a balcony because he was standing on it. The room became a room because someone was in it who knew where rooms were supposed to go in a life. He looked at me like a ledger looks at an entry it recognizes. His gaze slid past the tricks I couldn't use here and weighed the one thing I had brought that mattered. Unity. Center. The fact that my blade no longer argued with my shoulder.

Something that might have been approval didn't touch his mouth. It barely touched the air.

"Julius Slatemark," I said, because saying a name correctly is a kind of bow I can afford to make.

His head tilted a degree, as if he were listening to the rhythm of a city I couldn't hear. Then his eyes met mine. He did not look pleased. He did not look angry. He looked… involved.

"Arthur Nightingale," he said, his voice as level as a metronome. "You felt it. The frame under the perfume."

"Empyrean Order," I said. "Not her power. Yours—stolen, wrapped, and used to drive this tower."

"It is a good skeleton," he admitted, his voice even. "Even dressed poorly, it holds." He stepped away from the rail, and the air agreed to be still. He studied me the way I study footwork—hips, shoulders, breath, where the eyes actually live when they pretend to be polite. "You carry yourself like a man who has stopped arguing with his blade," he said. "Good. Unity buys you honesty. Honesty buys you options."

"I'm learning to be smaller," I said. "Less talk before the motion."

"And less apology after," he said, and there it was again, the smallest tilt of his head, like a conductor testing a hall's reverb. "You came looking for the source of the tower. You found a story instead. Ask your questions."

I hadn't planned to. But they crowded forward anyway. "Luna," I said, the name feeling both intimate and ancient. "You were her first contractor. But this… this place tells me her origin is older than your oath."

"It is," he said. "Older, and younger. If time were a road you could trust, I would give you mile markers. It isn't."

"Tell me anyway."

He nodded once. "There was an Arthur before you. Not of our world, but one where our lives were printed as entertainment. He carried a great guilt for that, and a great love for people he could not touch. He refused to remain a reader. Using a Gift you now wear in pieces—Mythweaver, when it still listened to him like a child to a father—he shaped Luna's soul from a story that should not have been able to breathe. Then he spent what grace he had left to send her down our river, not when it was easy, but when it mattered."

"To you," I said quietly. "To this city."

"To a boy with too much structure and not enough pulse," Julius confirmed, without a trace of self-pity. "She made a contract with me on a morning when the city had three heartbeats and none of them agreed. She held me together long enough for me to hold us all together. That was her first job. She has been doing it ever since."

I pictured it then: Luna, younger, with wheat fields behind her, offering her hand to a man who already carried a formal, structured future between his shoulder blades. It fit. It still hurt, in a way I couldn't name.

"And what did you do for the world?" I asked, because I needed to hear it from the man who did it.

"For a time," he said, "I made Earth boring." The simple sentence had a weight that could crack the floor. He looked past me, to the old city routes he once kept clear. "I stood on corners and raised my hand. Not to command minds. To set a cadence. Freight ran on time. Hospitals didn't lose the seconds they couldn't afford. Small arguments ended in time for people to make dinner. When demons pushed up from the cracks in the world, the ground under our feet refused to help them."

"How long?"

"As long as it took to teach the city to walk by itself," he said. "Until the day something arrived that I could not set a beat for."

"A Demon Lord," I said. "Divine-rank."

"Yes." He didn't lower his eyes. He didn't raise them. "Lysantra wore her courtesy like silk over wires. I lived because the city needed me to live. I died when that need no longer convinced the math." He watched me, seeing the ghost of relief hiding in my next thought. He didn't punish it. "I lost to a category of being, not to a person. That should comfort you. And also, it should not."

It did both, which was deeply annoying. I shifted my weight, suddenly feeling like a student again. "I expected to meet a legend and feel competition," I admitted. "Instead, I just want to take notes."

"Good," he said. "Then take them with your feet."

He pushed off from the rail. The room straightened itself by a degree I couldn't see. "Draw when you're ready."

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