The Extra's Rise - Chapter 800
800: Two Years (1) 800: Two Years (1) Time moved with cruel indifference through the ruins of what had once been the greatest city in human civilization.
Two years had passed since the night Avalon City burned-since thirty million lives stood on the edge of annihilation beneath the Order of Fallen Flame.
Two years since sacrifices held the darkness at bay and cracked the Empire’s foundations.
Time marked none of it.
It went on.
Autumn breathed through the Memorial Gardens in cold drafts.
The grounds spread where the old noble district had stood: a plain of white marble among the scars of palaces.
Names shone-knights, Nighthawks, civilians.
At the garden’s heart, a low platform gathered morning like an altar.
Two tombs rested there, unadorned and absolute.
Emperor Quinn Slatemark knelt at those stones in plain black.
The robe of state lay folded in his chambers.
The weight across his shoulders was of another kind-layered days of regret, decisions that could not be untaken.
He smoothed his hand over the first inscription, familiar as prayer: Archduke Leopold Astoria – Beloved Father, Loyal Servant, Demon Slayer.
His fingers moved to the second: Elara Astoria – The Healing Light – Saved Three Million Souls.
“I was wrong about everything,” Quinn said.
There was no one here to convince.
“Twenty years of suspicion.
Twenty years of watching you like an enemy when you were the Empire’s most loyal man.” Empress Adeline stood a respectful distance behind him, steady.
She had heard these words before: at dawn, at midnight, after Quinn woke with a name on his lips.
“The border reports worsen each week,” Quinn went on, duty’s cadence returning.
“Demonic incursions up across the arc.
The Order rebuilding in gaps.
And we’re weaker-” He paused.
“Our two strongest nobles, gone.” Violets had seeded by the platform.
Security had cleared the gardens at dawn; paths lay empty beneath low-humming wards.
The silence felt held rather than hollow.
Quinn’s senses knew this place: the layered enchantments, the perimeter’s heartbeat, the gardeners’ sigils under soil.
He widened his Radiant awareness across lawns and marble, through the air itself.
Nothing.
No brush against lines, no footstep weight, no fault in rhythm.
Wind, stone, and two people who returned to grief in the open.
Nothing at all.
Which is why the voice behind him landed like a palm on a bruise.
“I’m sorry, Elara.” Cold drew taut along Quinn’s spine.
He turned so quickly something in his neck clicked.
Reflex arrived before thought.
Someone stood here-inside the Empire’s most secure ground-speaking with a sorrow that thinned the air.
Yet there had been no approach.
No signature on the wards.
No seam to mark an addition to the pattern.
A figure knelt between the tombs, a travel cloak pooling like dark water.
Stains on the fabric resisted his senses-neither blood nor ash nor any substance he knew.
They read as absence, like a missing word leaving a shaped silence.
“Who-” Adeline began, and stopped when the stranger rose.
He did not defy gravity so much as gravity waited for him.
The air did not waver; nothing flashed.
Everything else hushed.
Recognition found Quinn at once.
The worn cloak.
The way light slid around the outline.
The sense that space had permitted itself to be rearranged to fit him.
The hood fell.
The face was older-honed, not slack.
Black hair lay longer than before.
The eyes were the same-azure, unmistakable-but they held an ease with distance, a depth his senses wanted to call orbital.
Arthur Nightingale stood before them, and morning sharpened.
Quinn named the weight in his chest.
He remembered it from the Demon Duke: the certainty of standing before something beyond your tier.
That had been hunger.
This was authority-no threat, only presence that moved conflict into another category.
“Arthur,” Quinn said, mouth dry.
“You’re…” Arthur’s gaze held no condescension.
Patient, kind.
“Hello, Quinn.” The words were plain.
Their effect was not.
The engraved letters seemed to take a faint tone.
The wards rippled-minute, attentive.
The violets lifted.
Quinn’s knees met marble.
Not collapse, not bowing.
The body choosing honesty while the mind searched for a fitting name and found none.
He had knelt to kings, to teachers, to necessity.
This was none of those.
“Impossible,” Adeline breathed.
She did not fall so much as choose to meet the truth.
Her senses lit with calm urgency.
She knelt beside him, palms to stone.
Arthur faced the second tomb.
His shoulders lowered by the width of a breath; the mantle around him thinned for a heartbeat.
The grief beneath did not seek witness.
It was simply there, a seam that had never knit.
“I promised I’d come back stronger,” he said to Elara’s name.
“Strong enough that no one would ever die the way you did again.” Something in the world’s posture adjusted, as if a lantern had been set higher.
The wards settled into a pattern Quinn did not recognize.
It felt like the way places mark landmarks.
Quinn lifted his head.
The man he had known-the guild founder, fiancé to five women the Empire now spoke of with respect, the man who stepped into impossible light-stood here without contradiction.
The difference was not a wall.
It was a horizon made road.
Titles gathered and fell apart.
Lord-Protector.
Shield of the Dawn.
Radiant-No.
The Empire’s ladders had no rung for this.
“You were always surrounded by doubters,” Quinn said.
“I was the worst.
I would ask forgiveness, but I don’t think I’ve earned it.” “If you had not doubted, you would be someone else,” Arthur said.
“You learned.
That will do.” The line struck harder than penance.
Quinn’s shoulders eased.
He did not feel absolved so much as assigned.
The borders.
The Order.
The thinness of hope in towns no gazette named.
A plan began to gather like tools on a bench-lines to reweave, allies to call in, orders to rewrite around the reality of a presence like this inside Imperial lines.
Adeline looked up.
“You broke no ward,” she said.
“There was no approach.” “I didn’t arrive,” Arthur said.
“I was permitted.” Not a riddle-straight speech.
Adeline held it, then nodded, as if a calculation had resolved.
When the world decided you belonged, gates were simply found open.
A memory moved through Quinn-the night Avalon burned; sky tearing; Leopold standing in a river of fire; Elara’s final light drawing a boundary demons could not cross and citizens could.
He had carried those images as punishment.
For the first time they felt like charter.
He stood.
His knees argued and forgave.
Adeline rose with him.
“You mean to stay,” he said.
He did not make it a question.
“For a time,” Arthur said.
“Long enough to make sure the next choice you face is not between a thousand dead or two thousand.” Quinn exhaled.
“Then we start today,” he said.
“Briefing at ninth bell.
Be there-not as spectacle, but as knife.
If you have objections to how we’ve been fighting, say them, and we’ll fix what can be fixed before dusk.” Arthur’s eyes warmed.
“Good,” he said.
“Bring maps.” “We will,” Adeline said.
After a beat she added, with a small smile, “And tea.” “Tea will help,” Arthur agreed.
They stood in quiet for a few breaths.
The gardens made room for the future by continuing to grow.
Quinn looked again at the stones.
He had imagined a thousand speeches for an impossible hour with the dead.
None ever sounded right.
Perhaps steadiness would speak louder.
Perhaps refusing to repeat his mistakes could count as prayer.
He turned to Arthur and found he could meet his eyes without flinching.
It did not make him larger.
It made him truer.
The age of struggling against impossible odds was ending.
Arthur Nightingale had returned, and Quinn finally understood what it meant when a Nightingale’s voice truly pierced the sky.