Lymur was humming.
He didn't know the song. He was fairly certain he'd made it up somewhere between the bath and the mirror, which meant it wasn't really a song so much as a general expression of being in a good mood on a rainy morning. He hummed it anyway.
The bath had been long and very hot, which was how he liked it. He'd taken his time. Nobody was waiting for him and nowhere needed him before nine, which meant the morning was entirely his, and his mornings, when they were entirely his, tended to involve standing in the bathroom for too long thinking about nothing in particular.
He dried off, opened his wardrobe, and spent a respectable amount of time on the outfit.
Dark trousers, straight-cut. A loose cream-colored shirt left open at the collar, tucked just enough to look intentional. A short, charcoal jacket with a subtle texture. Clean white shoes. A single thin bracelet on the left wrist, silver, with a watch of the same color.
He picked up the perfume last. It was obscenely expensive and he'd bought it because a woman in the shop had told him it smelled like morning rain on stone and cool cedar, which he'd thought sounded ridiculous, and then he'd tried it and had to agree.
He put on the glasses. Blue-tinted, round lenses, a thin, silver-black frame. He'd bought them on a whim and then discovered he liked the way the world looked slightly filtered through them on bright days.
On rainy ones, too, it turned out.
He stood in front of the big mirror by the door.
Not bad, he thought. He stayed there for a second longer than was strictly necessary, then picked up the bouquet money he'd set on the table the night before, hummed the made-up song one more note, and headed for the door.
Outside, it was raining properly.
Not a storm — no thunder, no wind to speak of. Just steady, consistent rain coming straight down. The streets were slick and the sound of it on the rooftops was even and pleasant.
Lymur walked out of the building into it without breaking pace.
The rain didn't touch him. Ruler's Authority held a skin-thin barrier across his entire body and the drops that should have hit him simply didn't. He hadn't thought about doing it. It was the kind of thing that had become reflexive a long time ago.
He walked down the wet street looking dry and smelling expensive and mildly annoying, by most accounts.
The flower shop was two streets over and around a corner, tucked between a tailor and a closed breakfast stall. He'd been coming here long enough that the bell above the door felt familiar when he pushed it open.
The owner looked up from behind the counter. She was in her late twenties with flour on her apron, which she wasn't wearing because of flour — she just always seemed to have it on her — and a blush that arrived one second after she saw who'd walked in.
"Oh, Mr. Lymur," she said. "Good morning."
"Morning, Hettie," Lymur replied.
She recovered quickly — she'd had practice. "You look nice."
"I always look nice, don't I?"
"You look especially nice today, then."
"I know," he said, which made her laugh despite herself, and he moved toward the nearest display looking at the arrangements while she came around from behind the counter. "I need flowers for a grave."
"White?"
Lymur smiled kindly at her before responding, "Whatever you'd recommend."
That was what she liked to hear, apparently, because she immediately started moving between the displays, talking as she went. She had opinions. Strong ones, specifically about white flowers — which held up in rain and which didn't, which varieties read as peaceful, which ones she personally thought were more honest about what grief actually felt like versus what people wanted it to look like.
"These," she said eventually, holding up a small gathered bunch. White ranunculus, waxflower, a few stems of something delicate he didn't know the name of. "They'll hold. And they're not too much."
"Not too much?"
"For a grave. You don't want too much." She looked at him. "Is it for the same person as last year's?"
"Yup."
Hettie looked at the bouquet for a moment. Then she added one more stem of something. She didn't explain why and he didn't ask.
"Come back soon~," she said, when he left.
"Sure will," he replied, which was true, and the bell rang behind him.
He flagged a public service wagon at the next intersection. It was pulled by a skitter — a mana beast that looked like someone had scaled up a lizard to carriage-pulling size and then given it an indifferent personality. This one regarded Lymur with the mild contempt skitters reserved for everyone and then looked away.
"Xyrus Cemetery," Lymur told the driver.
The driver nodded, and they set off through the rain-quiet streets.
Lymur sat back and watched the city go past the open side of the wagon, the bouquet across his knees.
He liked rain.
He'd thought about why, a few times, without arriving at a clean answer. It wasn't the cold — his body didn't mind either way. It wasn't the smell, though the smell was good. It was something closer to the quality of it. The way rain made everything slightly more itself — the stone more grey, the green more green, sound more contained, the city smaller somehow, pulled inward.
Rain was honest for him.
There was also the sound. He'd spent a lot of mornings in his apartment just listening to rain against the window and thinking about nothing in particular, and those mornings had a texture to them that clear mornings didn't. He did some of his better thinking in that state.
The wagon turned down a longer road.
She'd have liked a morning like this, he thought, without deciding to. He wasn't really sure if that was true. He hadn't known Lara well enough to know her opinions on rain.
He looked at the bouquet.
He checked his watch when the wagon stopped. Nine on the dot. Still raining.
The cemetery was quiet. It usually was — that was sort of the point — but the rain made it more so, the sound of it on the gravel paths and the wet grass giving the silence a texture that kept it from feeling empty.
He walked until he found the right row, the right stone.
Lara.
He stood there for a while without saying anything.
This was the third time he'd come. First was during the funeral itself. Second was last year when he'd stood in roughly the same spot and felt roughly the same thing, which was a difficult thing to name — not grief exactly, or not only grief.
He'd turned it into a habit, coming here every year. He'd told himself it was because he was a person who did things like this, who honored people, who showed up.
That was a fine reason by itself.
It was also, if he was being more honest than he usually bothered to be with himself, something else. Lara had been one of the first people in this world to make him feel something he hadn't expected to feel. Not the warmth of being needed — he'd identified that one early. This was different. This was the specific anger of a wrong that had no justification and no resolution through reason, the feeling that had sent him into the Beast Glades with a mission and a name he wanted to kill.
The thing he'd discovered about himself that day in the park when he'd looked at his own hand and found tears on it, because Lara was the first person to spark within him the feelings of grief, sadness, and a desire to correct a wrong through revenge.
He didn't think about any of that out loud. Not even to himself, really.
He set the bouquet against the base of the stone and straightened up.
"You're really pretty," he said, though not to the grave in front of him. "Do enough people tell you that?"
Two silhouettes stepped out from the shade of a nearby tree and walked toward him through the rain, each under an umbrella.
Both elves. The older one moved with the easygoing steadiness of someone who had been moving that way for a very long time. The younger one — the one Lymur had called pretty — was a woman maybe a few years older than she looked, with skin the color of snow, black hair cut to a clean bob, and large black eyes that looked at him impassively. She wore a military uniform that Lymur recognized on a delay.
Same cut, same insignia placement, as the one Alea had been wearing the second time they met.
The woman said nothing about the comment, which was probably the most professional response available to her.
Lymur smiled at them both.
"Good morning," he said, though he was mostly thinking about the uniform.
The old man glanced at the grave. White hair, long beard, grey robes under the umbrella.
"Someone you held dear?" he said.
Lymur looked at the stone. "I guess you can say that."
Rain on gravel. Rain on the umbrellas. Nothing else for a moment.
Then Lymur looked back at the two of them.
"So who are you two supposed to be," he said, "and should I care?"
The woman blinked. The old man did not blink — he seemed like someone who had heard a great many things and was past being startled by them. He chuckled instead.
"You're as eccentric as the rumors say."
"People keep telling me that like it's news," Lymur replied. "It's been years."
"Perhaps they keep hoping it'll embarrass you."
"At first it did, but now it doesn't."
"No," the old man said, looking at him with something that might have been appreciation. "I don't imagine it does." He settled the umbrella slightly. "My name is Virion Eralith. Former king of Elenoir." He gestured toward the woman. "And this is Aya Grephin. One of Dicathen's Lances."
Lance.
Lymur thought about the word as he looked at Aya.
He didn't know much about the Lances yet. But he knew the uniform. Alea had worn one exactly like it. If this woman, standing close to an elven royal, wearing that uniform, carried the Lance title, then Alea was high up there in the ranks. Very high.
Good for her. Something in his chest did something quiet and pleased, even impressed.
He looked back at Lara's grave.
"Alright," he said. "What do you want?"
The rain hadn't stopped. It came down even and steady on the gravel, on the concrete paths winding between the stones, on Virion's umbrella and Aya's umbrella.
Not on Lymur.
Virion was quiet for a moment, like he was choosing where to begin.
Then he said, "Dicathen needs you."
···---⚜---···
"How are we supposed to discuss Dicathen's supposed need of me," Lymur said, with the exasperated tone of someone who had expected better from the universe, "by drinking coffee and eating donuts in a cafe?"
He then immediately picked up his salted caramel coffee and drank from it with complete commitment.
"Because I sure expected somewhere super fancy." He reached for the chocolate donut. "Super lowkey, y'know. Somewhere with — "
He took a large bite.
" — wif like," he continued, still chewing, "big chairs 'nd stuff. 'Nd maybe a fireplace. 'Nd someone 'n a suit standin' by a door."
Virion watched him patiently, while Aya did with a face that she was working very hard to keep professional, and the work was not going especially well. There was something happening at the corner of her mouth that she had been suppressing since Lymur sat down.
He's actually like this, she thought. Unprecedentadly childish. The rumors weren't exaggerating. If anything, they undersold it.
"In my experience," Virion said, "the most important conversations happen in the most ordinary places. I've found boardrooms make people perform. Cafes make them honest."
"Well, I'm always honest." Lymur swallowed. "I don't need a cafe for that."
"No," Virion agreed. "I suspect you don't."
Aya ordered a matcha — same as Virion, same donut selection. She held the cup with both hands and watched him from across the small table with those large, still eyes, and Lymur watched her back for a moment. She held eye contact without flinching.
"Alright," Lymur said, setting his cup down. "You said Dicathen needs me. That's a large statement delivered in a cemetery in the rain by a former king of elves and a Lance I've never even met before today." He looked between them. "So what's actually going on?"
Virion set his own cup down and folded his hands on the table.
He explained it plainly, which Lymur appreciated. The Triunion Council — the formal unification of all three kingdoms under shared governance — was apparently being established. The Lances were being publicly appointed. And alongside them, a singular new position had been proposed, debated, and ultimately agreed upon by all three ruling parties.
The Arbiter.
Virion laid out the structure of it. The mandate, the four categories of authority — threat assessment, inter-kingdom arbitration, independent correction, and deterrence. The accountability to the full council and only the full council, the jurisdictional independence, and the legal immunity provision.
Lymur listened to all of it without interrupting. He finished his donut. He drank more coffee. He kept listening.
When Virion finished, there was a brief quiet.
"This is a means to keep my actions in check, isn't it?"
Virion only looked at him like he was prepared for this question.
"That's a direct way to put it," Virion said.
"I guess it is." Lymur looked at him. "Though am I wrong?"
"Partially," he said. "You're infamous, Lymur, for doing exactly what you want whenever you want to do it, and the kings and queens of three kingdoms have spent a long time watching you accumulate information about threats that their own intelligence networks haven't detected, making unilateral decisions that their legal systems can't touch, and walking away from situations that should have killed you."
He picked up his cup.
"The honest answer is that they wanted you somewhere they could also receive what you find. Rather than having you operate entirely outside any structure with no accountability in either direction, they decided the better option was to formalize the independence you already had."
He looked at Lymur over the rim.
"You are too valuable a fighting force to leave entirely alone. You are also too dangerous a fighting force to leave entirely alone. Both of those things are true at the same time."
Lymur looked at him for a long moment, a bit of surprise in his face. "I appreciate that."
"I thought you might."
"Doesn't mean I'm saying yes yet."
"I know," Virion said, and smiled. "Go ahead."
What followed was, by Aya's private assessment, one of the more exhausting negotiations she had ever observed, and she had stood in rooms with six monarchs arguing about border taxation.
Lymur had questions. Many of them. He asked about his adventurer registration and whether the Arbiter status created any jurisdictional conflict with guild contracts. He asked about the academy — specifically whether the position could be used to compel his absence during semester, and was firm enough about this that Virion had to pause and confirm explicitly that it could not. He asked about the unanimous requirement for council deployment and whether any single kingdom could veto an activation, and then followed it immediately with the inverse — whether any single kingdom could compel one.
"Neither," Virion said.
"Put it in writing."
"It is in writing."
"Then I want to read the writing."
"The charter is forty pages."
"Then I'll read forty pages."
Virion looked at the ceiling, sighing. He's going to be a trial, he thought, not without a certain fondness. An absolute trial. The council has no idea.
Aya was doing better at hiding her amusement by this point, but only marginally. She'd stopped trying to look unaffected and had turned to simply watching, cup held in both hands, saying nothing. She found she didn't want to interrupt. There was something almost entertaining about watching a former king get worked over by a man who was eating his second donut during the process.
Lymur argued for a clause explicitly protecting his teaching schedule. He argued for a provision that any Arbiter tasking with an estimated duration exceeding two weeks required advance council notice of at least one week, barring continental emergency. He argued, at some length, about the definition of continental emergency.
"You can't define that in a charter," Virion said.
"Then someone will define it for me later in a way I won't like."
"...That's a fair point," Virion admitted.
By the end of it, Virion looked like a man who had walked into a negotiation expecting to offer terms and had instead been handed a list. He also looked, quietly, like he respected it. He'd been a king for a long time. He knew the difference between someone being obstructive and someone being precise.
Lymur wasn't being obstructive.
They shook hands across the small cafe table, next to the empty donut plate and the matcha cups.
"Welcome," Virion said, "to an official position. Congratulations, Arbiter."
"Don't make it sound like a trap," Lymur said.
"It's not a trap."
"The best traps never announce themselves."
Virion laughed. Properly this time, the full thing. Aya looked down at her cup and pressed her lips together.
Virion stood up, straightened his robes, and smiled at Lymur like he just remembered something.
"I would suggest," he said, "dressing appropriately."
Lymur looked at him. "I always dress appropriately."
"More appropriately than this, perhaps."
Before Lymur could respond to that, Aya reached into her dimension ring and produced a flat case. She set it on the table and opened it.
The suit inside was black. Fully black, with white details at the collar and cuffs that were minimal and precise. Military in structure, it looked like something built for someone who was going to be looked at and knew it.
Lymur stared at it.
Then he looked up at both of them.
"Why," he said slowly, "do you already have a suit in my size."
"We were fairly confident," Virion said.
"That's alarming!"
"Is it?" Aya said. It was the first full sentence she'd said in twenty minutes, said with complete composure.
Lymur looked at her.
"Have I forgotten to mention," Virion added, in the tone of a man who had not forgotten anything, "that the kings and queens will be formally announcing the formation of the Triunion Council today? Unifying all three kingdoms under one structure, publicly appointing the Lances." He paused. "And you, as it happens, if you agreed — which you have."
Lymur stared at him.
"The announcement is in Etistin," Virion added. "So we should leave fairly soon."
"You were going to tell me this," Lymur said.
"I'm telling you now."
"You were going to tell me this earlier."
"The timing never quite — "
"Virion."
"The suit will fit," Virion said, which was not an answer. "And for what it's worth — " a small smile, "— try to look as dashing as possible. Though I imagine you barely need any effort for that."
Lymurm picked up the case.
I was going to go home and make lunch, he thought.