Mistarion

Mistarion sat out the puzzle entirely, meditating through the argument over wrenches and welds until the portents told him, with real confidence, that the plan on the table would work. In the fight he leaned on witch bolt, arcing lightning through Cinderwalker's superheated frame again and again, calm and mechanical about it even as the thing nearly cooked three of his crewmates. He showed no particular reaction to St. Crow's name or Heishi Q's unveiling — whatever is buried in his own past, it didn't surface tonight, not even as a flicker.

Mistarion hung back and watched the room the way he watches most rooms, waiting for the moment things went loud. When they did, he burned droid after droid down at range with firebolt after firebolt, methodical, a little smug about it, cracking jokes about pathetic wizards and tiny damage numbers that turned out not to be so tiny. He's good at this part — the part where nobody asks him to remember anything, just to point a hand and let the fire do the explaining.

Mistarion stayed quiet through most of the confessions, content to let the others bleed their histories onto the table — until the blue came up. Something in him rose toward the surface, unbidden, and his own journal answered before he did: a drawing of the exact container Kael had been sent to steal, one he has no memory of making. He showed it without hesitation, more curious than alarmed. Whatever thread runs between him, the relic, and whatever took his past, he's content to let it surface in its own time. He feels no rush to leave this place — there's too much still buried here.

Mistarion didn't go upstairs. He stayed at the bar with Scraps, aware of being sized up and unable to do much but let it happen. When the others came back talking about a lie-detecting crystal that never once lit up, he recognized the thing from half-remembered schooling — a detection charm, not a compulsion, and it had caught nothing from anyone in that room. The news that his own face sat on a security bulletin landed harder: not an answer, just another locked door with his name already on it, and one more reason to be careful about which faction learns to recognize him first.

Mistarion ducked behind Scraps' bar the second the first bottle flew — sound tactics for a man with no armor and a mouth full of magic. His cursed beam of moonlight found its mark twice, and the second time it killed. He knelt over the body afterward, checking for a pulse he already suspected wasn't there, and quietly told Scraps the truth of it rather than pretend otherwise. He never went up to Narok's table. He stayed by the corpse and the bar, which felt more honest.

Mistarion reached into Jax's mind for a memory and came back with a boy on fire in his sleep, hands lit and no idea why. It's the kind of thing he'd normally chase to ground, except the last thing he chased to ground was his own past, and that came back empty. He said little at Zabetta's, letting the negotiating happen around him, watching the gem-scanner tally up their price with the same close attention he gives anything that reveals more than it means to. Kessler Reach is a system built on people not asking questions. He is, professionally, a person who asks them.

The man on the table was going to die in eleven minutes or in one, and Verum-Gaea was already reaching for cloth. Mistarion did the arithmetic nobody had asked for and closed the distance to zero, then said the true thing out loud so it would not sit unsaid in the room.

The guard went through the girder a few minutes later, and Mistarion did not reach for him. He has noticed that about himself since, without much heat, the way one notices weather.

He was watching when Dr. Voss went — all of them were, except the one man diving for her. What he saw and Kael Vass did not is that there was nothing there to take hold of. He carried it the whole way to the shuttle before he set it down in front of him.

Oot interrogates a history Mistarion cannot confirm, because it isn't in him anymore — each rumor a coat held up by a stranger: try this one on. He meditates through the alarm. What finally moves him isn't the open gate; it's the word library. Parchment. Ink. A scroll of Witch Bolt with his name on it. The null field thins the moment they leave the block and he can feel the weave again, like blood returning to a slept-on arm. He is not escaping a prison. He is going to get his mind back, one page at a time.