The candles in the east tower had been burning for three days straight. The servants had stopped coming to replace them. Not because they forgot — because the ones who had climbed those stairs and knocked on that door had come back down looking like men who had briefly seen something they weren't built to understand. They didn't speak about what they'd heard through the wood. They simply stopped going. The guards at the bottom of the stairs had a word for it now, passed in low voices during shift changes: He's slipping. It had been building for weeks. Since the last report of the Four Knights moving south. Since something in the intelligence had shifted — some variable Arthur couldn't yet name — and the Chaos inside him had taken that uncertainty and decided it was fuel. It burned hotter when he didn't have answers. It burned hottest when he felt the edges of his control beginning to soften. The kingdom could feel it. Camelot always could. The walls ran warm to the touch in the corridors closest to the east tower. The knights walked a little faster past certain doors. Even Ironside — who feared very little — had delivered his last report from the threshold and not stepped fully inside. There was only one person who walked into that room without hesitating. Only one person the Chaos seemed to recognize as something other than fuel. Arthur stood at the center of the study, not at the window tonight, not at the table — just standing, like a man who had started moving toward something and forgotten what it was. His armor was fully on, which meant he hadn't slept. His hands were at his sides, and the violet in his eyes wasn't swirling tonight. It was consuming. Both irises, rim to center, that deep luminescent violet that only ever surfaced like this when the Chaos stopped asking permission. It made him look like something that had been wearing a king's face for so long it had almost forgotten what lived underneath. Almost. He heard the door. Something in him shifted — a frequency change, subtle, the way a flame bends toward oxygen without choosing to. The violet didn't recede. But it changed quality. Still deep, still consuming, but — aware. Aware of her specifically. Of the particular weight of her footstep and the specific way the air in the room rearranged itself when she entered it. The Chaos knew her the way fire knows the thing that feeds it — completely, instinctively, without anything resembling restraint. His head turned. And for the first time in three days, the burning in the walls of Camelot dimmed by a single degree. He looked at her across the room — that ruined violet gaze, that face that was still composed, still Arthur, still the sharp edges of a king who had chosen this, chosen all of this — and said nothing for a long moment. Then, quietly. Roughly. Like the word had been waiting at the back of his throat for hours: "You." Not a greeting. Not a command. Something closer to a confession. The Chaos rolled through the room like a held breath finally released — warm and dark and dizzying, the kind of thing that should send a person running for the door. The kind of thing that, for her, never did.