They keep asking me to hurry.
Not because the city's calendar will forgive me if I drag my feet, but because people like the illusion that I respect their schedules. The truth is simpler: I prefer to arrive when the audience has stopped looking. Timing makes applause sweeter, and danger tastes better when it is slightly late.
Tonight, however, I paused. Not because the sky required me to improvise but because I realized I had failed a small, unforgivable thing: I had never given Noctis his proper entrance.
Yes, I could hear you — or rather, I could imagine you, because I always imagine you — asking: Why would Eclipse bother with introductions? I will tell you why, because you will listen and because introductions are a ladder and I like climbing them slowly while the rope burns behind me. Noctis matters. He matters to the map, to the calm, to the particular kind of patient thunder that keeps a calamity from becoming a catastrophe. He is the only man I know who can make patience look like a shining weapon. He deserved his name said with flourish.
So I stopped. I leaned against the doorframe, boots soft on the worn wood of our hideout, and I told you — because I tell you everything that makes me look clever before I do something terrible — about Noctis Veyra.
Noctis is the architecture of a plan. He sketches in negative space and builds staircases out of commas. He is the kind of man who reads chaos like scripture, underlining the margins. He will sit with a map and he will whisper to it until it tells him its secrets. He keeps lists the way other people keep promises — obsessively, tenderly, and without romance. He has a habit of folding corners of pages, and when he does this small thing I am unreasonably pleased because it means his mind is aligning with paper rather than panic.
You should know this: Noctis worries about me. Not in the melodramatic, possessive way of a soap-opera husband — he worries like someone catalogues antique glassware: carefully, because if you drop it the world loses a shape. When we stand under a skylight with plans threading between our knees, his calm is not a lullaby; it is a guillotine disguised as an embrace. It keeps things tidy so I can be loud.
If you ever meet him on the page or in a rooftop shadow, and he appears bored and a fraction more amused than he should be, take it as a compliment. That small smirk means he is tempted to marry the plan. Treat his inscrutable patience like applause. It will make you braver — or more reckless — depending on your constitution.
There. Intro given. Please tuck it into your mental costume box because we will need to pull it out at the correct moment.
Now for a word about the Mask, because of course you wanted it. You have been fluttering at the edges of the subject like moths who read obituaries and call them spoilers.
The Mask is older than the career choices that led me here. It fits like a promise on a face that is only sometimes willing to be true. People ask me in interviews if it gives me power. They expect a checklist — strength, agility, a heroic crescendo. I tell them yes, as you would tell a flattering lie at a gala. The truth is messier.
The Mask chooses. Not like a crown swells for a head, not like a lover chooses a shoulder on a windless night. It threads itself through the small things you already are and sharpens what's there. It will not fabricate compassion where none exists, and, mercifully for some, it will not manufacture decency. If you wear the Mask and your hands are rude, the world will call you charismatic. If your hands are kind, the Mask will make your kindness legend.
A few rules, because I love rules almost as much as I love breaking them (which is to say: obsessively).
Rule one: The Mask does not rewrite you. It amplifies. Think of it as a microphone for the soul you were born with. If the soul is a whisper, the Mask will make it opera. If the soul is a scream, well — I have been that scream, and let me tell you, echo is addicting.
Rule two: The Mask remembers — in the way old things remember. It keeps ledgers. It folds names into the lacquer. You put it on and it will cough up faces you had forgotten you owed; a debt collector in porcelain. That memory is not always helpful, but it is always honest.
Rule three: It drinks an audience like some people drink gossip. It is hungry for witnesses. Masks get lonely when you put them on to hide; they prefer to be worn to be seen. That is the mask's vice and its virtue. It wants an audience because it wants to be known, or perhaps because being known feels like not being erased.
Rule four (a footnote that only the very careful ask for): the Mask likes ceremony. It prefers names and roll calls. It is a showman's artifact because it pulls the world into a theater. If you ever see me having a tantrum at a performance, it is less for the stunt and more because the Mask has been ignored.
Yes, it's a dangerous prop. Yes, it has teeth. No, I don't always like the meal.
Now: a little about me. You asked, if only with the baring of your curiosity teeth. I will tell you less than you want and more than you deserve — precisely because the mischief of it is in the balance.
I am not a tragedy wrapped in sequins. I am not a cautionary tale penned by bored gods. I am a woman who stole things because she liked the way the world flinched. I am good at making people admit what they loved, often for reasons that were selfish and often, occasionally, because some truths needed a gentle theft. I love metal between my fingers, the precise weight of cards, the smell of midnight in a locked museum. I am fond of pastries that do not belong to me and of people who hold the floor when I lose my grip.
I have fewer heroes in me than you might hope and more accidents. My past has the tendency to be dramatic and my future is inconvenienced by plans. If you insist on a headline, take this: I am spectacular sometimes, kindly other times, mostly a very bad influence with excellent taste in gloves.
Right. Enough autobiography for tonight. The city is breathing outside the hideout like a beast yawning awake. The heist waits. I can hear Jess downstairs swearing at a stubborn line of code (she uses profanity as punctuation; it's art), and Raven's paws are twitching with the sort of anticipatory violence that could be called adorable if you were less hardened by a thousand rooftop escapes. Noctis is, as he likes to be, slow and surgical — a man who thinks in diagrams and keeps rage neatly folded into his cuffs.
I check my pockets. Card deck: warm, eager. Gloves: two, one for show, one for the actual job. Mask: nestled in velvet as if it were a relic. Bag zipped. Heart ticking with the same rhythm it has used for years — a metronome tuned to the sound of possible calamity.
We move out like an orchestra that has only recently decided to play without consent. Noctis's route is a poem written in footfalls; Jess's console purrs like an engine of private weather; Raven melts into shadow behind my heel.
We run through possibilities because that is what sensible people do. Plans exist in tenses: if the guard is at the north hall, then we loop the drone; if the priest chants in Latin, then Jess throws the feed to the choir; if a god is bored, then Noctis sacrifices a witty bar line to keep it entertained. We are very good at contingencies. We are spectacular at improvisation. The difference between us and lesser troupes is we practice both.
We simulate for longer than it might feel dignified: we stage the bored guard, the overeager priest, the child who should not be awake at midnight but is because stories are louder than bedtime some nights. Each scenario is a small exercise in humanity and in theatrics. I practice my roll call until Jess flinches and then times the audience gasp for me because she has a spreadsheet of potential crowd reactions (yes, she is that extra).
We argue, not so much about who does what — we each know our roles — but about flavor. Elara, dramatic; Jess, cunning; Noctis, clinical; Raven, adorous. I ask for fireworks in B-flat and Noctis responds by telling me that B-flat will set off the humidity sensors in the east wing. We compromise: small fireworks in a key the sensors don't hate.
We have a tradition before every job: a ridiculous bet about something trivial. Tonight's bet is whether a guard will sneeze during my final flourish. Jess wagers against; Noctis says he will hold the guard's breath with a charm (which, I suspect, is a euphemism for bribing a pigeon). I bet that the guard will sneeze, and it will be melodramatic. Raven, being unhelpfully canine, bets with a look that translates roughly to: "I bet you will trip."
We laugh, an honest sound that lives in nerve endings and makes us foolish in the best ways. I tuck a stray thought away — the kind you keep where you store little, dangerous truths: I like them. They are a tidy constellation in an otherwise messy sky. They will catch me if I fall, which is an indulgence I have earned perhaps as often as I have stolen crowns.
But underlying the jokes, there is the Mask. It hums, quietly, like a cat in the hush between pages. I touch it once across the velvet — the strap is cool under my fingers — and I think something small and very old. The Mask does not like being left waiting. It prefers applause. I prefer the things the Mask sacrifices to look like art after I am gone.
You will forgive me if I sound dramatic. There is a kind of theater to my confession: we are about to step into a scene and I like to narrate the stage directions in advance, because the best curtains are the ones that rise with a soft, delicious gasp.
We climb. The city is a set of lights and impatience below us. Noctis checks the watch on his wrist as if time is a thing he has made an agreement with. Jess murmurs in code across the comms — our private liturgy. Raven pads silent and sure, all teeth and intent.
I reach into my pocket and draw a card as if it were a sacrament. It's a comfort ritual. I flip it between my fingers. The ink gleams, the edges are worn like a thumb worn into a favorite book. I smile, half to the card and half to myself. There is a loneliness that sits under my ribs sometimes, thin and witty and sharp. It purrs when I am onstage and scowls when I am in bed. It is not so much sorrow as it is an old, patient companion that keeps time with my bravest mistakes.
Tonight I look at the Mask lying in its velvet and I feel that pinch sharper than the rest. I do not pretend it is novel. I have called it many things — tool, partner, jailer, crown — depending on the audience and how well their hearts agreed with metaphors. Tonight I do not reach to explain its hunger. I only look.
If you are reading this from a comfortable chair, with a cup of something innocently warm at your side, imagine for a moment the weight of being both a show and a refuge. The Mask wants to be a story; I sometimes want to be a person. It is not an argument I win. Usually, I fold cards and go back to work.
I stretch the strap and let the porcelain kiss my face. The city breathes under me and I can hear my team's small, brave noises like a chorus. I slide the Mask up over my cheekbones and the world decides, in a rush and then a whisper, that I am no longer Elara.
I am Eclipse.
And I tell you now, because I have always told you what it costs me to be splendid and to be small: being Eclipse is an exquisite loneliness dressed as performance. The mask gives a face that the world remembers, but it also builds a room between you and everyone else. Even here, with my people pressed into my bones, the porcelain makes a seam. It keeps me from being wholly owned by laughter and wholly owned by anything tender.
We move. The heist begins. The stage lifts. We play our parts. There are plans and improvisations, triumphs and near-misdirections that make headlines and the occasional guard who sneezes just when the lights hit the right note.
And even as I stride and dance and steal, the seam is there — a small, steady thread between my ribs and the mask. I feel it tug like an old promise. I am noisy, I am spectacular, I am likely to be found in the morning's feeds with confetti in my hair and a god's toy in my pocket.
But tonight, before the curtain fully rises, I offered you Noctis, I gave you the Mask's rules, and I gave you a sliver of myself: not raw, not repentant, but honest enough to keep you awake and polite enough to make you interested. That is the bargain of a storyteller. I give you the hints and keep the core, because part of the job is to be a spectacle and part of it is to keep the light on until everyone goes home.
We step into the dark together. I feel the Mask settle, the world fold, and I grin into porcelain.
"Ready?" Noctis asks, quietly.
"Always," I answer, and the word goes out into the night like a dare.
If you love me for the spectacle, stay for the tricks. If you like me for my mischief, keep a careful hand on your pockets.
If you are here for the confession — and you always are, you patient thing — remember this: the mask makes me loud, but it cannot make me lonely without witnesses. I prefer witnesses who hold my hand after the show.