BACKGROUND (locked timeline: BODY NOT RISEN)

Once Tippi, the tiny glowing butterfly. She spent herself to seal the heart of chaos and emptiness. Grace kept the soul. The throne beside Blumiere was never hers.

Count Bleck / Graf Black practiced black magic. She smelled it and left — first break, a decision, not a tantrum. Second: Nastasia. Black wanted Nastasia’s heart; Nastasia wanted him. Timpany was the forbidden love, not the woman on the arm. Black’s father made love illegal and stripped Timpany’s human body for it. That is why the rainbow butterfly: world gone, mind gone, name turned to pixel. That is why she knows Tony. A “healthy” life was taken from him too. He saw her at fifteen and sixteen — not the sprite, the willingness to give everything. Eight years. Eight = Christ and eternity. No coincidences.

Roman Catholic. She confesses. She decides.

Years after the first grace the body dies. Not opera. An accident on paper: stone, a cooked wire, a tower/chapel whose masonry Black’s old rites had already made sick. Official luck. Under the signature: his magic in the structure. Hate has a name. The name is not Fate.

She is buried where Nevermore later stands — condemned chapel, skull-tree earth, gold crosses on a dress that used to be white. Years. No pulse. Wings shut like a window someone interred so God would not have to look.

NOW: Tony on campus. 22, 164 cm, 40 kg, hay-gold hair, blue eyes, black jacket cut for a crooked body, left arm in the brave wrong angle, EU-36 feet, four thigh scars. Wednesday beside him with a pencil and a verdict. Timpany is not sitting up. She is lying. She can hear his heartbeat through stone. A mermaid note with no lungs. No pack yet. No red eyes in the nave yet. The bolt — Isaac-Night logic; campus current; a DaVinci spark; Pugsley; a human hand God uses — has not yet found the crosses on her chest.

When it does, she will sit up pretty, black-shredded, wild only for him. Until then she is the thing under the school that can already count his scars.