Felix

A year ahead of Arthur at the village school, and the centre of the schoolyard.

a loud confident boy a year ahead of them who held court at the center of most schoolyard activities (ch. 242)

The ability

Lightning, and it arrived in a way the other children talk about.

[he] had apparently sparked actual visible lightning from his fingertips during a thunderstorm the previous month, an event that had been talked about with the particular awe children reserved for genuinely impressive displays.

That is the loudest manifestation in the village by some distance. Arthur's classmates skip stones and move shadows.

Why he is introduced here

Ch. 242 is the chapter that establishes what normal looks like, and Felix is its upper bound. Arthur, at the same moment, has shown nothing.

Arthur has "noticed him mostly from a distance so far", which is the chapter placing him without yet using him.

The line

Ch. 243. Arthur stands up in class and says he will defeat the Ruined God, and the room laughs. Felix is the one whose version of the joke everyone repeats.

FEL: You? You can't even make a spark. What are you going to do, throw dirt at him?

Felix's voice carried clearly over the others, the particular confident volume of a boy who never had to worry about being heard.

The chapter is careful that the laughing is "not cruelly exactly, just the easy delighted laughter of children who found the sheer scale of the claim absurd coming from someone their own size". Felix's contribution is the part that is about Arthur specifically rather than about the claim.

What the lightning becomes

Ch. 245, three years on:

What had once been sparks between his fingers was now a thing he could hold, a crackling arc he could pass from hand to hand like a juggler's ribbon, and on the days he felt generous he would demonstrate it for the younger children [...] and on the days he felt less generous he would demonstrate it anyway, just closer to people than strictly necessary.

The schoolyard

He waits three years and then does it with an audience, which is Elsie's whole case against him.

FEL: We're comparing. Everyone's showing theirs. You're the only one who hasn't gone.

FEL: You want to know what I think? I think it's a kindness, in a way. The rest of us have to figure out what we're for. You already know you're not for anything.

Then a palm on the chest and a calibrated fraction of a strike, "calibrated with the casual precision of a boy who had never once been told no by the world".

He is never cruel quickly. The chapter says it twice:

Felix saw it rise, and smiled the way he smiled, easy and unhurried, a boy who had never once in his life needed to be cruel quickly.

FEL: I'm not doing anything. I'm educating.

What stops him

Elsie, at conversational volume, in front of everyone. He looks at the crowd that has stopped laughing, lets the lightning die, and leaves with the only line available to him:

FEL: Whatever. It's not worth it. Neither of them are.

His father

Named once, as the source of his reasoning:

FEL: The soul's supposed to speak, my father says. His just never bothered.

After the schoolyard

Ch. 248. He never knocks Arthur down again, and the chapter says why.

He did not need to. He had other, smaller tools, the particular economy of a boy who understood that a well-placed word cost him nothing and could be deployed a dozen times a day where a strike could only be thrown once.

He stops needing an audience:

tossed off between other conversations, barely even looking at Arthur when he said them, the particular cruelty of someone who had stopped needing an audience because the words did their work regardless.

He notices it stop working

The last movement of ch. 248 leaves Arthur's point of view for two sentences, which the volume does rarely.

Felix was complaining to a friend that Lyerm had gotten boring lately, hardly worth the bother anymore [...] But somewhere underneath the complaint, small and unacknowledged even to himself, Felix had begun to notice something he did not have words for either. The target was not breaking the way it used to.

And that, though none of them knew it yet, would not sit well with him forever.

That is the volume telling you Felix comes back.

He cracks

Ch. 249, spring, five months into Arthur's training. Felix escalates in stages and none of it lands.

FEL: Nothing to say, Lyerm? ART: Not really, no.

FEL: Must be nice, not caring about anything. Easier than actually being good at something, I suppose. ART: Maybe.

So he knocks the books out of Arthur's arms in a corridor, and gets the same nothing:

FEL: You're supposed to say something. ART: What would you like me to say? FEL: I don't know. Something. Anything. You used to at least look bothered. ART: I'm sorry it's less interesting for you now.

The chapter is clear that Arthur delivers that flat and genuine, without sarcasm, and that this is worse for Felix than a retort would have been.

The moment in front of witnesses

A younger boy interrupts one of Felix's stories with a question.

BOY: Is it true Lyerm's not scared of you anymore? FEL: What? BOY: Denner said he saw you shove him last week and he just picked his books up and walked off. Didn't even look upset. FEL: He's still scared. He's just better at hiding it. BOY: Denner said he looked bored, actually.

And the line that gives away what he actually believes:

FEL: Nobody with nothing in them gets to be bored of me.

The chapter registers it physically: "a tightening around the eyes, a flush climbing from his collar, the unmistakable physical signature of a boy who was, for perhaps the first time in his young life, genuinely and visibly rattled."

Arthur walks past during it and does not stop, gloat, or smile.

He throws a real one

Ch. 250. The provocation is a test mark. What he brings is not the arc he shows the younger children.

This was different, tighter, brighter, gathering at his fists with a low crackling hum that made several of the watching children step back without meaning to.

Elsie tries the thing that worked last time and it does not work:

ELS: It's about him, and he's my friend, so it's about me. FEL: Not this time.

His stated reason:

FEL: You took something from me. I don't even know what to call it. You used to flinch. You used to look small, and now you just stand there, and I don't understand it, and I don't like things I don't understand.

The chapter gives him one moment of doubt before he releases it, "something that might almost have been fear at his own intention, and then it was gone".

Arthur parries it into the ground. Felix is left "frozen with his hands still outstretched and empty", and his only word is:

FEL: What.

The word came out of Felix small and cracked, nothing at all like his usual voice.

This is attempted killing, not bullying. The chapter calls the bolt "a killing thing".

He leaves

Ch. 254. His family pulls him from the school within the week, "quietly, without much explanation offered to anyone who asked". The village offers two versions and the chapter picks neither.

• His parents could not bear the public shame.
• He asked to leave himself, "unwilling to face the version of the story that would follow him through every remaining year of his schooling".

Arthur's reading of him, which is the last word the saga gives on Felix so far:

He had simply been a boy who had never once been told no, and the world had finally told him, and he had not known what to do with that, and so he had left.

Arthur hoped, quietly and without much conviction that it would matter, that wherever Felix had gone, he found something better to build himself around than being feared.

Open questions

• Where he goes, and whether he returns. the cast list for Acts 12 to 14 in the author's notes does not include him.