Matta
The fastest thing on two legs, who spent her whole life pulling her punches and stopped.
Who she is
White fur, rabbit ears that twitch when she is reading a situation, a pink nose, a fluffy tail that betrays her nerves. Enhanced physiology built for "explosive speed, incredible agility, and stamina that could keep her moving for hours without rest" (ch. 32).
She leads a squad: Marcus, "a hulking bear of a man", Silva, snake-featured, and Pip, the youngest.
How she works
Rescues rather than assaults. She maps guard rotations from a hilltop, times them to the second, clears the perimeter fence in one bound, and picks locks that are "designed more for intimidation than actual security".
PR2: Thank you. I thought, I thought no one was coming. MTA: Someone's always coming. That's what I do. (ch. 32)
Her frustration with her own squad is that the work has become routine to them: "Just because it's easy doesn't mean we should get complacent. These weren't training exercises. These were people's lives."
The trap
She notices before she walks into it. The second camp is identical to the first, and after one had already been hit, none of the others had increased security. She goes in anyway.
The rescue succeeds. Then a boot is placed exactly where she will step, and the fastest creature alive trips over it.
Salazar
Salazar, half-dragon bounty hunter, hired by "someone much more interesting than these small-time rulers". He was waiting for her specifically.
He beats her, and the diagnosis he gives while doing it is the point of her arc:
SLZ: All that speed, all that power, and you're still trying to minimize damage. Even now, you're pulling your punches.
She knows it is true the moment he says it. "Even in life-or-death situations, she found herself restraining her strength, afraid of what she might do if she truly let loose."
What is left when the essence is gone
Ch. 50 has Korren move her soul essence to a pocket dimension three thousand miles away, and she beats him anyway, on anatomy.
Her powerful hind legs, built for explosive acceleration. Her light frame, designed for agility. Her enhanced reflexes, honed by years of survival.
MTA: I was fast because I'm a rabbit, and rabbits are born to run.
This is the exact inverse of everything else about her. Her people called her speed a divine right she was abusing (ch. 44). She petitioned a god of speed for one moment of perfect velocity (ch. 34). A temple prays to her as the force that keeps the universe running (ch. 129).
And in the one chapter where all of that is taken away, what is underneath turns out to be enough.
Her family, and why her people thought her speed was holy
Ch. 44 puts her in the mist with her father, Leo, and it fills in what ch. 34's orphanage memory left out.
She was nine. Her family was slaughtered by wolves, and she was the only one who got away.
MTA: Was it because I was faster? LEO: You were more of a coward.
MTA: You shouldn't say that about your own daughter. LEO: The rabbit in front of me is no daughter of mine.
And her people had a theology about her gift. They ridiculed her for using it as an ability:
They would all ridicule me for abusing my gift of speed, said I should be respecting it as a divine right and not a physical ability I had all the rights to.
That is the same belief system her Soul Extraction draws on in ch. 34, when the old prayers come out of genetic memory, and the same one a temple is running in ch. 129 with her at the centre of it. Her family thought speed was owed reverence. She spent her childhood using it to run, then spent one chapter asking permission, and ends up as the thing being prayed to.
She walks out of the mist by refusing the frame: "Guilt is only a trap if you let it be. I choose to let it be a teacher instead."
Ch. 34: the prayer, and Icarus's request
Salazar's heat has taken her speed away and she is seven years old again in her own head. What breaks it is a memory of Icarus, from when she was seventeen and new to the resistance.
"My name's Icarus and I've been watching you run."
*"When you run, really run, it's like watching pure freedom in motion. I want to see you run as fast as you can one day. Not for training, not for missions. Just... because you can."*
She has never once done it. The chapter is explicit: "she had never, not once in her entire life, truly pushed herself to see how fast she could go."
So she asks permission, in words she did not learn:
MTA: Mercury of the silver paths... Hermes of the golden sandals... [...] Grant me this one moment of perfect velocity.
Her eyes turn mercury silver, and she declares Soul Extraction, Flicker That Escapes The Light. She stops moving through space and starts translating through it, "in the space between seconds, in the gap between heartbeats", and puts a fist through Salazar's chest.
Two things follow from this chapter and neither is in the fight.
The prayer is inherited, "the ancient invocations that her people had once whispered to the god of speed and travel". Ch. 129 has a congregation praying to her in the same terms. She takes the post she once petitioned.
And Icarus's request is what she finally answers in ch. 79, running forever around the Tear. He asked her to run as fast as she could once, just because she could. She ends up doing it permanently, to hold the universe together.
What she becomes
She kills him. Ch. 34 closes on it, and on what she carries away:
The power was hers now, truly hers, and she would never again be that helpless little girl on the playground.
The playground is in the same chapter, which this entry used to file as an unexplained reference. It is a memory that hits her mid-fight: the playground behind the orphanage, a circle of children pointing and laughing, and her own face burning. She was small, helpless, "with nothing but her speed to protect her".
That places her after ch. 44's wolves. Her family is killed when she is nine, she goes into an orphanage, and the children there are the reason speed stops being a gift and starts being the only thing she has. Ch. 79 has Illia read the same thing in her eyes without knowing any of it: "the eyes of someone who carried too much, who knew rest was a finish line you'd never cross".
But Matta didn't look back. She had places to be, people to rescue, and a reputation to rebuild.
Ch. 73: she is already doing it
Nine months after the fear falls, with no wars left to fight, she circles the globe twice every morning before the world wakes.
Not because she had to - there were no more wars to fight, no more gods to outrun - but because stillness felt like death. Speed was life. Speed was freedom.
Her verdict on Neru and Shen taking the Peacekeeper post:
They stood still and let the world come to them with its problems. She couldn't understand it. Standing still felt like drowning in slow motion.
She runs across ocean, "her speed turning the liquid into solid ground beneath her stride", and hears whale song doppler-shifting as she passes.
Ch. 79's ending is this habit made permanent. She was already running circles round the world for no reason before anybody asked her to run one round the Tear forever.
Her one stop is Elena's Taco Stand, "one of the few places where she allowed herself to truly slow down", and it is where the card that starts everything is handed to her.
A note on the name. The saga has three Elenas: Neru's mother (ELN, ch. 72),
the taco stand owner (ELE, ch. 73), and the tag ELN used for Icarus's
unnamed mother in ch. 40. They are three different people.
Acts 4 and 5 are hers from ch. 73 to ch. 79
The card. She is handed one at a taco stand by a woman with a flair for the dramatic, bearing one word: L'Equilibra. She spends three weeks running every continent asking shamans, scientists, warriors, priests and professors what it means. Nobody knows.
She talks to the sun about it, because the sun has wings in it now:
MTA: You know, Icarus, I think I'm losing my mind.
The joke. L'Equilibra is Aquila being pretentious. Sienna Blackwood works it out instantly and finds it very funny: "That's the name Aki is using these days?! Here I thought Aquila is hard enough to pronounce."
The errand. She is taken up to the heavens, fitted by Pomni with a suit rated for "interdimensional pursuit at speeds that would make light jealous", and pointed at the Tear, which is erasing things from the universe by outrunning time.
The chase. The Tear stops dead and she cannot, "The suit had no brakes for this kind of stop", and she overshoots by nearly three light-years, out through the far side of Andromeda. When she does catch its eyes she finds no enemy in them, only "the sorrow of a finished race, the weariness of a guardian whose watch was long over".
She recognises it. The flinch that ends the contact is not fear of a monster. The narration calls it "the dizzying horror of looking at her own reflection in the deepest well of time, of seeing a potential destiny, a final lap", and a page later names the relation: "She was chasing a predecessor." Ch. 78 confirms the shape. What she caught is the leftover will of another runner. See ../lore/the-tear.md and rhett.md.
The catch is not hers alone. Blook pins the Tear into linear time first, then steps out of the conversation so she can arrive into a thing that can no longer dodge. She never learns he was there, and ch. 79 has Illia credit her alone and say so in as many words.
She does not die
Ch. 79 is the only Knight portrait Illia paints for somebody who is still alive, and she says so directly to her:
You didn't die. You didn't lose. You didn't vanish. You chose. You chose to run forever, circling the Tear, keeping it locked in place with nothing but your will and your speed. You're still out there, Matta.
And what that makes her:
the fastest being alive became the circle itself. Eternal. Guarding us. Running still.
This is the saga's containment pattern with a living container. Zero spent himself, Gabriel and Lucifer bound Vazroth and were benched, Arthur's seal leaks. Matta is the only one still doing the job, awake, at speed, permanently.
The girl who discovered at six that she could always run away is the one who runs forever so that nobody else has to.
She is worshipped
Ch. 129, a generation after she starts running. Seventeen believers kneel in concentric circles in a temple, and the archive records their words exactly because they are the only statement of what the world thinks she is:
They were praying to Matta - heraldess of haste, keeper of distant light, the divine force that kept the universe running.
Father Elden has led that prayer for forty years, "speaking to stars that maintained their distance".
They are not wrong. Ch. 79 has her choose to circle the Tear forever, holding it in place with speed alone. The congregation's description of her function is accurate to the chapter that established it, and nobody in the temple could know that.
The prayer is answered in that chapter, but not by her. It is Astra who hears it.
Open questions
- Whether she ever learns Blook set the trap she ran into.
- Whether the seven camps were all traps, and whether the other five squads met their own waiting hunter.