Natta

• Build & height: 1.83 m, tall and starved-thin (ch. 238), long-limbed, all wrists and collarbones. Full of light, her thin body swells and glows; emptied (ch. 239), she is a rag of a girl in a borrowed blanket.
• Face: narrow, hollow-cheeked, young (late teens or early twenties), with a soft, hungry, almost childlike expression when she smells light, and a lost one when she can't.
• Hair: long, black, hanging lank.
• Eyes: no light in them at all, only a hollow glow, like two windows onto an empty room (ch. 238). They don't track: she turns her face toward light and sniffs. After the overflow (ch. 239) the glow is gone too, and her eyes are dark forever.
• Skin & sin-mark: pale as a fish's belly, and under it, faintly, glowing: the light she's eaten, dozens of lamps' worth, moving under her skin like embers in ash (ch. 238). Gluttony, amber, integration: taking the world in. It is Codex-written: GLUTTONY · VOLUME VIII · THE LAMP-EATER, one of the seventy books that woke and flew at the Second Sign (ch. 144). Her mark is the amber that the eaten light turns to under her skin; full, it blazes "like a furnace through rags".
• Clothing, layer by layer: a shift of tarred oilcloth · ragged black sailcloth stitched from a dozen wrecked ships' sails · bare feet · an old brass lantern-hook on a string round her neck. After: a borrowed blanket.
• Signature item: the brass lantern-hook, from the false beacons she lit as a child.
• Movement: slow, patient, a cat at a mousehole. She sits on a broken figurehead in the wreck-yard, reaches up one long thin hand as a moth drifts past, and eats it. Climbing, she eats each stair-lamp as she passes, and the stair goes black behind her.
• Voice: soft, hungry, almost childlike. Short, breathy lines: "…More." "…Little light. Come here." "…The big one. Last." Balloons are small, soft-edged, faintly lit from inside while she's full, and plain grey once she's empty.
• Variant looks: In the wreck-yard (ch. 234: one lantern swallowed, every lantern in the yard out). Moth-hunting (ch. 236: coves going darker behind her). THE LAMP-EATER (ch. 238 splash: in the lantern-room doorway, glowing with dozens of lamps). Full (ch. 238–239: drinking the Lamp-Glare, lit up "like a paper lantern"). Overflowing (ch. 239: light pouring out of her ribs "like sunlight through a cracked shutter"). Emptied (ch. 239–240: dark-eyed, thin, a bowl of untouched stew, a blanket). Night-keeper (ch. 240: sitting at the top of the stair, face turned toward a lamp she can't see).

She eats light, and it fills her. (Saga V beats; ch. 238)

• What she eats (on the page): a lantern, flame and all, in one bite (ch. 234); lighthouse moths, each carrying a scrap of the Beam ("Little light. Come here."), and with each one the Beam flickers (ch. 236); every stair-lamp on Fyren's 212 steps (ch. 237–238); Hallbard's Lamp-Glare, which feeds her ("Stop feeding her!", Emma); the green lightning off Vigolas's fists ("HEY!"); Fru Gnista's fireworks, swallowed "like sweets"; the moth Rougeina was about to Swap with; the silver light of the Pride script on Krydog's knuckles; and finally a bite out of the Beam itself: …chmp, "the way you'd bite a slice of bread" (ch. 238).
• It fills her: brighter, faster, stronger, "the light under her skin blazing like a furnace through rags." A sniper's shot by sound alone clips her shoulder and she doesn't even notice.
• She smells light. "You've got light on you. Green. And gold. I can smell it." (ch. 238) Later: "Twelve ships. Thirty-six lanterns. They're burning cheap oil." (ch. 241)
• SFX: a lantern swallowed glk; a light going down her throat hhhmmm; the Beam bitten …chmp; the overflow FWOOOOSH (a thousand lights leaving her at once).

• Tempo: 330.
• Home tempo: the dark: coves, wreck-yards and stairwells at night, where every light is a meal and nobody else can see.
• Heartbeat technique: THE SNUFF. Inside one heartbeat she eats one light, and every light that hangs from it goes out at the same instant: one lantern, and the whole wreck-yard is black (ch. 234); one bite of the Beam, and every ship's silver thread across the Current goes out (ch. 238). No one else puts out a whole sea of lights with one mouthful.
• Burn cost (HADOM OVERFLOW, on the page): every light she eats goes dark in her forever. Her ceiling is how much light one heart can hold, and the Sweep (one full turn of the Beam inside one heartbeat) was more than any heart could: her chest overflowed, light pouring out of her ribs, her heart unable to close round it (ch. 239). Emma's Keeping Beat held her heart ("Inside my circle, nobody's heart overflows."), and the light came out of her mouth instead: a thousand stolen lights released into the night sky. She lived, emptied, and dark-eyed forever.

Every light she eats goes dark in her forever. She can't see by light any more, only by hunger. (Saga V beats; ch. 238) Kompis sees her threads: "dozens of thin lines running from her into the dark, every one ending in a lamp she's eaten, every one cut." After the overflow she has given every one of them back, and still can't see: "…I can't see any of them. I never could." (ch. 239)

• Don't shine. Tihi, "deadly serious for once": "…She eats everything that shines. So don't shine." Hallbard's 400-year soot-black lens-rag on Rougeina's blades ("…Dark blades. I could get used to these."); Krydog's bandages back over his silver script; Kompis draws only Tyst ("…No shine, old friend."); Vigolas fights with plain fists ("Turns out we're good at being unremarkable.") (ch. 239).
• Emma's circle: nothing gets made to go out. Not even a light.
• Her own appetite: the Sweep was more light than a heart can hold.
• How she was beaten (ch. 239): cut, held and pinned in the dark by people she couldn't smell, stopped at the chalk line, then overflowing on the Sweep and kept alive by Emma's Keeping Beat (Emma paid one of her own heartbeats: a grey streak at her temple). "…Why'd you keep me?" / "Because nobody in my circle gets made to die. Not even you." Krydog: "…Fall down. Get up. That's all there is to it, kid."

• The brass lantern-hook on a string.
• The Wreckers (WRECKER · K-II MARKED · false-beacon gangs): tarred oilcloth, hooked poles, false lanterns; their boss is RASP (RASP · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #6,060 · Wrecker Boss), unpowered, brass teeth, a hammer. She was their worst weapon, not their captain.
• The wreck-yard: "a graveyard of stolen hulls, lit by a hundred hanging lanterns", until she was hungry.

She eats the battlefield's light, then waits in the dark. She hunts patiently from the coves, thins a light by eating what carries it (moths), climbs toward the biggest light by eating every small one in the way, and turns every weapon that shines into food. She doesn't strike much; she starves a fight of light until nobody can see but her. Wrecker combo: Natta + Rasp's gangs: the false beacons lure ships onto the rocks, and the Lamp-Eater puts out the true one.

• Wants: for nobody to drown. "No light, nobody gets lured. Nobody drowns." (ch. 238)
• Fears: lights, all of them; she can't tell the true ones from the false any more.
• Contradictions: a girl who wants to save ships, eating the lamp that saves them; a Wrecker who hates what Wreckers do; blind to every light and able to smell them all.
• Humour: none at first; later, a whisper of trust ("…Okay.") and a night-watch's dry report ("There's a draught on the north side of the glass. It'll gutter in a storm.").
• Habits: licks light off her fingers; sniffs before she speaks; sits with her back to the wall.
• Alone (now): at the top of Fyren's stair at midnight, face turned toward the lamp: "…Still burning." / "…Good."

• Hallbard: the keeper whose light she ate and gave back, and now his night-keeper. "I need someone on nights. …One of us sees what it touches. The other smells if it's there."
• Emma: kept her alive and gave her a reason ("You'd be keeping the lamp that saves ships. Not the ones that sink them."); Emma sits beside her at the Long Table.
• Krydog: "No light, nobody gets home, either." / "…Nobody gets home anyway. Not round here." Later: "Fall down. Get up."
• Tihi: worked out how to beat her, then sat next to her at supper chattering about a man hit with a fish.
• Vigolas, Kompis, Rougeina, Perne, Isa: the climb up the dark stair; their lights eaten one by one.
• Drekk: the only human who can read the Beam without going blind, and her opposite: he sees its threads, she smells its fire.
• Rasp and the Wreckers: her people; the lights she lit for them.
• Iskall: a girl whose whole power is a flame. To Natta, a meal; to Natta now, perhaps a lamp worth keeping.

• "…More." (ch. 234, 238)
• "…Little light. Come here." (ch. 236)
• "…The big one. Last." (ch. 237)
• "I'm a Wrecker's daughter, pirate. I lit the false beacons from when I was six. Every light I ever saw called someone onto the rocks." (ch. 238)
• "…I can't tell the true ones from the false ones any more. So I eat them all. No light, nobody gets lured. Nobody drowns." (ch. 238)
• "…I can't see any of them. I never could." (ch. 239)
• "…I chose. Every night. Who'd drown." (ch. 241)