The Arbiter

• Build & height: unseen until the Convergence. Then: a figure taller than the Arena's walls, built of frozen final moments: every last blow, every falling body and every raised fist the Arena ever decided, packed together like the stones of a cathedral.
• Face: none. Where a face should be there is always the moment just before an ending, and it changes depending on who looks.
• Hair / eyes / skin: none. Its surface is made of other people's last moments, each frozen at the instant the match decided.
• Skin & mark: no sin, no Signet. Its "mark" is its lettering: hard, square, white on black.
• Signature item: the square balloon: "hard-edged and white-on-black, like text carved into stone" (ch. 37, 74). In the sky its letters are made of stars dragged into right angles (ch. 46). Its full stop is "a perfect black-edged square of star-iron the size of a mountain", and Vigolas has it in his coat.
• Movement: it doesn't move; outcomes do. Plates flicker and hang; boards jump; a whirlpool drags two ships together when it's tired of waiting (ch. 38).
• Voice: never spoken aloud. Its words are only ever written: square balloons, sky-letters, carved board lines. Stage directions give its moods: "impatient" (ch. 38, 40), "very large and very calm" (ch. 42), "cold and final" (ch. 43), and, for the first time, "slower, almost uncertain" (ch. 147), "as if reading something it has never had to read before" (ch. 148). Balloons: square, black, hard white capitals, no tail. Never give this lettering to anyone else.
• Variant looks: The balloon (Saga II–IV) · The sky-sentence (ch. 46: ONE MATCH. / OF MANY., the letters so heavy the O's corner lands "like a tombstone hitting a floor") · The carved column (THE DEAD, ch. 76–77) · The empty balloon (ch. 230: "Small, in the corner of the sky, as if someone were reading over our shoulder: a black square balloon, empty. Waiting.") · The Convergence (ch. 382, the full figure: taller than the walls, a cathedral of frozen final moments) · The true shape (ch. 388: a hollow shaped like an empty chair, with Kompis and Rougeina's match still going inside it).

It decides. It is a being made of every outcome the HADOM Arena has ever decided, and it adds one more every time a match ends.

• The Call: it Calls any soul with a sin awake, K-II and above, by sin, not number (Vigolas, whom no board can number, is Called like anyone). It can't be refused. One heartbeat booms through the Called ("BOOM"), their sin-mark burns white, and they're gone mid-step; their plate hangs in the air, pulsing with their heartbeat, until the match ends.
• The field and the stands: it builds the match out of a fighter's worst memory ("THE FIELD IS THE CALLED ONE'S WORST MEMORY."), perfect and then wrong, and seats the dead whose deaths are on them in the stands ("THE AUDIENCE IS THE CALLED ONE'S DEAD.").
• The rules it writes: the four public ones (The Match Decides · Sin Counts · No Rank Ceiling · The Witness Clause, ch. 37–42) and the sealed ones as they're reached: RULE FIVE: THE ARENA MAY CALL THE DEAD. (ch. 74) · RULE SIX: TWO WHO SHARE ONE— (ch. 147–148, burned out mid-word) · Rule Seven, still sealed (the Arena itself may be challenged).
• The wager: if you lose, the Arena keeps every beat you burned. The loser walks out older.
• Rule One binds even the Order: "An Arena result is the one number the Order can never edit." Nothing outside undoes what's decided inside ("WHAT ENDS HERE, STAYS ENDED.", ch. 39).
• It notices: "when it writes in the sky, it's because it's noticed someone" (Trollmage, ch. 46). Fenna, in her white room: "…Noticed you, did it."
• What it can't do:
  • Mingus: never Called (no line to call) and never built into a memory: where he'd be, there is "an empty patch of floor, still warm". He gives its sentence "a low, thoughtful wuff" (ch. 230).
  • Call a K-I (unless they hold on to someone being Called, or speak a sealed rule).
  • Decide a match between two who share one soul. "…THIS MATCH CANNOT BE DECIDED. THE CALLED ARE RETURNED." (ch. 148). The words after "SHARE ONE—" burned out "as if something on the other side of the rule has sealed it shut."
  • Finish its own first sentence. Vigolas COMPACTed its falling full stop into the verdict cube (ch. 46): "It fell on my ship. It's mine." The sentence still hangs over the Shallows without its full stop (Saga V beats), and the cube hums when it listens.

• Tempo: none of its own. It has no heart. It holds every heartbeat the Arena ever kept from a loser, uncounted and uncountable, and it grows by one ending with every match.
• Home tempo: inside a match, in the worst memory of whoever it has Called; and, since Jorvand left, the empty place of the Twelfth Chair.
• Heartbeat technique: THE FULL STOP. Inside one heartbeat it writes the ending: the beat after which nothing else can happen in a match. "THE MATCH DECIDES." lands, and the hanging plates settle, the boards jump, the Called are returned. No one else can make a heartbeat the last one. (Daniel's Stayed Beat is its exact opposite: a beat in which nothing can be decided.)
• Burn cost: every unfinished thing is a wound. It can't burn beats; it can only spend endings, and it can't leave one unwritten. Two wounds it carries into Saga V: the missing full stop (in Vigolas's coat) and the undecided match (Kompis and Rougeina, ch. 148), which it "does not forget". The HADOM OVERFLOW rule can't touch it (no heart, no ceiling), so no one can out-burn it. Its counters are refusals, not blows.

It can only end things. It never writes anything but verdicts (and never speaks aloud at all), never sees except by Calling, never rests while anything is undecided. Its first sentence has hung unfinished over the world since ch. 46. And it is made of other people's last moments: it has no moment of its own.

• Rule Six: two who share one soul cannot both lose. It met something it could not complete (ch. 147–148).
• The missing full stop: its own punctuation is in a pirate's pocket. Vigolas: "Next time it wants to talk, it can ask for its full stop back." (ch. 46).
• Rule Seven: the Arena itself may be challenged.

• The boards: every Scalelist board in every realm moves when it decides. It carved THE DEAD column onto all of them (ch. 76–77).
• The stands of the dead and the worst memories it builds from.
• The verdict cube (not its own any more): its full stop, folded into "perfectly black, with tiny square starlight letters crawling over its faces", humming in Vigolas's coat (ch. 46, 150, 230). (What unfolding it would do is unknown.)
• No companions. It has servants only in the sense that every Called soul plays its part.

It doesn't fight; it presides. A match chapter is its shape: the Call (one page), the memory (the splash), the stands (one face that matters), the advantage, the fight (one named technique per side), the decision (one decisive moment, never a grind), the return. It is impatient with stalling (a whirlpool, ch. 38), cold with yields ("THE CALLED ONE, VIGOLAS, YIELDS."), and pitiless about rescues: "A YIELD BEFORE A BLOW IS NOT A YIELD." (ch. 147). Its "combos" are with the Order's fear (Rule One is the only thing the Order can't edit) and, unintentionally, with Jorvand, whose empty chair it grew in. The crew's combo against it: the Five-Are-One, which it cannot decide.

• Wants: completion. Every unresolved conflict between souls with a sin brought to a definite end.
• Fears: the unfinished. "The Arena doesn't like unfinished things." (Sigvat, ch. 75).
• Contradiction: a being made of endings has none of its own; it hates loose ends and is one.
• Humour: none. (Vigolas supplies it: "It called two of us last time. It can learn to count.")
• Habits: it notices; it writes in the sky when it does; it reads, "as if reading something it has never had to read before", when a match refuses to end.
• Alone: it is always alone, and always waiting. "It can keep waiting." (Vigolas, ch. 230).

• Jorvand Kestraal: its source. "What I left behind in my chair."
• Vigolas: Called first (ch. 37); yielded to it (ch. 43: "Hey! Whatever you are! I YIELD."); stole its full stop (ch. 46). His plate doesn't move for it; it blinks.
• Smurjan: the Wrath lock opened in its field (ch. 41: "A LOCK OPENS. WRATH IS STRUCK."); his name written back into his skin after Rule Five (ch. 76).
• Kompis and Rougeina: the match it couldn't decide (ch. 147–148).
• Sigvat: the dead it called down (ch. 74).
• Fenna: "…Noticed you, did it." (ch. 46) · "…Counting them too, now." (ch. 76).
• Mingus: never Called, never built. A thoughtful wuff at its sentence (ch. 230).
• Trollmage: "Old sailors call it the Arbiter." · "You've got a piece of the Arbiter's handwriting in your pocket." (ch. 46).
• Kompis: "I'm scared of that one." (ch. 46).

• THE FIELD IS THE CALLED ONE'S WORST MEMORY. (ch. 37)
• THE MATCH DECIDES. SMURJAN DEFEATED VIGOLAS. THIS HOLDS IN EVERY LIFE. (ch. 43)
• ONE MATCH. / OF MANY. (ch. 46)
• RULE FIVE: THE ARENA MAY CALL THE DEAD. (ch. 74)
• A YIELD BEFORE A BLOW IS NOT A YIELD. (ch. 147)
• RULE SIX: TWO WHO SHARE ONE— … THIS MATCH CANNOT BE DECIDED. THE CALLED ARE RETURNED. (ch. 148)
• (an empty black square balloon) (ch. 230)