Starlark Grandstand stood in the tunnel under the coliseum and tried to make his mouth say the words. Ladies and gentlemen. Warriors and witnesses. The phrases tasted like cold rice. He had called every bout in the lands for nine years, and tonight the biggest card of the season waited above him: a six-fight ladder ending with Champion Kevintor Neverloss against Saber Warborn. If Starlark opened with the same lines he always used, the crowd would clap, drink, and forget him by sundown. He wanted bards singing his words a hundred years from now. He needed new words by the time the first fighter walked. He pressed his back to the stone wall and listened. Above him, thirty thousand people stomped the tiers of the World Tournament Coliseum. The sound came down through the rock like a second heartbeat. He clicked his microphone on, off, on. Nothing came. Mr. McMuscle Armstrong squeezed past him in the tunnel, oiled and grinning, headed up the ramp for the opener. The big man slapped Starlark on the shoulder hard enough to move him. "Make me sound scary," he said, and kept walking. Starlark watched him go and felt the old script rise in his throat. Weighing in at three hundred pounds of pure thunder. He swallowed it back down. Further along the tunnel, Shinzo Thornstep sat cross-legged on the floor in a white gi, glasses fogged from breathing into his hands. He was on the third fight tonight, judo, and he looked like a clerk waiting for a bus. Starlark crouched beside him. "What do you want them to call you up there?" Shinzo thought about it. "My name. That's all." Then he added, quieter, "Say what I actually do. Not what looks good." Starlark wrote that down on the inside of his cuff. He found Saber Warborn last, near the champion's door, two wooden swords crossed on his back. Kevintor stood beside him, already wrapped, staring at nothing. Starlark asked them both the same question. Saber said, "I'm building something. Don't name it yet." Kevintor said, "Don't announce me as undefeated. Announce me as the man still looking." He did not explain. He did not need to. Starlark wrote both lines down and felt his hands go warm. He climbed the ramp as the lights dropped. He stepped into the ring with the crowd pressing on him from every tier. He brought the microphone up, and the old catchphrase died in his mouth without a fight. Instead he said, "Tonight you will not watch six champions. You will watch six men who are not finished yet." The coliseum went quiet for one full second before it broke open. Starlark heard his own voice come back to him off the far wall. He had his opening. He did not yet have the line that would outlive him, but he had stopped repeating himself, and the night was only starting.