Dagan hits something hard.
The impact reverberates all the way up my spine. I gasp, grabbing the edge of the table.
For a second, everything goes fuzzy—the room, the women, the tea—and all I can feel is weight slamming into him, magic clawing at him, the earth buckling beneath his feet.
Then it clears.
He’s still standing.
But he’s bleeding power.
“What is happening out there?” Phoebe demands.
“Idris,” Delia says. “What else?”
Jules shifts Marcel to her shoulder and pats his back.
“Alaric says he’s pulling from more than just SoulTakers. He’s siphoning the gaps.” Her eyes go distant for a second, unfocused. “From the places the crown used to anchor. From the parts of Nightfall that don’t know who to listen to anymore.”
“The vacuum,” I say slowly.
Three sets of eyes swing to me.
“The what now?” Delia asks.
“In structural engineering,” I say, brain kicking into gear through the fear, “when you remove a support without replacing it, everything around it has to pick up the load. Sometimes it can. Sometimes it can’t. Stress lines form. Cracks propagate along the weakest planes.”
Phoebe blinks. “You’re going to have to de-science that for me.”
“The Prime,” Jules murmurs, eyes locked on the crown. “He was the load-bearing beam.”
“Exactly.” I gesture vaguely toward the ceiling. “The crown anchored the idea of that beam. One central point all the power flowed through. One leader. One person Nightfall answered to.”
“And now, there isn’t one,” Delia says, voice sharpening.
“So the power is confused,” I finish. “It’s trying to do what it’s always done—feed into a single focal point. Idris is offering himself as that focal point. The system doesn’t know he’s wrong. It just knows there’s a hole and something’s filling it.”
Silence.
The good kind.
The thinking kind.
Jules shifts on the bed. “You’re telling me Nightfall’s magic is basically code with a bug.”
“Yeah,” I say. “A very, very big bug. And your guys are fighting the end-user, but the exploit is still there.”
“You have an idea,” Phoebe says softly. “I can see it.”
I swallow.
The crown’s hum grows louder in my head, like it heard her and decided to lean in.
“I might,” I admit. “But if I’m wrong, it could go very, very badly.”
“Define badly,” Delia says, crossing her arms.
“Worst case? We destabilize the main anchor so hard that the whole system collapses. Nightfall fractures for good. The forges die. No more dreams. Just… entropy.”
