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I took one step toward my brother.

“Stay where you are,” Guy snapped.

“Guy…”

“You trusted my choice this morning,” he said, teeth bared around the words. “Don’t revoke it because it got scary.”

That hit with cruel accuracy. I stopped. Not happily. Not gracefully. But I stopped.

Maisie swore under her breath. “I made it too clean.”

The false answer had been convincing enough to pull the tether. Too convincing once it got close. The underlying Guy-and-Lou structure had started showing through, readable beneath the prettied-up lie.

So, Maisie did the last thing any sane Magical theorist would recommend. She made it worse.

Earth-and-Sky light snapped sideways. One stroke shifted where it had no business going. Another broke symmetry. A third dragged Sky-bright distortion across the bronze-gold depth until the whole false signal staggered like a drunk trying to impersonate three sober people at once.

“Exactly,” Maisie said.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Just agreeing with the Alicorn tap dancing in the depths of my psyche. No biggie.”

The tether faltered. For half a breath it could not decide whether it was hunting me, Guy, Lou, or something adjacent to all three and belonging properly to none of us.

Bernie saw the opening.

The Topside relay stretched and was exposed through the confusion. Fogarty’s Necromancy lay bare in a lavender and black thread pulled tight across the room.

“Phase Two,” Bernie said.

Her Necromancy rose, lavender and silver, not toward me, not toward the Hellmark itself, but around the external architecture carrying Fogarty’s Necromancy. Precise. Merciless. Personal.

Bernie smiled without warmth. “Hello, Father.”

Then she cut.

The cabin bucked.

Not shook. Bucked. Like the old watch station had decided it was done being architecture and wanted to become an animal. The floor slammed up under my boots. The containment circle blew outward in a ring of lavender and silver fire. Windows shattered all at once, glass bursting inward and outward as if the room could not decide which direction pain belonged.

The response lattice fractured like stained glass dropped from a bell tower. Black and red geometry split into bright, jagged pieces. Fogarty’s lavender-and-black thread snapped in Bernie’s hands, and the sound was not sound at all, but the pressure changed so violently that my ears rang with horrible white noise.

Something attached to my Hellmark lost a century-old support structure. It hit me like a falling mountain.

I went to one knee hard enough to crack the floorboard beneath me. Sully braced inside my bones, ancient wings flaring through my ribs, his roar locking behind my teeth because I did not have an extra breath to give it. Across the room, Guy was thrown backward into the hearth. Stone cracked. Lou’s bronze-gold light snapped around him like armor and kept his skull from meeting history in an unforgivably literal way.

Hank lunged for Bernie and caught her around the waist before the recoil could fling her into the broken window. They both went down in a heap of limbs, coffee thermos, and profanity.

Maisie’s false composite exploded into gold and sky-blue light. For one brilliant, impossible heartbeat, the cabin was full of– Earth-deep gold, storm-clear sky-blue, Dragon bronze, ancient King bronze-gold– all of it scattering through the shattered lattice like sunrise through broken glass.

Then the larger Wards outside settled.

I felt it even through the emergency shell around the cabin. The great pressure surrounding Arrhythmia eased, not gone, but no longer being pulled through me toward Guy’s network. The attack had lost that road. The Topside relay was severed.

For half a breath, nobody moved.

Bernie lifted her head from Hank’s shoulder. Blood ran from a cut at her temple. She stared at the collapsing remains of Fogarty’s structure with something like disbelief. “It worked.”