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This is working. Disbelief — the kind that showed up when something worked after she’d spent weeks bracing for it to explode. I am holding a ward line. I have been awake for sixteen hours. Drayce is fighting Rift creatures twelve feet away, and I am the one keeping the wall up.

This is a completely normal Wednesday.

Bexley’s voice in her ear, from the dock perimeter: “Eastern anchor is losing pressure. We need sixty more seconds.”

“You have it.” She had no idea whether she had it. She was holding the northern line with everything she had, her palms running hotter than she’d have called safe two months ago, but the fire wasn’t erupting.

It was working.

“Fiora’s holding the dock entry,” Bexley continued. “Garnet’s on the eastern anchor. Valene is at the⁠—”

On the emergency channel: Maelin — “Eastern flank holding. The dock district approach is slowing.” Three seconds of dead air. “Whatever you’re doing at the anchor, keep doing it.”

“Tell me she’s not doing what I think she’s doing.”

“She has a fire extinguisher.”

“I know about the fire extinguisher.”

“She’s being effective.” A beat of static. “Very effective.”

Do not think about Valene. Think about the ward line.

Her mind went to the ward line.

To the creatures, the cold fires, and the way the Rift’s pressure had spiked the exact moment the town began to panic.

The point isn’t to be scared. The point is not to let fear decide.

This was a thing she understood. She’d been learning it for months, one surge at a time.

“Coven,” she said into the night, loud enough to carry across the positions, “I need status.”

Bexley: “Eastern anchor holding.”

Garnet: “Stable.”

Fiora: “The creatures are avoiding my reflection field. I don’t know if that’s information or luck, but I’m using it.”

Althea: “Use it.”

Fiora: “Already am. Working remarkably well, for the record.”

Valene: “Fine.”

Everyone knew what fine meant in Spelltide Cove. Althea chose to interpret it as ironic.

The breach in the dock district solidified at ten nineteen.

Not dramatically — Rift breaches did not collapse when properly contained. They closed by degrees, the light changing character, the wrongness resolving into absence. The cold fires went out. The creatures pressing the boundary began to withdraw systematically, confirming that someone had decided the engagement was no longer productive.

Althea stood at the northern anchor, her hands still on the stone, the ward line steady under her palms, her entire body running on the exhaustion at full capacity. The fire in her palms was warm, present, and entirely under her direction.

Huh.

She’d been afraid of this for months, afraid of opening up, of letting it go, of being the liability that broke what she was supposed to protect. And the thing she’d been afraid of had turned out to be — the thing she was for.

She was still working through the irony when Drayce appeared at her shoulder.