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“I didn’t say we were going to die.”

“You didn’t say we weren’t.”

“She has a point.” Garnet’s voice was steady. “On the other hand, we’re as ready as we’ve ever been, and we’re here. That’s what we have. It’s enough.”

Static hissed once on the line before Fiora came back.

“I hate it when Garnet’s right.”

“You always say that.”

“Because she’s always right.”

Drayce found her at the central anchor stone.

She’d seen the partial shift enough times to have stopped bracing for it — had grown used to the gold eyes, the extra mass in his movements, and how rooms rearranged themselves around him when he let the wolf through. She thought she understood the scale.

She was about to be wrong about this.

He looked at the ocean, then at her, then at the ward line. The calculation she watched him run was quick and competent, and it ended with his hand coming up to her face—warm at her temple, his thumb at her cheekbone—the touch that meant he was paying attention to her, not the broader situation.

“You don’t have to hold the full boundary.” His voice was quiet. “You hold what you can, and the line fills in around you.”

“I know.”

“You’re not holding it alone.”

“I know that too.” She turned her face into his hand for a moment — a small, private thing, the kind she’d started allowing herself without cataloging each time she did it. “Go be a wolf. I’ll be here.”

Something crossed his face. The wolf was already running close to the surface, and she’d learned to read it.

“Don’t run.” Which was both a joke and not.

“I’ll try.” Which was also both.

He kissed her once — quick, sure, and not at all apologetic that Tor was standing eight feet away, professionally examining the horizon. Then he stepped back.

And shifted.

She knew the partial shift. She had calibrated for it. She had watched him drive a Rift creature into a cliff face in partial shift and had processed and accounted for exactly what it meant.

The full shift was considerably more wolf than she had calibrated for.

He was enormous. That was the first and only word for approximately three full seconds. Gray coat with silver threading through it — not only at his temples but threaded through the whole of him, like silver through old stone, integral and earned. He moved through the cliff space with a weight that made the ground feel different underfoot, and the pack reformed around him before she’d fully processed the sight, adjusting positions without signal or sound, responding to their alpha in a way that was less decision and more gravity.

She made a sound. It was involuntary, and she was not going to specify what kind.

The wolf turned and looked at her. The eyes were gold and entirely his — recognizable despite everything that had changed, the same focused attention she’d been cataloging for three months, now wearing a considerably larger face.

The jokes are going to be so good. She was saving them. She had a list.

But not yet. The ocean was building.

The breach hit the northern section first.

It wasn’t the incremental scout behavior she’d watched. This was coordinated pressure at three points simultaneously—the weakest sections, the ones the modifications had compromised, the ones the coven had been shoring up for weeks—the ward line held at two of them. The third buckled.

The creatures that came through were not scouts.