The greenhouse was quieter the next evening.
Arin sat cross-legged among the resonance patterns, eyes closed, breathing slow. The training crystal pulsed once against his thigh. He'd been holding partial openness for nine minutes now. Maybe ten. Long enough that his jaw ached from concentration, that sweat gathered at his temples despite the cool air drifting through the glass walls.
Bram moved between planter beds, pruning plants with practiced precision. The soft snip of his shears provided rhythm. Outside, fog thickened against the curved glass, turning the city beyond into shapes and suggestions.
"Better," Bram said without looking up. "You're learning to breathe through it."
Arin didn't respond. Couldn't, really—not without losing the position. He held awareness like water in cupped hands, feeling the greenhouse boundaries, Bram's steady presence, the plants breathing their slow existence. The Weave hummed beneath everything, threads connecting soil to stone to sky, but he'd learned to sense without drowning in sensation.
The crystal pulsed again. Gentle reminder. He adjusted, refining the edges.
Nine and a half minutes. Ten. Eleven.
His control slipped.
Awareness tried expanding, reaching beyond the greenhouse walls toward the city humming in the distance. He caught it, pulled back carefully, and the sensation faded.
Arin opened his eyes, breathing hard.
"Eleven minutes," Bram said. He set down his shears, amber eyes appraising. "That's progress."
"Doesn't feel like enough."
"It rarely does." Bram moved to his workbench, checking instruments that monitored resonance levels. Glass tubes filled with liquid that shifted from clear to pale amber. "But you're building the muscle. Another week and this might be reflex."
Arin pressed palms against cold stone. "That's if we get to have another week."
Bram didn't answer.
***
The world shifted.
Not physically—not exactly. More like the air changed density, pressure building in ways that had nothing to do with weather. The plants throughout the greenhouse reacted immediately. Glowvines brightening, leaves turning toward something Arin couldn't see but could feel pressing against his awareness.
His training crystal went silent.
Bram's head snapped up. "What is it?"
Arin didn't answer. Couldn't. Every thread of partial openness he'd been maintaining suddenly blazed with information. Something several districts away was wrong. Threads tangling. Reality warping. Pressure building like air before lightning.
"Arin," Bram said sharply.
He forced words through the sensation. "Eastern Candle District. Something's pushing through."
Bram moved to his instruments. The liquid in the glass tubes had gone from pale amber to deep red, climbing toward the top. He pressed fingers against a resonance gauge, frowning. "Medium-sized disturbance. The Wardens will handle it."
But Arin could feel that there was nothing medium about this.
The pressure kept building. His Anchor senses showed him things Bram's instruments couldn't—the disturbance spreading like infection through the Weave, reality buckling, threads snapping one by one. Three Warden squads wouldn't be enough. Maybe five wouldn't be enough.
He stood, drawn toward the sensation.
"I feel like I could help."
Bram's voice cut sharp as broken glass. "If you go, you risk exposure. Everything we've worked to avoid."
The truth of that settled over Arin like weight. His hands clenched. The stabilizer burned hotter against his chest—responding to his agitation, to the disturbance resonating through the Weave. The urge to move warred with the need to hide.
"Three squads are already en route," Bram continued, pulling an emergency communication crystal from his workbench. "They're trained for this."
But Arin could feel it wasn't enough. His senses showed him the disturbance peaking—reality fracturing, something vast trying to force its way through. People were there. Civilians. Wardens who would arrive thinking they faced a medium-sized rupture when what waited was so much worse.
The plants throughout the greenhouse reacted violently.
Glowvines blazing painful-bright, searing afterimages across Arin's vision. Resonance-flowers shriveling, petals turning black. The sigil-roots pulsed erratic rhythms that made his teeth ache.
Bram's instruments spiked into zones that shouldn't exist. The red liquid in the glass tubes boiled over, spilling onto the workbench.
"Fuck," Bram muttered. He pressed the communication crystal against his ear. Listened. His expression went grim. "Wardens are struggling to contain it. They're calling for reinforcements."
Arin took one step toward the door.
Then stopped.
He sat back down on the cold stone floor.
Forced himself to resume practice while the disturbance raged several districts away. The training crystal pulsed frantically—his control was shit, awareness slamming between completely closed and too open, no middle ground, no regulation.
Bram said nothing.
They both felt the moment when the disturbance finally stabilized. And it did so slowly.
The greenhouse went quiet except for the hum of overloaded instruments and the too-bright glow of suffering plants.
*******
The Beckoned emerged on Market Street in Eastern Candle District while civilians ran screaming and reality forgot how to hold its shape.
Lira's squad arrived to chaos.
The building on the corner was collapsing in slow motion—stone falling upward before gravity righted itself and dragged everything down. Streets warped, cobblestones rippling like water, becoming unfamiliar. A woman clutched her child behind an overturned cart. An old man lay bleeding near a lamppost that had bent into impossible angles.
And in the center of it all, the Beckoned.
Massive. Wrong-shaped. Made of angles that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space. Not quite solid—flickering between material and immaterial, like looking at something through water. Lira could see fragments something resembling a person buried in the wrongness: an arm that bent too many times, a face stretched across surfaces that defied geometry, eyes that watched from places eyes shouldn't be.
"Formation!" Lira shouted.
Her squad moved with practiced coordination. Ren flanked left, resonance gauntlets blazing. Jalen took right, containment field already forming between his hands. Tessa stayed back, ready to support whichever side faltered first.
The Beckoned turned toward them. Movement that looked less like motion and more like reality deciding it existed somewhere else now.
It shrieked.
The sound wasn't audible—not exactly. It pressed against the inside of Lira's skull, making her teeth ache and her vision blur. The Weave itself recoiled, threads snapping in the Beckoned's wake.
"Contain it!" Lira drew her blade—useless against this, but training ran deep. "Keep civilians clear!"
Ren hit first. His gauntlets discharged pure resonance, striking the Beckoned center mass. The thing flickered, form destabilizing, then reformed three feet to the left. One of its too-many arms lashed out—not swinging, just existing where Ren had been standing a moment ago.
He rolled clear.
Jalen closed the containment field, trying to lock the Beckoned in place. The air shimmered with woven energy. For a heartbeat it held. Then the Beckoned simply stepped through, reality parting around it like curtains.
"It's not fully manifested!" Tessa called. "Half in, half out!"
Which meant normal containment wouldn't work. They'd need to force it fully into this reality before they could put it down.
Lira made the decision fast. "Resonance shock! All three points, synchronized!"
Ren and Jalen positioned themselves at opposing angles. Lira took the third point, drawing the resonance dagger from her hip. Not her standard blade—this one was older, threaded with Weavework that made it feel alive in her palm.
"On my mark!" She waited until the Beckoned flickered toward solid. "Now!"
Three points discharged simultaneously.
Pure resonance converged on the Beckoned from three different angles, forcing it fully into material reality. The thing shrieked again—that skull-pressing sound—and suddenly became real. Solid. Vulnerable.
Also significantly more dangerous.
The Beckoned lashed out with all its wrong-angled limbs at once. Ren took a hit that sent him sprawling. Jalen raised a barrier that cracked under the impact. Lira dodged an arm that had too many joints and came at her from a direction she hadn't been watching.
But it was solid now. Which meant they could hurt it.
"Tessa! Bind its core!"
Tessa moved fast, weaving threads of pure will between her hands. The binding shot forward, wrapping around what might have been the Beckoned's chest or might have been three different parts of its anatomy simultaneously. It tightened, glowing bright enough to hurt.
The Beckoned thrashed. One arm caught Tessaa across the shoulder, sending her stumbling. But the binding held.
Lira didn't hesitate. She drove her resonance dagger into the thing's core—or what she hoped was its core. The blade sank deep, threads of Weavework burning silver-bright.
The Beckoned shuddered. Its form destabilizing, flickering between solid and not. Then it began dissolving—threads of unraveling reality pulling apart, returning to whatever wrong place it had emerged from.
Ten seconds later, nothing remained except scorch marks on the cobblestones and the smell of burnt ozone.
Lira's hands shook. She didn't lower the dagger immediately—training made her wait for the other shoe to drop. But the Weave had gone quiet. No more ruptures. No more wrongness pressing against reality.
"Clear," she called.
Ren groaned from where he'd fallen. Jalen was checking Tessa's shoulder—dislocated, probably, but not worse. They'd gotten lucky.
Then Lira heard the screaming.
Not from the Beckoned. From the building.
The one that had been collapsing in slow motion finally remembered how gravity worked. Three stories of stone came down all at once, crashing into the street with sound that felt like the world ending.
Dust billowed outward. Lira ran toward it, knowing she was too late but running anyway.
The evacuation team had arrived during the fight—Warden reserves pulling civilians clear, getting them behind barriers. But not everyone had made it out.
Three bodies lay beneath the rubble, covered in grey cloth. Two adults. One child.
Lira's stomach turned to ice.
"We got here as fast as we could," the evacuation commander said quietly. His face was pale. "The building came down before—"
"I know." Lira's voice sounded hollow in her own ears.
She helped anyway. Pulling survivors from wreckage, treating Weave-shock, searching for anyone still trapped. Her hands shook the entire time. When a woman grabbed her arm asking "Where is he? Where's my husband?" Lira already knew the answer from the grey-clothed shapes being loaded onto stretchers.
She didn't know how to say it. The woman kept asking—voice rising, desperate—and Lira just stood there with blood on her sleeves and dust in her hair and no words that would make this better.
Someone else took the woman aside. Told her. Lira heard the sound that came after—animal grief, raw and terrible.
The aftermath rendered itself in small details she couldn't stop noticing.
Blood on cobblestones, already mixing with dust.
A child's shoe left behind near the collapsed building. Small. Blue. One of those cheap ones sold at market stalls.
Civilians being treated for Weave-shock—vacant eyes, trembling, unable to speak.
The unnatural silence after violence, broken only by quiet weeping and the creak of rescue equipment.
Lira worked until there was nothing left to do. Then she stood in the wreckage and tried not to think about how they'd been calling for reinforcements. How if those reinforcements had arrived faster, maybe the building wouldn't have fallen. Maybe those three people would still be alive.
Her squad regrouped near what had been the corner of Market Street. Ren was being treated for cracked ribs. Tessa's shoulder had been popped back into place, though she'd be on light duty for days. Jalen looked hollowed out, the way everyone did after such tragedy.
"Good work," Lira made herself say.
No one responded.
Because they'd all seen the bodies.
*******
Lira arrived back at their apartment well past midnight.
She was exhausted—physically and emotionally spent. Still in uniform, gauntlets removed but blood on her sleeves from helping with the wounded. Her shoulder ached from where she'd caught a glancing blow. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking.
The apartment was dark except for a single lamp burning in the kitchen.
Arin sat at the table.
He looked haunted but somehow hopeful—like he'd been sitting there convincing himself it hadn't been as bad as it felt. Face pale, jaw tight, hands clenched around a cup of what must have been cold tea by now. The training crystal sat dark and silent in front of him.
He looked up when she entered. The hope in his eyes died when he saw her face.
Neither spoke at first.
Lira sat across from him without removing her uniform. Couldn't quite manage it yet.
"I felt it," Arin finally said. "The disturbance."
Lira's expression shifted. She nodded once.
"Three people died." Her voice came out flat. Professional. The tone she used in reports. "We got there as fast as we could, but the building came down before evacuation finished."
Arin's hands tightened around the cup. The ceramic creaked.
"A family," Lira continued, because if she didn't say it now she never would. "Parents and their daughter. She was maybe seven."
She watched it hit him—saw his face go even paler, saw the way he flinched like she'd struck him. The hope that had been there when she entered was completely gone now.
"I felt I could have helped." Arin's words came slow, careful. "I felt it building. Knew it was worse than Bram's instruments showed."
"And if you'd gone?" Lira's voice stayed level but her hands shook harder. "What if the Beckoned had reacted more violently to your presence? What if it sensed what you are and the rupture spread more out of control?"
No answer to that question.
Lira looked at the blood on her sleeves. Couldn't remember whose it was—one of the wounded, probably, but she'd been pulling bodies from rubble for hours and it all blurred together.
The silence stretched.
Outside their window, the city continued. Distant sounds of cleanup crews. Wardens patrolling. Life moving forward despite everything.
The training crystal remained dark on the table between them.
Eventually Lira reached across. Took Arin's hand.
Her fingers were cold. His were trembling.
Neither spoke.
They sat like that—two people in lamplight—until the lamp burned low and exhaustion made decisions for them.
"You should sleep," Lira said quietly. "You might feel better in the morning."
But neither of them moved for a long time.
When Arin finally went to his room, he tried practicing. Forced himself to find partial openness, to hold it, to make this his new normal.
The crystal began pulsing again. Steady. Relentless.
He managed thirty seconds before control slipped. Tried again. Twenty seconds. Again. Fifteen.
It was harder now. Like the weight of what happened had settled into his bones and made everything heavier.
He gave up after the fifth attempt. Lay in the dark with the crystal warm against his palm, pulsing its gentle reminders.
But sleep wouldn't come. Just the knowledge that he could have helped but chose not to.