The Glimmer and The Gloom: The Wisp-Keeper stood at the edge of the Threshold and watched the fractures spread.
They always started small. A hairline crack in the fabric between worlds. A shimmer in the air that shouldn't be there. A whisper of emotion so concentrated, so suppressed, that it began to solidify.
Rylan had seen it happen dozens of times before. Hundreds, maybe. He'd stopped counting years ago.
Another one was coming through.
He could feel it in the way the air tasted-bitter and metallic, like fear left too long in the dark. Could see it in the way the Wisps overhead flickered and dimmed, responding to the corruption seeping through from the other side.
Someone was breaking.
And when they broke completely, they would fall through.
Into Aethelgard. Into his responsibility.
Rylan pressed his fingers together, summoning his Aura of Order-that cold, precise energy that had kept him alive and functioning for longer than he cared to remember. It spread outward in careful waves, temporarily stabilising the Threshold. Buying time. That's all he ever seemed to do anymore. Buy time for people who were running out of it.
The fracture pulsed, and through it, he caught a glimpse of the other world. The real world, as the Travellers always called it, though Rylan wasn't sure either world was more real than the other.
He saw a girl. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Brown hair. Pale face. Eyes wide with panic. She was running through a hallway-fluorescent lights, lockers, the unmistakable markers of a human school-and her hands were beginning to glow.