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We don’t stay up there all day. There’s tea to be had, and a coffee shop to clean, and Dis’s fourth attempt at macarons waiting to be judged, and the ordinary business of exhausted people slowly remembering how to be friends rather than a war council.

Dark stays too, which nobody quite comments on. He folds himself surprisingly easily into the general chaos of the flat. He accepts a mug of tea from Big Brian with the careful formality of a man being handed something sacred. He loses spectacularly at a card game Adam’s trying to teach everyone the rules of. He lets Hex talk to him, at length, through the plot of the series he and Adam have been working through on the sofa. Hex has strong feelings about it. Dark has never seen a single episode.

It’s somewhere in the middle of all that domestic chaos that Felix’s phone buzzes. Whatever’s on the screen makes him go very still, mouth twitching despite himself.

“What?” I ask, immediately suspicious of the twitch.

“My dad.” He doesn’t look up from it. “Congratulating me on saving the world, apparently. In fairly formal terms. He’s very proud.”

“That’s lovely,” I say, and mean it, mostly. “How’s Wraith?”

Felix wrinkles his nose at me like I’ve asked something faintly indecent, but his thumbs are already moving, tapping out a reply before he can talk himself out of it.

We wait. Felix stares at whatever comes back with an expression I have genuinely never seen on his face before, going slowly, unmistakably green.

“What?” Adam says, card game forgotten entirely.

Felix doesn’t answer straight away, just keeps staring at the screen like it might rearrange itself into something less horrifying if he waits long enough.

“Felix,” I say. “You look like you’re about to be sick.”

“My dad,” Felix says, faintly, “texted back adorable. Adorable. About Wraith. Then unsent it. Then sent, safe, fine. Like that fixes anything.”

Nobody says anything for a very long moment.

“I saw the notification before he managed to delete it,” Felix adds, voice climbing slightly on every word. “It was right there on my screen. Adorable. My actual father, about the shadow being who was chained to an amulet he stole.”

Hex looks delighted and doesn’t even try to hide it. “That’s wonderful.”

“It is not wonderful, Hex,” Felix says. “It is the single worst thing that has happened to me this week, and this week has included an actual apocalypse.”

Dis is at his side before the sentence’s even finished, one arm settling round his shoulders, levelling a look at Hex that could curdle milk on contact. “Leave him be.”

“Felix has a new step dad. I’m delighted for him,” Hex protests. “That’s an entirely different thing from tormenting him.”

“You are doing both simultaneously, and rather well, which is precisely the problem,” Dis says.

Dark studies the whole exchange for a long moment with the particular careful attention of someone filing away a wholly new category of human distress for future reference.

The afternoon rolls on much the same way after that. Camp beds pushed aside to make room for the card game Adam keeps insisting has simple rules. Sleeping bags commandeered as extra seating. Dis’s macarons declared a genuine triumph this time round.

Somewhere in amongst all that ordinary noise, the day quietly stops feeling like something to survive and starts feeling like something to simply be inside of.

In the evening, we climb the tower again, all of us, because nobody quite trusts the day to end without witnesses.

The sun sets exactly the way a sun is supposed to, gold sliding into pink sliding into the ordinary blue-grey of an actual, unremarkable dusk. Stars appear one by one in a sky that’s simply doing what skies do. Every single one of us is holding our breath, waiting to find out whether ordinary is actually going to be allowed to happen again. Right up until the last of the light settles exactly where it should.

Dark’s hand finds mine again, less urgently than it did this morning. “It set,” he says, low, just for me. “Properly. On its own.”

“On its own,” I agree.

It’s such a small thing. A sunset. Gold, then pink, then the same ordinary blue-grey dusk it’s been doing since long before anyone wrote a prophecy about it. I could cry over it. Instead, I’m beaming at the sky like it’s just handed me a present.

Something has come loose in my chest, and it takes me a moment to work out what. It’s the fizz. That bright, bubbling, everything-is-lovely feeling I’ve spent weeks faking, then propping up by force, then losing altogether. It’s back. And it’s real. On a good day, I used to mean about sixty percent of my cheerfulness. Tonight I could shout “How may we serve you!” across the whole of Bristol and mean every last bit of it.

I push my sleeve up. Nothing. Just my arm, pale and ordinary and entirely mine. I have never been so delighted by a bit of inner elbow.

“I find I have missed evenings,” Dark says. “Ordinary ones. I did not know, until recently, how much I wanted one.”