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“It’s working, Maia,” Julen said, very quietly. “Whatever he’s doing is working.”

It was. Slowly, reluctantly in some cases, the outer ring began to break off, but not all of them. Many held their ground, their body language reading not as uncertainty but as refusal, the set of people who had waited centuries for this moment and would not be talked out of it by any argument, however well-made.

But enough moved forward that the alignment structure visibly responded. The glowing wardlines began to dim. The curtains of violet light contracted slightly at the edges.

Safir released Maia and moved.

He crossed the glass plain toward the convergence point with long, deliberate strides, his expression furious, raw and personal. He reached Caelith and grabbed his shoulders.

“Enough,” he said, loud enough to carry. In the human language, which told Maia this was as much for her benefit as for Caelith’s. “What are you doing?”

“My brother,” Caelith said, “wanted us free. He died for the Umbralyn and humans next to him because he believed coexistence was possible. I spent centuries deciding he was wrong.” He looked at Safir directly. “I told you. I was the one who was wrong.”

“You ask us to disappear,” Safir said. “To simply vanish back into the dark and leave them with everything. With the city. The power. The world. Everything they took from us.”

“No,” Caelith said. “I ask us to take ourselves back. They cannot use the Fracture without us tethered to it. The wardlines fail without us powering them. Every chain they built, every vow they forced, every century of servitude, it all relied on keeping us here. If we go, they lose everything they built on our backs. That is not disappearing.”

His voice was very quiet. “We can leave now. On our own terms. Taking our power with us.”

Nobody on the plain spoke. Some of the holdouts had turned to listen. She could see the argument landing even in the ones who didn’t want it to.

Safir looked at him for a long moment. “You were always going to be the one to end this,” he said. “I just thought it would end differently.”

“So did I,” Caelith said.

“We still have many Umbralyn in the cities. This will only leave us with one less unit. The plan will still happen,” Safir said.

“I know.”

Safir’s jaw tensed. Then he turned from Caelith entirely. He’d not accepted any of it, he’d simply decided arguing with Caelith was a waste of the little time he had left.

“Listen to me,” Safir said, raising his voice to the wavering ranks instead. He changed to the old language, words crowding the plain the same way Caelith’s had. It had the shape of the plea. He was begging now, in the only language that could reach them.

A few of the wavering Umbralyn hesitated and turned back toward him.

But more didn’t. The ones already moving towards the tear didn’t stop - didn’t even look back - as though whatever Caelith said to them was already embedded too far past the reach of Safir’s voice. Only a small handful peeled away to stand with him instead, a small defiant cluster, watching the rest of their kind walk away from everything they’d built their beliefs around.

Bleddyn was among them. Of course he was. He stood at Safir’s shoulder with his arms folded and the silver scars bright across his face, watching the others go with the same cold, appraising interest he had once turned on her in the dark beneath the Archive.

Safir looked at the ones who stayed. Then at the ones who hadn’t. Something in his face was pained, but he sealed it back behind fury.

“This isn’t over,” he said to Caelith, to the tear, to no one in particular. “The plan still stands.”

Around the plain, most of the remaining holdouts broke.

One by one and then in groups, the faction Umbralyn moved toward the tear, and the alignment structure collapsed around them as they went, wardline by wardline going dark, the violet curtains contracting inward, the terrible beauty of the thing Caelith had built dismantling itself in the process of being used for the last time.

The creatures at the tear’s edge screamed and were drawn back in with everything else.

The glass plain cracked, splitting in two. Shards of it rose and fell in the Fracture’s contracting breath, and the light beneath them blazed up through the gaps, and Maia stood at the convergence point with Julen beside her and watched it all and could not speak.

The holdouts who had refused to move now staggered where they stood. The pull had changed. It was no longer an invitation. The tether that had bound them to this world for centuries was unravelling, and as it went, it took them with it. One by one, then faster, their forms brightened and contracted and were drawn inward, whether they chose it or not.

The Fracture was not asking, it was calling them home, and it would not be refused.

Bleddyn fought it.

He dug his heels into the glass and leaned back against the pull as if he was leaning into a gale, and for a few long seconds it looked as though he might hold. But the ground beneath him cracked. His boots slid. The light caught in his scars and lit them from inside, every line of his face burning white.