The barrier's steady hum had become, in the weeks since its raising, less a sound and more a permanent fixture of daily life in the swamp settlement, background noise the way a heartbeat is background noise, right up until the night it changed pitch.
Remus felt it before he heard it properly, a deep, wrong shudder through the ground itself, and Search confirmed what his own gut had already half guessed.
Skill Activated: Detection.
Wall of Shadows: Structural Stress Detected. Sustained Impact Ongoing.
"They're not testing it anymore," Pompey said, arriving at Remus's side with the hurried gait of a man who'd felt the same tremor from clear across the settlement. "This is a real assault. Concentrated. Coordinated."
"How long does it hold," Andrea asked.
"I don't know," Remus said, and hated, more than almost anything else this last year had asked of him, that it was the truest answer he had.
A shape crossed the swamp's own low mist an hour later, small, winged, moving with a controlled, deliberate grace that had nothing in common with a Nightforged craft's fluid, unnatural glide, and touched down at the settlement's outer edge with a rider Remus recognized before the wyvern had fully folded its wings.
"Vantor," Remus said, and felt something in his chest lift for the first time in days.
"Corvin sent me the moment the Council finally agreed to send anything at all," Vantor said, sliding down off the wyvern's saddle, red skin dust-streaked, tattoos catching the low firelight in restless, shifting patterns. "It took the Nightforged actually reaching Kethara's own shores to convince them your war and our war stopped being two separate problems. Akira and Mira are readying a proper fleet of wyvern riders to follow behind me. It won't be fast. It won't be large. But it's coming."
"You kept your word," Remus said.
"I told you the terms were fair when I agreed to carry that shard for you," Vantor said, something almost like warmth breaking through his usual flat calculation. "Fair terms cut both ways, Draymoor. Don't act surprised that I actually honor them."
He didn't stay the night, riding back out before the swamp's own mist had fully lifted, and Remus watched him go with a cautious, hard-won relief, the relief of a man who'd learned not to trust good news too completely before it had fully arrived.
The barrier held, for now, its light pulsing steady and unbroken over the eastern horizon even as the ground beneath the settlement kept its low, constant tremor. King Belsarius remained wherever Duke Corvath's people had put him, a hostage to a war that had started, technically, as a request for aid. The Eastland army licked its wounds somewhere beyond the ridge, humiliated rather than defeated, and every soul in the swamp settlement understood, without needing to be told twice, that a humiliated enemy rarely stayed quiet for long.
Remus stood at the edge of the new watchtower that night, charcoal turning slow between two fingers, and thought, not for the first time, about a tank's blueprints handed across a table to a woman with a soft laugh and cold eyes, and a claw handed to him instead by a blind sage who'd told him some truths were his to keep. He hadn't yet worked out where the line sat between the two kinds of secret-keeping, the kind that got a man killed and the kind that simply cost him something smaller, slower, harder to name. He suspected, watching the barrier's light shiver against a night sky that no longer felt anywhere near as safe as it once had, that he was going to have a great deal more time to work it out than he wanted.
Somewhere behind him, Andrea's voice carried low across the camp, arguing gently with Annabelle about tomorrow's grain ration. Somewhere further off, Gregory's laugh rose once, briefly, over a game some of the younger refugees had started to pass the time. Somewhere beyond the ridge, an entire kingdom's worth of trouble was still deciding, patiently, exactly how it meant to come for all of them next.
The barrier held. For tonight, that would have to be enough.