The journey back to Oakhaven took two weeks.The freed people from the Unfinished City traveled with them, over a hundred souls who had been trapped in marble for decades, now adjusting to a world that had moved on without them. Wren tended to their physical needs. Finn told stories to keep their spirits up. Dorian helped the elderly walk. Grenda carried the weak. Jace scouted ahead, finding safe paths and clean water.Sera trained the younger ones in basic self-defense. Not because they would need to fight, but because the world was dangerous and they had been helpless for too long.Kaelen walked at the back, her pendant glowing softly, her mind on the final failsafe.Beneath the sanctuary. All along.She thought about Caspian, about all those years he'd spent tending the memories, sitting by the central stone, never knowing that the Creator's final contingency lay just beneath his feet. Would he have been angry? Frightened? Relieved that he hadn't known?She would never know. But sh

The days after the celebration were quiet. Almost too quiet.Kaelen had expected to feel different after destroying the final failsafe. Lighter, maybe. Freer. Instead, she felt something she hadn't expected: emptiness. The kind that comes after a long journey, when the destination is reached and there's nothing left to chase.She spent her mornings at the sanctuary, as always. Touching the central stone. Reading names. Sitting with pilgrims who came to remember. But her mind wandered. She found herself staring at the horizon, waiting for something that never came.Finn noticed first, because Finn noticed everything."You're distracted," he said one afternoon, finding her on the hill above the sanctuary. The sun was warm, the grass soft, but she hadn't been enjoying any of it."I'm thinking.""About?""The next thing." She pulled at a blade of grass. "There's always a next thing. The Creator's failsafes. The anomalies. The reset. But now... there's nothing. Just peace.""Is that bad?"

The farming community was called Dusty Meadow, which Finn immediately declared was "the most depressing name for a town I've ever heard."It was two days east of Stillwater, tucked into a dry valley where the soil was thin and the water was scarce. The people there were farmers, mostly—hard-working, sun-baked, resilient. They grew what they could, raised what they could, and prayed for rain.Jace had heard about their irrigation problems from a merchant in Stillwater. "The stream that feeds their fields has been running low for years. They've tried everything. Wells, canals, even magic. Nothing works.""Nothing works, or nothing they can afford?" Sera asked."Both."The guild approached Dusty Meadow as the sun set, painting the dry fields in shades of orange and gold. The town was small, maybe fifty buildings, mostly homes, a few barns, a single inn that looked like it hadn't seen guests in months.Children played in the dirt streets, kicking a ball made of rags. They stopped when the

The village to the south was called Greystone Hollow, named for the pale grey rock that formed the hills around it. It was smaller than Broken Crossing, maybe twenty families, nestled in a valley where the sun reached late and left early.The wolves had been coming for months.Not all at once. One or two at first, taking chickens, a goat. Then more. Then a whole pack, bold enough to attack in daylight, strong enough to drag away a sheep twice their size.The villagers had tried everything. Fences. Traps. Torches at night. Nothing worked. The wolves were smart. Too smart."They're not normal wolves," the village elder said. Her name was Hester, a wiry woman with grey braids and eyes that had seen too much. "Normal wolves don't hunt like this. They don't coordinate. They don't learn.""Rift-touched?" Finn asked."Maybe. Or something else. Something left over from the war."Kaelen touched her pendant. The sanctuary stone was warm, but quiet. No warnings. No echoes. Just presence."We'll

Three months had passed since the guild began their wandering.They had visited a dozen towns, solved a dozen problems, helped a dozen communities heal in small but meaningful ways. They had dug wells and built bridges, calmed wolves and mediated disputes, fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless. They had done all of this without once drawing their weapons in anger, without once facing a world-ending threat, without once hearing the word "failsafe."It was strange. It was wonderful. It was exhausting.Kaelen sat on a hill overlooking Dusty Meadow, the farming village where they had dug the well that saved the crops. The sun was setting, painting the fields in shades of gold and orange. Below, the villagers were preparing for a celebration, the first Festival of the New Well, they called it. An annual tradition they had started after the guild left, to remind themselves of the year the water returned.The guild had been invited as guests of honor. They had arrived that morning to fin