Taking a moment to fiddle with the ruby ring on her forefinger, Dreen Brislyn let her smile fade. “I do have a thought to share. Perhaps it has been thought of already, and already discarded, but…”

“Go on,” Brice invited. “I am interested.”

“If Dorana is unmaking itself, then I believe our only course of action is to summon to the First district every ranked and unranked mage of talent, and under the auspices of this Council and the College, strive to save it in a working. Our many voices of healing must be raised to drown out the lone voice of disease, before we all perish… and take the wider world with us. Or before the wider world decides it can live without us.”

“It is an intriguing notion,” Brice said slowly, looking round the table. “Venette, has Mage Ranowen, have any of the College mages, suggested a similar approach?”

“No,” she said, still looking at Dreen Brislyn. “They—we—have been focusing on the cause of the problem, assuming that no answer is possible before that cause is understood.”

Dreen Brislyn frowned. “Has there been any glimmer of understanding so far?”

“To an extent,” she admitted. “The damage to the magical plane, for want of a better description, is not constant or consistent. It breaches, it ripples then cobbles together, only to breach in a new harmonic key, and ripple there, and finally cobble again. Mage Ranowen and her colleagues and I have had some small success healing, let’s say, a few of these breaches, but…” Painfully reminded of recent frustrations and despair, she had to clear her throat. “To borrow Mage Ranowen’s fanciful analogy, if Dorana is a tapestry, then something is wildly dashing about with a sword, slashing holes in the fabric… and we, its mages, dash from slash to slash with needle and thread so we might stitch it back together before the whole collapses entirely.”

Eyes alight with eagerness, Dreen Brislyn leaned forward. “Then surely you can see that my suggestion is most timely! I say we give you and the College’s mages thousands of needles!”

“What say you, Venette?” Brice prompted. “It sounds like a possible answer to me.”

She was tempted to retreat to the balcony herself, just to escape the pressure of everyone’s stares. Even Sallis and Shari seemed impressed with Dreen Brislyn’s suggestion.

“Sounds like, yes,” she said. “And yes, it might be possible. But I caution against taking my analogy too literally. Until we know why these tears and instabilities are occurring, it could be very dangerous to throw so much magic at them at once. Instead of healing Dorana, we could destroy it ourselves.”