In desperation, I triggered the spell before I reached it, hoping against hope that Jace would be able to compensate. In the blink of an eye, the three pieces of star-iron broke through the sky. For a moment, a rippling patch of the beautiful blue of the material sky showed the velvet black of Celestial's eternal night, before the meteors turned into flaming death streaking towards the city.

Jace's power flared into light far more blinding than that of my confluence. It washed over me like a physical force, a blast-wave of magic flung into the breach.

The meteors stopped midair, glowing red-hot from their passage through the atmosphere, three little pieces of the broken sky drifting so peacefully in the air.

With a sweep of my hand, I finished the summoning, capturing the burning firmament and dropping it into my summoning circle, leaving the sky over Ibexen clean blue once more.

Heat beat out at me from the star-iron as I swayed in place, fear-exhaustion hitting like a hammer as I released my grip on my emotions. I stared at the pieces of the Celestial Plane with something that felt too close to despair, tears prickling at the corners of my eyes. This was the third capture Jace and I had to do in the past four months, and we'd almost failed because of the stupid mice in Barixeor Spire—because of me. We would have failed, if Jace hadn't been the most powerful sorcerer in the world. It had been a fucking decade since Tarandrus had fallen, and if anything, the situation was getting worse.

Her voice slammed into my mind—What the fuck was that?!—the words slung through the connection between us in a sting. Jace could do it because she was so damn powerful, putting the force of her power behind it.

But I could do it, too, because I had the most precise and fine-scale mage-senses ever documented. I found the slender ley-thread that marked our friendship and stung my response through it. Mouse on the line.

The response came a heartbeat later, a scared-sounding, Fix it.

I focused – stinging was difficult, even for people like me and Jace, and especially at these distances – then sent, I will.

I didn't know how I'd keep the promise, but I chewed on the problem as I linked to the diagram I had chalked in one of the storage levels deep beneath the earth, where the volcanic power seared through the Spire's spellwork. Mice and rats were notorious for their ability to evade warding spells by literally following ley-lines places, an obnoxious characteristic shared with cockroaches and cats. Short of summoning every mouse in Barixeor Spire and dumping them in the lake before every meteor-snare I cast, I wasn't even sure what I could do. I didn't have a skillset particularly conducive to mouse extermination.