A boom of sound rocked me, and I pulled myself back to reality. Al and Trent stood before the writhing column of what had to be Newt and the Goddess. Power echoed between the walls, straining the glass and bowing out the wood. My skin tingled, and Bis’s grip pinched when a flash of light exploded and Newt tumbled out onto the hard floor.

“It won’t hold!” I shouted, and she turned to me, the Goddess occupied for a moment with Al and Trent. Neither of them needed a line to do their magic. The entire church was glowing with the cast-off power.

“Balance it,” Newt said, staggering upright and fixing her hat. “You need to balance it. If you get enough mass on the other side, it will stay open.”

“With what!” I shouted, but she’d flung herself at the Goddess with a joyous howl.

A sudden pop of high pitch burst the windows. Trent and Al were knocked down and I cowered, Bis’s wings shielding me. The very air was glowing, and I inched back until I hit the wall. Balance it with what? I thought, palms stinging as they found the broken floor. I could hardly think with all this smut.

The smut! I realized suddenly. Smut was intent to pay back an imbalance in reality created by magic. It was a counterweight to reality. It was ... balance. Newt had given me balance.

“Bis, be ready,” I said, and his grip on me tightened.

“For what?”

“I don’t know!” I cried, focusing my attention entirely on one day, one beautiful thought that had held me. I was. I existed, and I would not be ended so easily!

And the weft and weave parted.

Go! I exclaimed to the mystics, and they went, flooding into the tiny hole I’d made in reality. Newt’s smut pushed me forward, and I gasped as I felt Bis’s thoughts snag mine. His wings beat and he held me firm in this reality as black imbalance pulled over and around me like a shirt over my head, leaving me disheveled and clean. For an instant I watched the new reality quaver, heart in my throat.

And then it began to collapse.

No! I screamed. It would not end like this. It would not!

Hold it open, Rachel! Al shouted in my thoughts, and then suddenly I wasn’t alone. The demons. The demons had come!

Streaks of half-heard emotion flowed past me into the new, still-fragile bubble of thought, etching ley lines with the footprints of their mind as they dove into the new reality, cementing into place new lines to keep it alive.

What? What have you done? the Goddess exclaimed, all our thoughts as one for this moment of time. And then Newt pounced, wrapping the Goddess and her mystics up in the smut that polluted the ever-after. Holding tight to it, she dove into the new reality sparkling in our joined thoughts.