The immediate, frantic needs were met. Our meager supplies were counted and stacked. Watches rotated in a silent, grim rhythm. The perimeter had been scouted and declared seamless—a perfect, beautiful, inescapable hexagon of glowing crystal. For a few hours, there was a fragile, exhausted calm. The mandate held. I sat on my crystal ledge, a statue of enforced composure, while beneath the surface, a silent catastrophe unfolded.
The spiritual drain was not like physical exhaustion. That was a deep ache in the muscles, a leaden weight in the bones. This was a hollowness in the place where my soul met my body. The well of holy power, which had always been a warm, golden sun at my core—first as Selene, then as a guarded ember as Rosalind—was gone. In its place was a cold, ashen crater. It didn't just feel empty; it felt violated, scraped raw by the violent expenditure of the barrier.
