Sir Galahad Thorne (Human)

The ritual had already failed by the time Galahad arrived. He could tell by the smell — a sharpness in the air, like something had been folded the wrong way. He had smelled it twice before. Both times at the site of a boundary event that someone had tried to manage with incomplete information.

The woman at the centre of the collapsed circle was sitting in the mud. This seemed practical. She was not weeping or staring blankly. She was calculating.

"It didn't work," she said, when he got close enough.

"I can see that." He crouched to examine the circle. The markers were all in place. The chalk work was careful, precise — the kind of careful that meant someone had been taught by someone good. The problem was not the technique.

"I drew it correctly," she said.

"I believe you." He traced one chalk line with his eyes, not touching it. "The ground moved. Not physically. The layer underneath — the pattern substrate. It shifted between when you drew this and when you tried to activate it."

She looked at him for the first time. Where did you learn that language, her expression said.

He chose not to answer the implied question. "What were you trying to do?"

"Close a door." A pause. "There is something coming through."

He stood up. "Yes. We know." He looked toward the ruins of the old causeway — a structure that predated every survey he had ever read, that did not appear correctly on any map he had used. "We are trying to understand what."