Dewdrop felt the air split before she saw it. A crack tore through the old grove, spilling light that wasn't supposed to exist until spring. She flew toward it without thinking. The circle should have been here already. They always sensed these things first. But the grove stood empty except for her. The rupture cut through the ground like a wound, edges glowing pale green where mushrooms had already started to grow. Broken branches littered the opening, and the wrongness of it made her wings ache. Spring light poured from the gap when it should have stayed dormant for another month. She hovered above it, watching the seasons bleed into each other. This was exactly the kind of thing the circle existed to prevent. And they weren't here. Dewdrop landed and began gathering branches. She wove them into a frame first, then layered moss between the gaps. The structure grew taller as she worked, platform by platform, until she could reach the rupture from above and below. She threaded living vines through the scaffold and coaxed them to grip the old oak nearby. Flowers she'd been saving for her first planned demonstration went into the supports instead. The whole thing looked deliberate. Intentional. Like someone who knew what they were doing had built it. When the circle finally arrived, they found the rupture half-sealed and contained within a ring of stones Dewdrop had pressed into the moss. The light no longer spilled wild across the grove. It pulsed steady and controlled inside the boundary she'd made. She stood beside her scaffold, dirt under her nails and pollen in her hair, and waited for them to tell her she wasn't capable. But their eyes went to the contained rupture first. Then to her. And nobody said a word.