Thane Gorsky stood at the base of the fortress wall, watching his men haul timber toward the northern gate. The gate was wood, just wood, and everyone knew it. The walls rose thick and solid around it, but that entrance would crack under a real attack. He was building something that could hold against the south, but time was running short. Rylan Foil appeared from the gate passage, carrying something that caught the low sunlight. A metal sphere, the size of two fists pressed together. He walked straight to Thane without stopping, his face set in a way that made the other men step back. When he reached Thane, he held out the sphere. Grooves covered its surface, carved in patterns that spelled out measurements, angles, stress points. Thane turned it slowly. The grooves showed the gate's weight distribution, the places where the wood was already splitting. Numbers marked how many days until collapse. Not weeks. Days. Thane looked past Rylan toward the gate. Behind it sat the barricade Rylan had built, wooden stakes layered with ice to hold sharp edges. It was meant to be the second line if the gate fell. But the sphere told a different story. The gate would fall before any attack came. The weight of its own cross-beams and the frozen hinges were tearing it apart from within. Everything Thane had planned, every position and fallback, was built on a foundation that was already failing. He closed his hand around the sphere. The defense plan was finished. They would need to rebuild the gate from the ground up, or abandon the northern approach entirely. Thane turned to the men hauling timber and called them back. They would start again, today, and they would not stop until the gate could hold. The fortress would not stand on a lie.

By dawn, the men had torn down half the gate. Rylan directed them where to cut, where to brace, which timbers could be salvaged and which needed burning. Thane stood close enough to watch but far enough to let Rylan work. The plan was simple: strip the gate to its foundation, rebuild it with lighter cross-beams, and finish before the weight could shift again. But by midday, the posts they'd planted stood crooked. One of them, scarred deep with old axe marks and wrapped with a frozen cloth banner, leaned too far south. The fishermen tried wedging stones beneath it, but the ground was too hard. A miner sat nearby, his pickaxe resting against his knee, dust covering his face and hands. He watched the post tilt and said nothing. Then another man dropped his tools and walked back toward the village. No argument, no explanation. Just gone. Word spread fast after that. Thane heard it from the men still working: the gate would collapse no matter what they built. The ground wouldn't hold. The wood wasn't strong enough. The weight would always win. By evening, three more men had left. One of them abandoned his axe, still leaning against a neat stack of logs near the gate passage. Thane picked it up and carried it back to the work site himself, but the man didn't return. Thane gathered the men who remained. He told them the truth again: the gate might fail, the south might come, and some of them might not survive what followed. But walking away wouldn't change any of that. The only question was whether they'd face it with a gate or without one. Most of the men stayed. A few more left before nightfall. Thane counted who was left and adjusted the plan. They would finish with fewer hands, and it would take longer, but they would finish. The fortress would stand, even if some men wouldn't stand with it.