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“Show me.”

Maisie blinked at me. “That is not the reaction people usually have to prophetic Hell doodles.”

“Draw it,” Carrick said through the communication shimmer. “Now. While the pattern is fresh.”

Guy found paper and shoved it across the table. Maisie picked up the pencil like she was being handed a live snake with excellent branding.

“No pressure,” she muttered. “Just reproduce the mysterious prophetic Hell doodle from memory, or everybody dies.”

“Nobody said everybody dies,” Bernie said.

“I inferred,” she scoffed. Then she changed.

The sarcasm did not disappear. Nothing short of divine intervention and possibly industrial equipment could manage that. But it moved aside. Her shoulders settled. Her breathing evened. The pencil touched paper, and Maisie stopped being the woman who weaponized jokes because the room was too full of fear.

She became the artist.

I had seen Maisie as a smartass and an Alicorn, a fighter, and the woman who had kissed every thought straight out of my head. I had not seen the artist.

Her hand moved quickly, sure and confident. Curves. Intersections. Empty spaces that apparently mattered as much as the lines surrounding them. She turned the page sideways, added another arc, stopped, then rotated it again.

Every time the paper turned, I watched her face and caught the instant another piece fell into place. She didn't erase the errant pencil strokes. She worked around them, incorporated them, made them part of whatever she was building.

I didn't know how the hell she did it.

I couldn't look away.

“There.”

Carrick went silent.

Bad silence. Old-Dragon-found-a-body-in-the-basement silence.

“Same Spellwork?” I asked.

“Same language,” Carrick said. “I am not prepared to say the same hand.”

“It resembles the same family of Spellwork we recovered from Keevandrie’s ritual material,” Carrick continued. “The oil-rig structure. The tether-comparison framework. The mathematics of living Magical signatures interacting with boundaries.”

“It is not a gateway diagram,” Carrick said. “It is a response lattice.”

“It isn’t the door?” I asked.

“No,” Carrick said. “It is the lesson.”

Ranger training translated the Magic before fear could muddy it. “It’s casing the place.”

Every eye turned to me. “It isn’t trying to kick the door down. Not yet. It’s checking windows. Testing locks. Watching what responds.”

Bernie’s face tightened. “Then the lattice predates Maisie’s involvement.”

“Correct,” Carrick said. “Which means Maisie’s interaction with the Wards did not create this structure. She stumbled into a system that was already active.”

Carrick paused. “Her Earth-and-Sky Magic may have detected bleed-through from the probe before she ever crossed the Wards. Her conscious mind had not understood it. Her artist’s brain had translated the pressure into imagery.”

“So, my subconscious painted a Magical error message?” Maisie asked.

“Hell sent you a bug report,” Hank said.