Seven days.

That's how long it took for the Skáli to stop feeling like something I'd borrowed and start feeling like something I'd built. Seven days of short sessions—twenty minutes, sometimes thirty, never long enough to drain—with Books sitting on the lower bunk timing me with a watch he wasn't supposed to have, making sure I came back before I did something stupid. Seven days of touching the rough walls and walking the length of the hearth and getting to know the space the way you get to know a new cell: by feel, by smell, by the sound of it when it's quiet.

It was still rough. Young. The kind of place that looked like it had been lived in for a long time but felt like it knew it was being looked at. But it held.

And on the seventh day, I came back from the morning session and sat on the bunk and Books asked, "How'd it feel?" and I said, "Like it knew I was coming," and Books said nothing, which from Books was the same as applause.

The thing that happened that morning—the thing I'd been waiting for without knowing I was waiting for it—was the hearth.

Six days of sessions, the fire had been wrong. Not cold, exactly, but not lit either. The shape of a fire, the heat of a fire in the way you feel heat in the between-space, which is with will rather than skin. But the color had been off. Grey. Dormant. A hearth that knew it was supposed to burn but hadn't decided to yet.

Day seven, I stepped through the threshold and the fire was running. Deep blue at the base, working up through colors that didn't have names in the physical world—not quite violet, not quite gold, not quite the dark at the edge of visible light. It threw heat differently than before. Fuller. Like the difference between a space heater in the corner and a proper fire in the center of a room built around it.

I stood there for a long time and didn't do anything. Just looked at it.

When I came back Books was already watching. He did that—watched without looking like he was watching, the twenty-five-year lifer's trick of seeing everything without making it obvious.

"Something's different," he said.

"The hearth's burning."

"Is that significant?"

I thought about how Werner had explained it. The hearth was the power source made conscious. Everything else—the walls, the floor, the threshold—that was the container. The hearth was what the container was built around. It igniting wasn't a decoration. It meant the Skáli had moved from being a space I could inhabit to being a space that would work for me.

"Yeah," I said. "It's significant."

Books picked up his book. "What's the fuel source?"

I sat down. The bunk creaked the way it always creaked. Somewhere on the tier, Barkov's alarm was going off for the third time.

"Everything I've put into these walls. Two years of blood wards and protection sigils and working every time I had thirty seconds of privacy." I rubbed my hands on my thighs. "It's all still there, in the between-space. And now it's—consolidated."

"You built it without knowing you were building it."

"Werner said Kask's been building his for thirty-one years. That's intentional accumulation. I was just doing the work, and it piled up." I looked at the wall. Past it, in the way I'd learned to look past things. "Turns out there's no difference."

Books was quiet for a moment.

"Efficient," he said, and went back to reading.

That afternoon, yard time. Werner came over from the weight pile the way he always did—apparently purposeless, ends up at my stretch of wall like it was coincidence. The sky was doing that February thing where it couldn't decide if it wanted to snow or just threaten to.

"Report," he said. Eyes forward.

I told him about the hearth.

He was still for longer than usual. Not thinking-still. Something closer to careful.

"That's—sooner than I would have expected," he said finally.

"You expected a timeline?"

"I expected years." He adjusted his footing. "Early-stage Constructs don't cohere like that. They're impressions. Memory. Kask described the process to me once—how the first decade you're barely able to find it, let alone operate in it. The hearth igniting usually marks the transition from echo-space to working Construct." He looked at me sideways. "That usually takes longer than a week of deliberate work."

"Maybe the two years of not-deliberate work helped."

"Maybe." He didn't sound like maybe. He sounded like a man adjusting an estimate. "Whatever the reason. The hearth changes what's possible. You have an amplifier now. Your power inside the space will be significantly higher than your baseline. Techniques that cost you outside the Skáli will cost less in it." He paused. "And visitors will feel the home-turf differential immediately."

"Visitors," I said.

Werner didn't answer. Watched the weight pile.

"I want to show you," I said.

A long beat. Cold wind off the yard. Two Kings at the phone bank—Carlos and a guy I didn't know, not watching us, which meant they were watching us. "Not here," Werner said. "After dinner count. Send word through the usual channel."

He walked back to the weights. I stayed by the wall and watched Carlos not watch me and thought about what it meant that Werner had said "visitors" before I did.

Werner came to Cell 47 that evening the way he sometimes did—Brotherhood business nearby, real cover this time, something with a guy in 3-Beta. He stopped at our door. Books was reading. I was sitting on my bunk with my eyes closed, feeling the Skáli hum in the between-space the way a generator hums when you put your hand near it.

"You've been practicing," Werner said. Quietly. Just to me.

"Every morning this week." I opened my eyes. "You ready?"

He looked at Books.

"He knows," I said. "He's been anchoring me."

Books turned a page. Did not look up. "Evening, Werner."

Werner's jaw moved the way it did when he was accepting something he hadn't anticipated. "The anchor stays. If either of us snaps back unexpectedly—"

"I know what to do." Books's voice was flat, not unkind. "I've been doing it for a week."

Werner looked at me. I shrugged. "He researched it. Library cart access. I don't know how he finds this stuff."

"There's a reasonable amount written about astral practice," Books said, "once you know where to look. The accounts are inconsistent, but the anchoring protocols are consistent across traditions. Physical contact or proximity to the projecting body. Verbal anchoring if the subject is non-responsive. Basic vitals monitoring." He finally looked over his glasses at Werner. "I'll call it if something looks wrong."

Werner stood there for a moment being a man who didn't know how to account for Books.

Then he pulled the chair from the small desk, sat down, and got ready.

The between-space snapped around us the way it always did—that cold-quality nothing, the grey static of the layer between. I'd moved through it hundreds of times. Werner projected less often than I did; I could feel him orienting, finding his bearings.

Then I pulled us inward instead of outward.

Not through the between-space toward somewhere else. Down into what was already here. The accumulated weight. The echo-space that had been building for two years.

The stone came up under our feet.

Werner went still. I watched his face—his real face, in the between-space, which is a stripped-down version of the physical one. The scar on his jaw shows more clearly here. His age shows differently. And right now, the thing that showed was something I didn't have a word for. Immediate recognition.

He turned slowly. Looked at the walls. The timber-and-thatch ceiling. The hearth burning wrong colors down the center of the space. The long hall running further than Cell 47 in every direction, because this wasn't Cell 47—this was what Cell 47 had been holding.

"Christ," he said quietly.

Not a curse. Something else.

He walked toward the wall. Put his hand on it the way he'd put his hand on things he was reading—pressure and attention. His mouth moved slightly. I watched him work through it. The bones of the architecture. The runic structure underneath the chaos expression. He was a Norse practitioner. He knew what these bones were built from, even through the distortion of my working.

"You built this from Kraus's grimoire," he said.

"And your teaching. And—" I gestured at the space. "Whatever was already in me, I guess."

"Your working is chaos." He moved along the wall. "But the architecture it's expressing through is—" He paused. "It's right. The proportions are right. The hearth placement. The high seat at the far end." He looked at the shadows in the corners, the way they didn't quite behave correctly. "Even the alive quality. Old halls had that. The timbers settle. The fire shifts." He turned to look at me. "I couldn't have taught you to build this. It's not in Werner's training and it's not in Kask's."

"No. It's in the name my drunk Irish dad gave me." I watched him. "It's in twenty-year-old ink I got because Vikings looked badass. It's in a dead man's grimoire." I shrugged. "It's in whatever's in me that I didn't know to call Norse until you showed up and started talking about runes."

Werner looked at the hearth.

He looked at it for a long time.

I noticed it gradually. The way you notice a change in a room—not the moment it happens, but three seconds after, when something about the air is different.

Werner had moved to the hearth. His hands were at his sides. He wasn't projecting anything, wasn't working any technique I recognized. He was just standing near the fire.

And then his face changed.

Not frightened. Not excited. Something more unguarded than either, the way a person looks when they've been holding a door closed for a long time and something on the other side has finally pushed it open. Open. That was the word. His face was open in a way I'd never seen it—not Werner-the-strategist or Werner-the-teacher or even Werner-the-man-who-used-to-be-more-than-he-was-now. Something underneath all of that.

I didn't say anything. Didn't move.

His hand came up slowly and touched the hearthstone. The wrong-colored fire bent slightly toward his fingers—not burning him, just leaning. Like it recognized him.

The moment stretched.

Then: "What?" I asked. Quiet.

Werner didn't answer immediately. His hand stayed on the stone. The fire kept leaning.

"Something heard me." His voice was different. Lower. Careful with it, the way you're careful with something you don't want to break. "I didn't—I wasn't trying to. I was examining the hearth architecture and something—" He stopped. "Something at the edge of it. Not here, not quite in this space. Further." He exhaled. "It heard me."

"The Æsir?"

He was quiet for long enough that I knew he didn't want to say yes and couldn't bring himself to say no.

"Twelve years," he said finally. Not to me. To the fire, maybe. Or to whatever was at the edge of it. "Twelve years without—" He stopped again. His jaw worked. Whatever was happening inside Werner, he wasn't going to let me see the rest of it.

He pulled his hand back. Got his face arranged. Put Werner-the-strategist back on, piece by piece, the way a man puts on armor.

"The hearth is your power source and your weak point simultaneously," he said. His voice was level. Almost. "Keep it central but don't let visitors establish a presence near it. Proximity to the hearth inside a Construct amplifies whoever's standing at it."

"Were you just getting tactical advice from my fireplace?"

Werner looked at me for a moment. Something moved across his face—not quite a smile, something that lived in the same neighbourhood.

"I don't know what I was doing," he said.

He turned away from the hearth and moved toward the threshold. Before he left he stopped, hand on the doorframe, and looked back at the space once. The long hall, the wrong-colored fire, the alive-quality in the shadows.

"When we get out of this situation with Kask," he said, "there are things I need to think about." A pause. "This changes—" He stopped. Decided something. "We'll talk theory. Tomorrow, yard time."

He crossed the threshold. I stood by the hearth and felt it hum and understood something had shifted in the room that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with me, and that I was going to need to sit with that for a while before I understood it.

I stayed another hour after Werner left. Alone in the Skáli for the first time since I'd built it—the first time I wasn't focusing on navigation or stability or showing it to someone else.

I ran Werner's techniques.

The difference was immediate and real. Thurisaz strike executed at maybe 60% outside these walls on a good day—clean, functional, effective enough to defend myself. Inside the Skáli, near the hearth, it hit like I'd been training for years I hadn't had. The sigil work cohered faster. The chaos improvisation that usually felt like controlled falling—I'm always recovering from the last move while I'm doing the next one—felt smoother. Less falling. More like flying, which is different.

I worked through the inventory. Berkano reinforcement—significantly better. Scatter pattern—wider, more responsive. The anchor reach—I tried it against the air itself, just to see, and the Skáli's walls leaned toward me like the fire had leaned toward Werner's hand.

Home turf.

Werner had called it home turf advantage. I'd understood it intellectually. I understood it differently now.

I played with the space while I was in it. Small things at first—the rush on the floor shifts when I want it to. Minor. Cosmetic. Then I moved the hearth a foot to the left, and it moved cleanly, no resistance, like I'd always known it could. I moved it back. Moved it again. Sat with the strangeness of that.

Then I started playing with the shadows.

Not the fire—the shadows. The places where the light wasn't. I found I could redirect them without redirecting the light source. Shadow falls from the wrong direction. Nothing dramatic, just—wrong. You'd notice it if you were looking carefully. You'd have to look carefully twice to work out what was off.

And then the thing happened that I hadn't planned on.

I let the hearth drift left again—just a foot, just enough—and moved the shadows to compensate, so from the threshold the space looked exactly like it had five minutes ago. The proportions appeared correct. Everything appeared where it was supposed to be.

I knew the real state of the space.

I knew where the hearth actually was. I knew where the floor rushes had been shifted. I could feel the real architecture even while presenting a false one.

I stood there and turned that over.

Kask had been inside the echo of my working. He'd pulled my signature from the inside—the improvisation patterns, the chaos logic, the way my mind moved when it was cornered. He'd spent two weeks building something calibrated to what he knew. He was going to show up with a plan built around what I did.

What I did.

Past tense.

Before I had this.

I came back to my body slowly, the way you come back when there's no urgency pulling you—just the tether pulling gently, the physical world reasserting its details. Cold bunk. Tier sounds. The smell of dinner starting somewhere below.

Books was on the upper bunk. Hadn't moved. I didn't know how long I'd been gone—no way to tell from inside—but from the way Books had put his book face-down on his knee, I'd been under long enough for him to start watching.

"Books."

"Yeah."

"I can make it look like I'm losing control of it when I'm not."

He was quiet for a moment. I heard him pick up his book again.

"That's called deception," he said. "Congratulations on discovering it."

"In the magical space I built."

"Even better." A page turned. "Kask read your working under pressure. He now knows what you look like when you're desperate."

"Yeah."

"So." Books set his book down again. The deliberate motion that meant something was coming. "You have a space that responds to your will. You have the ability to alter that space while knowing its actual state. You have an opponent who has prepared for the version of you that existed before you had either of those things." A pause. "What are you going to give him?"

I stared at the ceiling.

"The version he prepared for," I said slowly.

"And then?"

"And then move the hearth."

Books picked his book back up. "There you go."

Dinner was routine. I ate. Kept my head down. Carlos was at the Kings' table and Rey was next to him, the two of them not quite looking at each other in the way that meant they were definitely looking at each other. Three weeks since the yard. Three weeks since I'd put a Thurisaz strike into Rey Santana's chest and dropped him in front of everyone who mattered in CNCC. He'd been back in gen pop for a week now. No move yet.

Whatever came next would be different. Harder to predict. They weren't going to frame someone again—Axel's intervention had made that play too expensive. They weren't going to front me directly, not without a guarantee they could finish it. That left something I couldn't see yet, which was the worst kind of problem.

I ate my dinner and watched Carlos not watch me and added that to the list.

After count, lying in the dark, I went through the inventory. Kask: quiet for two weeks, preparing. The Skáli: hearth burning, chaos mode functional. Werner: something had changed at the hearth, and he wasn't ready to tell me what it was yet. The Kings: a humiliated leader and a lieutenant who'd gotten a taste of running things and a grievance that hadn't been resolved. Axel's debt: unspecified, unpaid, and Axel was a man who remembered things.

A lot of moving pieces for someone who was just trying to get to year six without dying.

"Thor," Books said into the dark.

"Yeah."

"Werner."

"I know."

"What happened at the hearth?"

I stared at the ceiling. "I don't know exactly. Something heard him. Something from—" I stopped. "He hasn't been connected to the Æsir in twelve years. Whatever he did, whatever they cut him off for—the severance has been holding. But in the Skáli—" I thought about the fire leaning toward his hand. "Maybe the jurisdiction works differently in a space that's mine."

Books was quiet.

"He didn't regain his power," I said. "Whatever contact happened, it wasn't that."

"No. But he felt them."

"Yeah." I stared at the ceiling. "I didn't build the Skáli for Werner. I didn't plan any of that."

"I know." Books shifted on the upper bunk. "But you built it from the same bones. The same tradition." A pause. "Sometimes the things you build for yourself turn out to matter most to someone else."

I didn't have anything to say to that. So, I didn't say anything.

The Skáli hummed in the between-space, young and rough and getting steadier. The wrong-colored fire burning at the center of it, casting shadows that didn't quite fall right. Kask was going to make his next move—a week, maybe two. He'd spent two weeks reading what he'd pulled from me, building something calibrated to what he knew.

He'd come in with the map he'd made.

I'd give him the territory he was expecting.

And then I'd move the hearth.

I had a week to get better at this before he made me. I was going to use every hour of it.