Mom was up again by 8 a.m., looking annoyingly energized, like she finally had a plan. She shoved a quick cereal breakfast at us before herding us into the living room for what she called “experimenting.”

  “Alright,” Mom said. “I have two theories. Either Syrin’s connection to the Light is so strong that the original door couldn’t fully close… or the door is closed, and Syrin’s connection has essentially become a new portal.”

  I blinked. “What’s the difference?”

  Mom sighed. “One is like a door being propped open. The other is like a climbing rope hung over a wall. Either way, things can get in, but how they get in is different, and that matters for figuring out how to block it.”

  “How do we know which one it is?” I asked.

  “I suspect it’s the rope,” Mom said. “Since both times the creatures appeared right next to Syrin instead of at the cave, but better to be sure.”

  “How can we check?” Syrin asked quietly.

  Mom smiled. “First, we talk. You said the connection feels like music through a wall. So… does it feel more muffled, like something contained behind a barrier? Or stretched, like it’s pulling on you?”

  Syrin blinked slowly, concentrating. “Um. Taut, maybe? It doesn’t feel smothered so much as… unstable.” He winced. “So… maybe that means stretched?”

  “Perhaps,” Mom said. She stepped closer. “Syrin, what direction is the Light in?”

  He gave her a deeply baffled look. “Direction?”

  “Yes. Does your connection feel like it’s coming from a specific point?”

  “…No?”

  Mom nodded, as if that confirmed something. She guided him to the center of the room. “Alright. Try this. Reach for the connection, and ask the Light to show us where it is.”

  Syrin shifted uncomfortably. For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then light appeared, soft at first, then swelling. My arm glowed. The couch glowed. The walls shimmered. Everything in the room took on a hazy golden halo, like dawn had wrapped itself around every solid surface.

  “Keep going,” Mom said.

  The glow intensified. The rug Syrin was standing on became almost hard to look at, edges swallowed by radiance. Everything close to him did.

  “Okay, stop now!”

  The glow snapped back, dimming until the room was just a room again.

  Syrin looked shaken, not hurt, just unsettled. “That didn’t tell us anything, did it?”

  “Oh, it absolutely did,” Mom said. “If your connection were stretching through the portal, the glow should have been strongest in that direction. A gradient. A pull.” She pointed toward him. “Instead, the brightest point was around you. You’re the conduit.”

  I let out a long breath. “Great. So, Syrin is a walking portal.”

  So wherever he went, things could appear? Did that mean we had to send him back? My heartbeat picked up. That would be like turning him over to his enemies. That couldn’t be the solution. I took a deep, calming breath. There had to be another way.

  “How do we fix it?” I asked.

  Mom shrugged. “Severing the connection would be easi—”

  Syrin flinched as if struck. His glow reacted instantly, flaring copper, like the edge of a flame. It was the most intense color I’d ever seen on him. He gasped, stumbling and grabbing the armchair for balance.

  “Syrin?” I rushed to his side.

  He shook his head, breath trembling. “Not an option. Definitely not an option. You probably… shouldn’t say that again.”

  We both just stared at him.

  “What… just happened?” I asked.

  Syrin shivered. “That wasn’t me. Not… exactly.”

  I braced instinctively. “The portal? Again?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Not the portal. The Light.” He swallowed. “It’s not alive exactly, but almost. It has… feelings. Intent. Like the memories of its creator come to life. It doesn’t like the idea of you… taking me away.”

  “You’re saying it’s possessive?” I asked.

  “No. Well… maybe. But mostly protective.” He rubbed his sternum as if the Light still ached there. “The Light guards its bearers. If you disconnect me, it can’t. And that’s… distressing. For both of us.”

  I stared at him. “You can tell what it’s feeling?”

  “Not always,” he admitted. “But yes. We all can.”

  He shifted uneasily on his feet and his glow changed. I couldn’t tell if it was silver or white. His eyes though, were unmistakable silver.

  “We need to do this carefully,” he said. “It’s paying attention now, and if we do something it thinks will hurt me, it might react… forcefully.” He exhaled. “And I might not be able to stop it.”

  “Forcefully how?”

  He winced. “Well, usually it responds to danger with fire.” He swallowed. “And fire is what I’m worst at controlling.”

  Ah. Okay, so we were literally playing with fire here, but the alternative was playing with shadow creatures and drakelings.

  “Can you… tell it we’re trying to protect you?” I asked.

  “That’s the problem with the almost alive part,” he said with a grimace. “It doesn’t always listen to logic.”

  Mom pressed her palms against the table, exhaling slowly. “Alright. No severing anything. Fine. We need a gentler approach.” She glanced at Syrin. “How much control do you have over the Light without actually using it?”

  Syrin grimaced, but his glow flickered bronze. “Enough to ask. Not enough to command.”

  “That’s still something,” Mom said. “We start small.”

  I blinked. “Define small. Because last time ‘small’ became a fire alarm.”

  Mom gave me a look. “We’re not setting anything on fire.” We both looked at her. “Intentionally.”

  “That’s not comforting,” I said.

  Mom ignored that entirely and motioned us toward the living room rug. “Alright. Syrin, sit. Trina, get the salt from the pantry.”

  “Why salt?” I asked.

  “Because it’s safe,” Mom said. “And it can interrupt magical flow without actually blocking it.”

  I sighed, but retrieved it from the kitchen. Syrin stared at it like it was a grenade.

  “You’re not allergic to salt, right?” I asked.

  “No?”

  “So, why do you look scared?”

  “Because I don’t know what you’re going to do with it!”

  Mom’s sigh sounded so done, but she just said, “It’s symbolic. It symbolizes preservation rather than destruction. The opposite of fire.”

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  That seemed to help calm Syrin exactly zero percent. Still, he stayed cross-legged on the rug, looking like someone bracing for a dentist visit. His glow was a thin, nervous shimmer, mostly bronze, but with threads of white tightening around the edges.

  Mom sprinkled a faint circle of salt around him. “This isn’t a trap,” she said gently. “But if something tries to come through using your magic, we should see it distort the boundary. Now I want you to try and limit the connection. Pull it to just you.”

  Syrin let out a slow breath. “Alright. I’ll… try.”

  I settled outside the circle cross-legged, and Mom knelt across from us. “Okay. What you’re doing is not cutting the rope. Just… tightening your grip on it, limiting access to you and only you. We are trying to hide it from other eyes.”

  Syrin shut his eyes. His glow pulsed once, shifting more towards copper. Then again. The room warmed a degree.

  “Easy,” Mom murmured. “Just settle.”

  His breathing steadied. The glow dimmed. Then—

  The salt at his left side shivered. Only a grain or two falling. Like a wind that shouldn’t exist.

  Syrin’s eyes flew open. “I didn’t do that.”

  Mom stiffened. My hands’ tightened on my knee. The salt shivered again, vibrating outward in a faint ripple.

  “Syrin,” Mom said softly, “is that the Light?”

  He shook his head hard. “No. That’s not—it feels—” He cut himself off with a sharp inhale.

  The salt trembled once more… and then stilled completely. Silence fell like a dropped curtain.

  Mom let out a slow, shaky breath. “Okay. Good news: that wasn’t an entity forcing its way through.”

  “And the bad news?” I asked.

  She rubbed her forehead. “That was the connection reacting to being contained at all.”

  Syrin swallowed. “Like it didn’t… want boundaries.”

  Mom nodded. “Exactly.”

  “So we can’t block it?” I said.

  “Not entirely,” Mom said. “But maybe we can obscure it. Make the connection harder to follow without cutting it.” She gave me a thoughtful look. “Like putting insulation around the rope instead of severing it.”

  Syrin frowned. “How?”

  “That,” Mom said, “is what we’re going to figure out.”

  The salt at Syrin’s feet gave one last, faint tick. He flinched.

  I gave him a grin I hoped was reassuring. “Hey. Still better than drakelings.”

  His glow brightened to a tentative gold. “A very low bar, but yes.”

  Mom tapped her fingers on the coffee table. “Okay. No more containment circles. Let’s try grounding the connection instead. If we can divert or soften the ‘rope,’ maybe things won’t crawl along it.”

  Syrin made a face, his glow tight silver, edges flickering white. “Ground it how?”

  Mom held up a potted succulent from the windowsill.

  Syrin stared. “You want me to… hold the plant?”

  “It’s symbolic,” Mom said.

  “That is becoming a concerning pattern,” he muttered.

  I snorted. “Worst case scenario, it’s emotional support vegetation.”

  A thread of pale gold flickered through his eyes. “Emotional support—?”

  “Just try it,” Mom said, shoving the plant into his hands.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Find the magical resonance with the plant,” Mom explained. “How you do that… I don’t know. The book says you should just… feel it.”

  “Okay.” Syrin stared down at the plant, his brow scrunched. For ten whole seconds, nothing happened. Then, the dirt glowed faintly.

  I looked at Mom, trying to decide if this was a good thing. Then the pot cracked straight down the middle with a noise like a gunshot.

  Syrin yelped and dropped the whole thing in his lap.

  I jumped. “Okay! No plants.”

  “Agreed,” Mom said, dusting bits of soil off her shirt. “Earth absorbs too much power. It stresses the conduit.”

  Syrin looked personally offended by the word conduit. Bronze flickered under his skin. “I am not a pipe.”

  I held back a laugh. “A very fancy magical pipe.”

  “Trina,” he groaned, but his glow warmed to a rose gold I hadn’t seen before for a heartbeat.

  Mom didn’t miss it. Her eyebrows rose. “Well. It seems the Light likes her teasing better than mine.”

  Syrin’s glow jolted to silver so fast it was almost comical.

  “Moooom,” I hissed.

  Mom rolled her eyes. “Fine. Next experiment.”

  Mom set a roll of aluminum foil on the rug.

  I blinked. “We’re putting him in a tinfoil hat?”

  “No,” Mom said, then hesitated. “Probably not.”

  Syrin pressed a hand to his face. “Light help me.” He looked up at Mom. “What am I doing now?”

  “Same thing. Find the magical resonance.”

  He laid both palms on the foil. This time the glow rippled across it in an even haze.

  “Does that mean it worked?” I asked.

  Then the foil vibrated with a sound like angry bees and shot out of his hands in all directions, fluttering through the room like metallic confetti.

  “Okay!” Mom shouted over the chaos. “Metal resonates too well. Bad idea.”

  Syrin hunched down, looking worried. “Please stop throwing household objects at me.”

  Mom rubbed at her temples. “Perhaps we can try something more… communicative. Maybe that would be better.” She drew a simple sigil on a napkin, nothing dramatic, just spirals apparently meant to scramble magical currents.

  “Place your hand over it,” she commanded as she set the napkin down in front of Syrin.

  He hesitated but placed his hand over the napkin. The glow didn’t spike. The salt still left on the floor didn’t shiver. Nothing cracked or vibrated.

  Mom exhaled. “Okay. This one works.”

  Then the napkin caught on fire. Syrin jerked back with a strangled sound, and white panic glow burst along his arms before he forced it down again.

  “Okay,” Mom said weakly. “Mostly works.”

  Syrin dropped his face into his hands. “I hate this.”

  I patted his back. “Your magic is dramatic. That’s not your fault.”

  He peeked at me, eyes silver, clearly mortified. “Trina, everything I touch either glows, explodes, or combusts.”

  “Same,” I said. “Just on the emotional level.”

  His glow warmed to that new rose gold again. Mom made a muffled noise that could have been a laugh.

  I shot her a glare, and she quieted.

  “So, what now?” I asked. Was there anything else left to even try?

  Mom rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Metal is a no. Earth is a no. Symbols… sort of work, if we accept spontaneous napkin combustion.”

  Syrin groaned softly into his hands. His glow jittered between pale gold and silver, like curiosity and mortification couldn’t decide who was winning.

  “We need something,” Mom murmured. “Something that dampens but doesn’t threaten.”

  They started talking magic, and I excused myself to the kitchen for a glass of water. I grabbed one for Syrin too. He needed something else to focus on.

  “But if we redirect,” Syrin was saying, “That might just put someone else in danger. They aren’t sending intelligent things. That probably would work, but then you’d have drakelings roaming the city.”

  Mom grimaced. “You're right. That is a possibility with a beacon, but perhaps we could find somewhere contained?”

  Syrin shook his head. “If the signal ends up splitting between us, they could land in the middle and we’d have no control.”

  Mom let out a frustrated breath, and Syrin’s light danced silver and bronze, clearly frustrated as well. I held the water out, and he took it, his light going that soft rose gold again.

  Mom stared for a moment. “Syrin, do you have more control when your light is gold?”

  “Sort of,” he said a little cautiously.

  “When the first portal breach happened, what color was your light? Do you remember?”

  “Silver,” I said. “Or maybe gray. I don’t think I knew the difference at that point.”

  Mom’s lips twitched. “And you were asleep last night, no way of knowing, but if it was silver the first time… Negative emotions can be more volatile, and that shadow is almost certainly dark magic. It probably hates your light. It would likely resonate best with more similar colors or possibly negative emotions in general.”

  Syrin grimaced. “So, what? Am I just supposed to avoid negative emotions?”

  Mom’s smile looked almost sly. “No, we just need something else that calms you down. If we can just… steady your light, that might act as insulation with some extra runes. We just need something we can leverage that won’t aggravate the light.” She looked right at me.

  Syrin got it before I did. His glow immediately went full silver, ears pinking, glow stuttering like a glitching neon sign. “No— I don’t think—” he stammered.

  Mom raised both eyebrows at the color change. “Fascinating.”

  “No,” Syrin said instantly. “Not fascinating.”

  Mom looked slightly too knowing as she nudged me toward Syrin. I stumbled, grabbing onto his arm, and the moment I touched his sleeve… soft gold, though it looked like the silver was trying to fight through it, popping up in little explosions of color.

  Mom’s expression turned smugly triumphant. “Seems to me, the Light amplifies the bearer’s emotions. Positive emotional grounding stabilizes the flow. Trina calms you. Therefore—”

  “Mom,” I hissed, cheeks flaming.

  “—the Light stabilizes around Trina.”

  Syrin made a dying noise. His glow flickered white around the edges, worry. I tightened my hand on his sleeve reassuringly, and the white vanished like someone hitting mute.

  “Oh,” Mom whispered, looking entirely too pleased. “That’s useful.”

  Syrin shot me a horrified glance. “Please stop touching me while she’s watching.”

  I yanked my hand back, and his glow immediately wobbled into uneasy silver again.

  “That didn’t happen before,” I said. “Not like that. It didn't change whenever I touched you."

  “The Light wasn’t paying as much attention before,” Syrin muttered, sounding almost… irritated.

  I blinked. What did that mean?

  Mom pointed. “See? She is literally insulation.”

  “Please stop saying that,” Syrin muttered, covering his face, fingers interlaced right at the bridge of his nose.

  But I kind of couldn’t unsee it. I reached out gently again, placing my hand on his shoulder, and the light stuttered, then stabilized to that rose gold.

  “Trina,” Syrin said, voice strained in protest. I pulled back, pointedly not looking at him.

  I cleared my throat. “So… how do we use that to actually insulate the connection?”

  Mom snapped her fingers. “Cloth.”

  Syrin blinked at her. “Cloth?”

  “Something personal. Something emotionally resonant. Something the Light associates with safety and calm.”

  I stared. “Wait. Are you suggesting—”

  Mom gestured at me. “Give him your hoodie.”

  Syrin’s glow slammed into full silver again. “ABSOLUTELY NOT—”

  But Mom was already rummaging through the laundry basket. She pulled out another hoodie and tossed it to me.

  I dragged a hand down my face. “This is so awkward.”

  “It’s magical science,” Mom corrected. “Now give him the hoodie you’re wearing.”

  I peeled it off reluctantly and held it out. Syrin stared at it like it was a loaded weapon, but reluctantly took it. “It smells like you,” he whispered, scandalized.

  “Okay, you don’t have to say it like that,” I sputtered.

  Mom clapped once. “Try holding it while you reach for the connection.”

  Syrin shot me a helpless look. His light warring between that silver and a soft, trembling rose gold. Slowly, he wrapped both hands in the fabric and closed his eyes. His glow steadied. No flare. No ripple. No trembling salt. Just warm, even light.

  Mom exhaled a long breath. “There it is. That’s what we needed.”

  Syrin opened one eye. “It worked?”

  I swallowed. “Looks like it.”

  Mom smiled. “We’ve insulated the rope. At least partially.”

  Syrin looked between the hoodie, me, and his now-peaceful glow.

  “So I have to wear Trina?” he asked miserably.

  “Not me,” I corrected quickly, face on fire. “Just the hoodie.”

  Mom beamed. “We’ll reinforce the effect with runes to make it a true insulator.”

  Syrin’s glow pulsed rose gold, then silver, then warm gold like he’d given up resisting reality.

  “I hate magic,” he muttered.

  But he held onto the hoodie like it was a lifeline.