Morning in the restored village brought practical questions and unexpected gifts. Several families offered supplies. A blacksmith who had spent eleven days forging the same hinge finally finished it and insisted Kael take a new iron shoe for his staff. Mayor Lind drew a rough map of the next three days of road from local knowledge, marking places where the air had felt “too full of almost” even before the double hour began.
More useful still were the stories. Because the villagers had lived the same evening repeatedly, they had begun to notice small differences between cycles—details that should have been identical but were not. A child had drawn a different picture on the fifth night. A dog had barked at empty air on the eighth. On the eleventh night, just before the party arrived, every
