EPISODE 10: THE THRESHOLD ## CHAPTER 1: UNWARDED Day fifty-six. Three days since the failed ritual. No wards. The membrane was thinning at a rate that exceeded Nadia's worst projections. Without the twelve anchor stones to concentrate and maintain boundary integrity, the erosion was uniform—not a leak at specific points but a systemic weakening across the entire Ashworth property and, increasingly, across the Harrowfield basin. The effects were no longer subtle. The east wing of the house existed in two centuries simultaneously. Nadia walked its corridors and saw them as they were—peeling wallpaper, warped floorboards, the accumulated decay of a building whose last major renovation had been in 1973—and, superimposed like a double exposure, as they had been in the 1780s. Fresh plaster. Whale-oil lamps. The smell of cedar and beeswax and the particular clean-wool scent of garments washed in lye. The two realities didn't compete. They coexisted, layered, each fully real and fully present, occupying the same space without contradiction. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was the boundary failing in real time. The forest was worse. Near the ward sites—where the stone anchors had channeled boundary energy for centuries, creating localized zones of high interstitial activity—the geometry had become noticeably non-Euclidean. Paths that should have taken ten minutes stretched to forty. A clearing that Nadia knew...