Scarcity changed the tone of everything.
Not the words.Not the requests.
The timing.
Rafe noticed it when three notices arrived within the same hour—each framed as independent, each marked time-sensitive, each positioned just far enough apart that attending one would delay the others.
Not coincidence.
Design.
He stood still in the corridor, slate in hand, feeling the Anchor hold him firm while the world tried to pull him in three directions at once.
They're testing limits, he thought.Mine—and theirs.
He declined the first.
A transport malfunction in the lower city. Serious, but containable.
He delayed the second.
A containment ward fluctuating near a private facility. Risky, but monitored.
He accepted the third.
A children's dormitory near an old mana seam—unstable ground, thin margins.
The choice wasn't strategic.
It was human.
The dormitory incident ended cleanly.
Rafe didn't suppress the seam.He redistributed the load, easing pressure into adjacent channels that hadn't been used in decades.
Old paths.
Forgotten ones.
The ground settled. The children were evacuated without panic.
When it was over, Rafe felt the cost immediately—not pain, but drag. Like moving through water that hadn't been there before.
He steadied himself.
The Anchor held.
But something had been spent.
The reports arrived before he returned.
The transport malfunction escalated—minor injuries, public outcry.
The private facility incident triggered a forced shutdown—economic loss, political complaints.
Three incidents.One success.Two degradations.
The comparison was obvious.
Rafe read the summaries in silence.
They weren't angry.
They were analytical.
Elyra found him on the west bridge, staring down at the city lights.
"They're spacing the incidents," she said quietly. "And watching how you choose."
Rafe nodded.
"Scarcity," he replied.
"Yes."
She leaned on the railing beside him.
"They want to know where you break," she said. "And if you don't—how many others will."
Rafe closed his eyes briefly.
"That's not a test," he said.
"No," Elyra agreed. "It's leverage."
By evening, the language shifted again.
Requests came with context.
Names.Faces.Potential consequences spelled out in careful detail.
Not commands.
Stories.
Rafe rejected one without opening it.
Accepted another without reading past the location.
The Anchor pulsed—steady, patient, unopinionated.
It would hold as long as he asked it to.
But he was starting to understand the real danger.
Scarcity didn't exhaust him.
It trained everyone else to rely on him more precisely.
Far away, the Director reviewed the data stream with interest.
"Response patterns emerging," an aide reported. "He prioritizes human proximity over systemic cost."
The Director nodded.
"As expected."
"So we escalate?" the aide asked.
The Director shook her head.
"No," she said. "We refine."
She leaned forward.
"Scarcity only works if the resource believes it's choosing freely."
That night, Rafe sat alone, the room dark, slate untouched on the desk.
He thought about the children.About the injured commuters.About the facility workers sent home without answers.
All of them mattered.
That was the point.
He finally understood the shape of the trap.
They weren't trying to force him to act.
They were teaching him that not acting was a choice with victims.
Rafe stood and walked to the window.
The city spread out beneath him—alive, imperfect, always on the edge of imbalance.
The Anchor kept him steady.
But steadiness wasn't enough anymore.
If scarcity continued, he would become a filter through which suffering passed—reduced, but never eliminated.
He clenched his fist slowly.
"They want a bottleneck," he said softly."So the pressure has somewhere to go."
The realization settled in, cold and clear.
If he stayed singular, scarcity would break him—or everyone else.
And that meant the structure he was becomingwas already insufficient.
Not because it was weak—
But because one pillar was never meant to hold a city.
The next move wouldn't be about choosing better.
It would be about changing the shape of the game entirely.