Counting Candles in a Quieting City

Then the creature lifts its broad head, and its coat — slowly, unevenly, like watercolor blooming back into paper — returns. Purple. Blue. Deep underwater green. Its amber eyes open fully, and the warmth in them is almost unbearable.
Down the hall, the river-sprite’s tank begins to glow.
From the roof of the moth enclosure, a sound: crystalline, faint, like a finger drawn around the rim of a glass.
I go back to my workshop. I pick up the striker. I hold it over the fourth candle’s wick.
It lights on the first try. The flame is small and very steady and burns a blue I have never seen in tallow before.
I open my ledger. I write: Fourth ward candle. Acknowledged. Then I sit with all seven flames burning in a row on the sill, and outside the window Halvenmere goes about its morning, and I begin, very carefully, to write down everything I know about what a city owes its magic and what happens when it forgets to say so.