In myself. In what I carry.
In the part of me that I’ve been told to fear—even when I don’t say it out loud.
How do you trust the thing you’ve always been warned might destroy you?
I stare through the window beside my bed, watching the trees ripple in the breeze. The water is quiet tonight, but I can feel it.
Calling.
Remembering.
It wants me to remember too.
And sometimes—I wonder if I was wrong to answer.
Because every time I dam it down, try to suppress what I am,I pay for it with headaches that start just behind my eyes and grow into a pulsing, full-body pressure by nightfall. Like I’m holding back a storm and cracking at the seams.
Noa is starting to notice. He thinks I’m straining to force my magick out. But the truth is worse.
I’m killing myself trying to hold it all in.
“It’s not supposed to come easy,” he murmurs. “But it will—little by little. You just started, Cel. Don’t hold yourself to the same standard as people who’ve been wielding for years.”
We are sitting propped against the carved headboard of his bed, my back against his chest, nestled in the vee of his legs. Our bodies fit together like pieces long meant to align. His hands massage my temples in slow, soothing circles.
He’s not mentioning the short years I practiced in secret with Gavrail, and I don’t correct him.
Guilt sits heavy in my throat—lying by omission, letting him believe the wrong version of my learning curve. But I know there is truth to Gavrail’s warnings. The inherent risk in lettinganyoneknow the depth of the power I am only just beginning to understand.
I’ve started researching in secret—visits to the Whittaker Library under the guise of studying. Books tucked behind other books. Notes hidden in my room. Passages I mark and copy. Names in news articles I don’t recognize but now can’t forget. There were Magicks who vanished—Magicks like Hayden, the Black Squad first-year. Some taken. Others found dead with no trace of weapon or cause. No bruises. No blood. Just… gone.
No one could explain it. And no one really tried. It’s easier not to ask questions in a world where power is everything and bloodlines hold secrets. But the one thing they all have in common is that they were all different. Powerful. Strong. Capable of magick that didn’t fit neatly into anyone else’s rules.
* **
History class doesn’t help.It just gives my fears more skeletons—and more names.
We’ve started diving deeper into the ancestral lines that weave through the schools and politics of magick. Turns out, magick isn’t just something you have—it is something you inherit, passed through generations like silver or land or secrets.
When something is inherited, it becomes valuable. And when something is valuable, people want to control it.
The bell’s echo hasn’t even finished fading before the room exhales—first-years surging toward the aisle like we’ve been held underwater for an hour and finally allowed to breathe. Chairs scrape. Books snap shut.
Professor Straits remains at the podium, pen still in hand, expression unchanged—as if she hasn’t just dismantled half the class’s social standings with a single lecture. On the screen behind her, the last slide lingers: a branching diagram of names, crests, and dates, lines knitting together like veins. Fire lines in red. Earth in green. Water in blue so deep it looks black at the edges. All the other ancient lines tracing back to just after the Primordial Shattering.
Magick isn’t just something you have—it is something you inherit.
Straits didn’t say it like a revelation. She said it like a fact. Like gravity.
I shove my notebook into my bag, the words still knocking around in my skull. Near me, students whisper—not quietly enough to be polite, just enough to feel like knives trying to dig at my past.
“My mom told me we’re tied to one of the founding orders,” a girl says, half brag, half prayer.
Rozsen looks at her like one would look at a bug you’re about to step on. Elliot, on the other hand, looks entertained. “I mean… it explains everything,” she says under her breath. “All the egos around here.”
I stand, slinging my bag over my shoulder—then freeze when Straits’s voice slices through the noise.
“Miss Farris.”
