Page 84 of Impawssible Magic

“She does that,” Leire agrees. She’s staring at the folder. “How does she do that? The woman’s over two hundred years old. She shouldn’t be able to vanish into thin air.”

“I’ve learned not to question it. Grandmother Peach operates by her own rules of physics.”

“That’s concerning.”

“Very.”

Leire opens the folder again, spreading the pages across the counter. The handwriting is cramped and difficult, switching between languages mid-sentence. But the more I look, the more patterns emerge. Dates that span centuries. Names I don’t recognize. References to events that sound like myths.

“The Severing.” She traces the words with her finger. “It’s mentioned over and over. A ritual that happened a long time ago.”

“And they are maintaining it, apparently.” I tap another page. “‘The old pairings must never reform. The potential must be identified and neutralized before awakening can occur.’”

“Mate potential.” Her voice is grim. “That’s me. I’m what they were trying to neutralize.”

“You and others.” I flip through more pages. “There are lists here. Witches identified over the years. Most are marked as ‘handled.’”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing good.”

I’m still flipping pages when a name stops me cold.

Dorothea. Handled. Five years ago. Weather-working incident, contained. No further investigation required.

The page blurs. I have to read it three times before the words stay still enough to make sense.

“Aslan?” Leire’s hand finds my arm. “What is it?”

I can’t speak. I turn the folder toward her instead, my finger against the line, against the word that just rewrote five years of grief into something worse. Not an accident. Not bad luck. A name on a list, crossed off like an errand.

“They killed her.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “She wasn’t unlucky. She wasn’t careless. She was a witch with the old potential, and they found her before she found anyone to bond with, and they made it look like weather.”

Leire doesn’t say anything right away. She just wraps both hands around mine, steady, grounding, while something in my chest that’s been braced for five years finally, quietly, breaks open.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice is soft. Fierce. “I’m so sorry.”

“I buried the question because I couldn’t stand to have another thing that didn’t make sense.” The words Elio’s office pulled out of me, come back around, true in a way I didn’t want them to be. “I knew. Some part of me always knew.”

“You know now.” She presses her forehead to my shoulder. “And now we do something about it. Both of them. All of it.”

I nod, because I can’t say anything else yet. But underneath the grief, something else is taking shape—not peace, not yet, but the first solid ground I’ve had under this particular loss in five years. An answer, even an ugly one, is still an answer.

Leire goes still. She’s pointing at something near the bottom of a page, her finger pressed flat against the yellowed paper. “Aslan. Look at this.”

I lean closer. The handwriting is cramped, but the words she’s found are clear enough: the Severing was performed at the site of the Warding Line. Mistvale was chosen because the old magic ran strongest at this boundary. The ritual was anchored here.

We both look up at the same moment. Through the kitchen window, the tree line at the edge of tiger territory is just visible—the direction of the Warding Line.

“It’s been here the whole time.” Her voice is quiet. “The boundary that’s been weakening. The place where the Preservers kept operating. They weren’t just using it as cover. They were—what, maintaining the ritual site?”

“Guarding it.” The pieces settle into place. “If the Severing was performed there, and our claiming cracked it⁠—”

“Then every time a new pairing forms, it cracks a little further.” She closes the folder slowly. “That’s why they were so desperate to stop us. It wasn’t just about us. We were the keystone.”

She’s quiet for a long moment, processing. I see her putting the pieces in order, building a picture of a threat much larger than either of us understood.

“They’ve been doing this for generations,” she says finally. “Hunting witches who could form these kinds of pairings. Preventing something they were terrified of.”