Not in a neat group—more like a constellation slowly unraveling. Pockets of people drifted together, then apart, pulled by gravity and familiarity.
Bella and Ardetia walked ahead, speaking quietly in low tones, their heads bent together, fox and fae sharing wary calculations. Nova and Lady Limora murmured about energy costs and timing. Opal and Vivienne talked with Marla about logistics, because somebody always had to think about food and sleeping arrangements, even at the apocalypse.
My parents walked side by side, not touching now, but not avoiding each other either. Mom’s hands moved as she talked, ward patterns trailing behind her fingers. My dad nodded occasionally, face intent.
Twobble and Skonk flanked me like mismatched bookends. Twobble muttered under his breath, presumably about Gideon’s fashionably-disastrous lateness. Skonk periodically wrote something down, then crossed it out.
Keegan kept pace at my side, close enough that our shoulders brushed when the path narrowed. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. His presence sat like a wall between me and the worst of my thoughts.
The walk from the Wilds to the Academy usually felt short.
Today it felt like three different lifetimes.
The air changed to that familiar, softened-sharp sensation of stepping through magic crafted by hands I knew. The towers rose ahead, golden light catching on the stone. Summer session’s absence showed in the quiet, with no clusters of midlife students gossiping on the lawn, no familiars chasing each other between hedges. Just us, and a handful of gargoyles shifting high on the roofline, watching.
Stella slowed, looking up at the building with narrowed eyes. “She’s bracing,” she said.
“The Academy?” I asked.
“The magic,” she corrected. “She doesn’t like being nearly used for something and then not.”
“Relatable,” Twobble muttered.
Karvey dropped from a ledge with the kind of controlled grace only a centuries-old gargoyle could manage. He landed heavily beside us, stone knees bending, then straightened.
“It did not happen,” he said. Not a question.
“No,” I said.
He studied my face, then Keegan’s, then the others’. “The Wards felt the Hollow’s rise and fall,” he said. “They are… unsettled. But stable.”
“Unsettled but stable,” I repeated. “Good. We match.”
“If you’re all going to mope in front of the school,” Stella cut in, “we’ll be here until the next solstice. Move your tragedies along, darlings. Tea awaits.”
She herded us like a sparkly, undead sheepdog, prodding people toward the gate with sharp little tuts and remarks about “wasting perfectly good stooping posture on the wrong doorstep.”
I’ll admit, it helped.
The walk from the Academy down through the Butterfly Ward and into Stonewick village was muscle memory now. We followed the cobbled path, past the Butterfly Ward, where the air still shimmered with soft colors even in the glow of late afternoon. My butterfly mark tingled faintly as we passed through, a nervous greeting.
The village went about its business, mostly unaware that we’d just failed to close a dark magical highway.
Shopkeepers swept stoops. Kids chased each other, shrieking happily, tiny sparks popping at their heels as their nascent magic flared. Somewhere, someone laughed too loudly.
The normalcy of it made my throat tighten.
We crossed the little square where Luna’s now-closed yarn shop sat, its windows still dark. I didn’t let myself look at it too long.
Stella’s tea shop came into view like a promise.
The bell above her door chimed as we approached, then chimed again with more force, as if recognizing the weight of the group. Warmth rolled out at us in a wave: spiced tea, sugar, polished wood, the faint iron tang of Stella herself.
She swept ahead to hold the door like a particularly glamorous maître d’.
“Welcome to emotional triage,” she announced. “Seats wherever. Tears optional. Goblins, no licking the sugar bowls.”
“I did that one time,” Twobble muttered.
