And then, almost imperceptibly, one wand at the far end of the shop begins to glow.
Not gold. Not white. But a deep, luminous violet that mirrors the color of my irises exactly.
It glows brighter, pulsing like a heartbeat, then detaches itself from the wall with such slow, deliberate intent that even Liam goes still beside me.
Merrow inhales sharply, the first sign of true surprise cracking through his placid demeanor.
“Well,” he murmurs, voice reverent, “it seems the question is no longer whether she will find a wand.”
The wand drifts closer, glowing brighter with every inch, until it hangs suspended before me, vibrating with restrained power that thrums like a living pulse.
“The wand,” Merrow whispers, “has found her.”
My breath quivers as I lift my hand toward it, the room falling completely silent around us. The shop seems to hold itself in suspension, air thick, magic trembling, the world narrowing to the space between my fingertips and the wand’s polished wood.
This time, I do not pull back. This time, I let the magic reach for me.
The moment my fingers close around the wand, the world does not simply brighten, it detonates.
The surge that tears through me is not the clean, focused current of spellwork I’ve felt before. It is something raw and untamed, something ancient and wild, something that feels as though it has been waiting centuries for a hand to grasp it again. A violent rush of heat slams into my chest, driving the air from my lungs so sharply that the breath leaving me feels stolen rather than released. Violet light bursts outward with such overwhelming intensity that every edge in the room dissolves into blinding haze. I feel the shop tilt, or perhaps I tilt within it; it becomes impossible to distinguish between my body and the force swallowing it whole.
Sound follows, not separate from the magic, but part of it.A rising roar, a crackling wail, the unmistakable timbre of something breaking open in the deepest part of my mind.
And then the visions strike.
They arrive as if hurled into me, too sharp to be dreams yet too unreal to belong to the waking world. First comes a single child’s cry, high and piercing. Then another joins it. And another. The sound layers, builds, becomes a tide of small, terrified voices that crashes hard enough to ripple through my bones. Images flicker with painful brightness: a child stumbling through smoke, tiny hands reaching for help that does not come; the shadowed form of a woman collapsing beside a burning doorway; the silhouette of a village swallowed by flame.
The heat intensifies until I feel fire licking at my skin, though I know I am still standing in the wand shop, somehow still gripping the wood that is pouring this nightmare into me. I smell smoke so vividly it burns my throat, hear the crack of timbers collapsing, see figures running, falling, disappearing behind roiling black smoke.
And then the vision sharpens to a single focal point.
A pair of eyes.
They do not belong to a child, nor to a villager, nor to anything human. They shine through the smoke like molten gold newly poured into a mold, dark irises rimmed with bright flecks that shimmer as if each one were alive. They hold a depth that is not merely ancient but endless, like a creature that has watched the world rise and fall more times than it can be bothered to count. The eyes narrow slightly, fixing on me with an awareness so direct it feels like a hand closing around my heart.
For a breathless second, I am certain the eyes are not part of the vision at all. That they are looking back. That they see me as clearly as I see them.
And then, they vanish.
Vanished not as images fade, but as though something reached through the darkness and tore them away before I could understand what I’d seen.
The entire vision collapses in on itself.
The fire disappears. The cries dissolve. The suffocating heat evaporates.
The wand’s glow gutters out, leaving a smoke-tinged stillness in the air so abrupt it feels like falling.
I stumble backward, my throat tight and raw, my chest laboring for breath that refuses to come in clean, steady waves. The shop around me, once tidy and quiet, is now in total disarray. Several wand racks have toppled over. Enchanted instruments lie scattered across the floor in tangled heaps of metal and wood. Glass cases are cracked, one entirely shattered, glittering shards strewn like fractured stars across the planks. Even the shimmering silver dust drifting lazily through the room feels like the aftermath of something catastrophic.
Liam is on me in an instant, his hands firm on my shoulders, anchoring me to a world my mind hasn’t fully returned to. His voice reaches me as though from behind a wall of water, muffled and urgent.
“Harper, look at me. You need to breathe. Breathe...just breathe.”
I blink, struggling to draw my surroundings back into focus piece by piece. Merrow stands several feet away, his usually composed expression cracked open by something between awe and alarm. Another wandwright has joined him, Welt presumably, and his face is full of a reverence tinged with fear. Neither approaches. Neither speaks. Neither seems certain the magic in the room has settled enough to be safe.
I force in a breath, sharp and trembling. Then another, slower, dragging through my lungs like a blade scraping iron.The wand lies in my hand still, warm, almost feverishly so, but no longer hostile or overwhelming. It hums faintly, like a living thing whose heartbeat has finally slowed from a sprint to a steady pulse.
“What was that?” Liam demands, his voice a quiet storm. “What did you see? Harper, what happened?”
