The silence stretched for a moment, heavy but not uncomfortable. It felt less like refusal and more like patience, as though the dragon had stepped forward for a reason that didn’t require words.
Slowly, it dawned on me that he hadn’t come to explain anything.
He had come to watch me.
The bronze dragon’s voice moved through the den again, steady and deep.
You cannot control Shadowick. You can’t control the Priestess. You can’t control Gideon’s redemption, if that is what this is.
I let out a slow breath.
“But I can control myself,” I said. “What I do. What I choose to do with my magic.”
The silver dragon answered with a low rumble that warmed the chamber.
Yes.
“I will do my best to protect everyone,” I said.
The words came easier once I started.
“Stonewick. The Wards. The people who showed up at my cottage and stood there like it was their own home.”
Karvey’s heavy landing on the roof flashed through my mind. Twobble’s worried expression. My father helped when my legs had nearly given out.
“And I’m bringing my mother home,” I added.
The words came out quieter that time.
Not because I doubted them.
Because saying them out loud made the promise real.
The black dragon’s silver-tipped scales caught the light as he shifted, almost imperceptibly. It felt like a nod in slow motion.
The silver dragon’s voice brushed my mind like moonlight through mist.
Go, Hedge Witch, with open hands and not clenched fists. Let your magical meaning guide you.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
The dragons didn’t respond with words this time, just presence…and warmth.
As I stepped away and started toward the exit, I felt it. There was a subtle shift in the den, in the Academy, in something that lived beneath the stone.
It wasn’t a prophecy or a warning.
It was a promise held together by hope.
The magic I had created, and somewhere behind me in the den’s deep hush, the black dragon with silver-tipped scales remained silent, watching me, like the Academy itself had just placed a new guardian in my path.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I didn’t go back to my room. Instead, I went to my office.
It had once belonged to women with firmer buns and stricter posture. Women who probably didn’t pace barefoot in the middle of the night thinking about dragons and traitorous grandmothers and mothers who walked into the Wilds to meet a Shadow Priestess.
But I’m sure they had their own set of problems to deal with, right? I couldn’t just be that unlucky where magic is threatening to unravel around us now and never before.
