Progress.
The iron gate loomed ahead, black and ancient, its runes pulsing faintly in the moonlight. Beyond it, the small building that housed the memory cauldrons sat quiet and still.
But the air around it felt wrong.
I could sense the pressure now. It wasn’t merely something pushing in from outside the Ward, but a strain running along itsseams. Something was drawing on the heat there, testing how much it could take without setting off alarms.
“Well,” I muttered, pushing the gate open, “that’s disconcerting.”
The hinges groaned as if they agreed, and I walked toward the building.
When I reached the door, I took in a steadying breath and moved forward over the threshold into the empty room.
Inside, the air shifted.
The stairwell rose ahead of me, steps winding upward toward the chamber where the memory cauldrons were kept.
With every step, the sting at my hip grew stronger.
The higher I climbed, the thicker the air became, carrying that metallic scent that always clung to old magic.
And I felt something else…movement.
It wasn’t like the heavy shift of stone at the Academy or the creak of old beams at the cottage, but something quicker than that, and quiet enough to slip along the edges of hearing.
I reached the top of the stairs, and the chamber beyond held a faint glow.
The memory cauldrons sat arranged in their familiar places. The enormous iron vessels were worn smooth by centuries.
Flame sprites darted between them.
Often, they were calm here, moving in slow loops around the cauldrons as if tending a quiet hearth.
This morning, they were anything but calm.
One shot too close to the rim of a cauldron and sparked sharply before veering away again. Another zipped straight toward me, circling in tight, anxious loops.
“Easy,” I said softly, stepping forward.
The heat in the room intensified.
It wasn’t just the flare of open flame. It felt more like pressure building inside the magic itself.
The surfaces of the cauldrons rippled faintly, as if something beneath them had begun to stir.
My birthmark flared so sharply that I had to brace a hand against the stone to steady myself.
That was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it might be a tear in the Ward or the beginning of a breach. But the longer I looked, the clearer it became that it was something else entirely.
A thread of magic, so fine it was nearly invisible, ran from the lip of one cauldron down into the seam of the Flame Ward.
Someone wasn’t attacking from the outside.
They were drawing power from within. They were attempting to collect memories.
The pull was slow and deliberate, careful enough that it might have gone unnoticed if the Academy were still half-asleep.
