Chapter Eight
As I walked inside the banquet hall, I saw tables arranged in a horseshoe arrangement, and every seat held a midlife witch with a mug in her hands or a notebook on her lap or a look on her face that said she had not come here to be talked down to.
Midlife witches had a particular kind of presence. They were done being polite about their instincts, and they weren’t interested in pretending they didn’t see the cracks.
I flashed back to the first time the Academy doors opened for me, and I remembered how I wasn’t sure if the doors would ever open for anyone else. And then that moment when I opened the door to see Twobble standing there, waiting to enter a place that had turned its back on him time and again, made me feel like I’d made the right decision. It had felt so unreal to see witches of every kind filtering in, as if the building itself had decided it was finished being a rumor. Vampires with elegant restraint. Goblins with their sharp opinions and sharper teeth. Human witches who looked like they’d just come from book club and were stunned to learn they’d been doing spells with their words for years.
It had worked, not because we were identical, but because we had one common thread.
The craft.
It didn’t matter if our magic came from blood or bone or garden dirt under your nails. We were all in this together. As long as you were willing to learn and respect the rules of the space, you belonged here. The Academy had always been good at knowing who should come through the doors. It took the messy, aching reinvention of midlife and shaped it into something steady, and I was asking it to change a little.
I looked into the sea of witches and at all these faces and felt the weight of what I was about to ask them. Because of what was ahead, the common thread of craft wasn’t enough. We needed to share our knowledge and bring in more midlife magical folk.
I could see it in the way the women sat. Some leaned in, curious but wary. Some crossed their arms and watched me like they were waiting for the catch. A few kept glancing toward the doors as if they expected something to burst through them.
Twobble stood off to the side near the wall, perched on a stool so he could see over everyone’s heads. His clipboard was balanced on his knee, and he looked like he’d been promoted into a position of civic responsibility without consenting to it.
When I cleared my throat, the room quieted.
“Thank you for coming,” I began.
But I paused, because the words sounded too formal for what we were. This wasn’t a corporate meeting. This was a room full of women who had rebuilt themselves, some from ashes, some from quiet loneliness, some from the slow erosion of being underestimated. I needed to change my tactic. We were all in this together.
“I know you came here to learn. To grow your craft. To figure out what your magic is and what you want to do with it.”
A few nods. A few expressions eased.
“And I know some of you are wondering what you’ve walked into,” I continued. “Because the Academy isn’t just waking up. Stonewick is shifting. The world is shifting. You can feel it, even if you don’t have the words for it yet.”
That landed. I saw it in their eyes. Relief and fear often lived in the same place, but it was how you brought about change that made one or the other stick.
“I need to be honest with you. There are shifters in our Wilds right now. More are coming. There are orcs nearby. But they aren’t here to raid or threaten. They’re here because they’ve been pushed out of their homes, and because they believe Stonewick can hold until they can go back.”
A low murmur moved around the room.
One woman near the center lifted her chin. “Why should we trust that they don’t want Stonewick for themselves?”
It wasn’t a hostile question, merely practical.
I nodded. “You shouldn’t trust anything blindly. You should trust what you can verify, and you should trust the structure we build together.”
Another woman, older, with gray hair pinned in a loose knot, spoke quietly. “We signed up for a school. Not a war council.”
“You did,” I agreed. “And I’m not turning this into a battlefield. But magic is shifting because Shadowick no longer wants to remain silent in their direction. The Priestess is pressing darkness into places that have only seen the light.”
“What if she succeeds?” a witch asked.
“Then I haven’t done my job at protecting my students.”
A murmur rippled through the room.
“When the Academy first reopened, some of you remember what it looked like. Vampires and goblins and human witches sharing a hallway and figuring it out.”
A vampire witch near the back lifted her cup in a small salute.
“You assimilated because you had the craft in common,” I said. “You had a shared language. You could disagree and still come back to the same foundation.”
