I rested my palms lightly on the table in front of me. “The Priestess is trying to break that foundation by making sure we never trust anyone outside our familiar circle. She’s trying to turn scarcity into suspicion. She wants magical folk to fracture into fearful little groups because fearful groups will beg for control.”
I didn’t say her name right away. I didn’t need to. The word Priestess held the room on its own.
“All the Priestess wants is control,” I said. “Not balance. Not safety. Control.”
The murmur returned, sharper now, threaded with worry.
I let my shoulders relax. I let my voice warm.
“I know this is scary,” I said, and the words were simple on purpose. “I’m not asking you to pretend it isn’t. I’m asking you to consider what kind of place you want this to be.”
A woman in a cardigan with little moons on it frowned. “You want to let non-witches into the Academy.”
There it was. The question beneath every glance.
“Yes,” I said, and I held it steady. “Not wandering freely. Not without boundaries. Not without purpose. But yes. I want to invite them in, intentionally, in a structured way, because leaving them outside creates a story we don’t control. But they have to want to learn the craft.”
A few women exchanged looks. Someone’s grip tightened on a mug, and it shattered.
Not the look I was going for.
“How is that safe?” another student asked.
I nodded slowly. “Well, they’d probably ask the same thing. After all, we’re the ones armed with wands, spells, and magic at our fingertips. But it will be safe because we will build it that way. If we show them what respect looks like inside and outside these walls, we’ll unite as one. We must make it normal to see each other’s faces and abilities, instead of imagining what the others are doing in the shadows.”
Silence followed, but it wasn’t in disagreement. Rather, I could tell the witches were considering my words carefully.
“Imagine a shifter child who’s been sleeping in a tent because their pack was pushed off their land gets to sit in the library for an hour and listen to a story because we want the next generation to grow up believing the Academy and magic are a place of light and healing.”
Stella smiled and stepped next to me. “Think about how much you could learn from an orc who knows how to work stone and metal. They could teach a small workshop on anchoring ward stones so they don’t crack under strain. That doesn’t weaken our craft. It strengthens it.”
“This Academy has always been about second chances,” I said. “It’s about women who were told their power wasinconvenient, or too late, or too much. You came here anyway. You chose growth instead of shrinking. Now, our world is asking us to choose again. Not between Stonewick and Shadowick. Not between isolation and chaos. We can choose unity with structure. We can choose to be the place that holds without dominating.”
I saw the fear in their eyes, and I saw something else, too. Determination. The kind that had brought them here in the first place.
The doors at the far end of the hall opened.
A hush rippled through the room as heads turned.
Keegan padded in first, not as a man, but as a wolf. Dark fur, steady gaze, calm power held in a body built for both protection and restraint. He moved along the edge of the room with quiet confidence, as if he belonged here in any form, and maybe he did.
Then my breath caught, because behind him came another wolf.
The Silver Wolf.
Keegan’s mother.
And then, as if the Academy had decided to squeeze my heart just to prove it could, a third shifter stepped into view. An English bulldog, with a familiar presence, a gait I knew even when the body was wrong.
My dad.
And then, Caleb walked in behind them all.
For a beat, I couldn’t breathe. The curse that had kept my dad trapped, the shape he’d been forced to wear, the way I’d learned to accept the ache of it, all of that cracked open inside meat once because a man who hadn’t done anything to stop it was trotting right behind him.
My mom followed them, cheeks flushed, eyes bright with emotion that she was trying very hard to keep contained.
The hall was utterly still now; even the kitchen sprites seemed to flutter less.
