The aggressive blue-green glow fought me. It pulsed brighter, as if sensing the threat. But I’d been doing this since I was twelve,since the day my mother died and my gift tore free. I had eleven years of learning to pull magic into submission without breaking the creature that housed it. The rune’s light flickered and dimmed from electric blue to sullen amber. I gripped tighter, ignoring the way ice spread through my veins, turning my blood sluggish and thick. The cold crawled outward from my sternum, down through my ribs, settling into the hollows of my shoulders like I’d swallowed winter whole. My bones ached with the pressure of it, frost and heaviness spreading from my core, threading down through my arms until my fingers went stiff.
Sleep,I insisted, pouring more of myself into the command.
The amber glow guttered and went dark. The book-dragon’s frantic breathing slowed. Its pupils contracted back to normal size, the panic bleeding out of its gaze in one long exhale. The creature slumped forward onto the table, curling into a drowsy ball with its tail wrapped around its nose. I sat back hard, my knees hitting the floor with enough force to rattle my teeth.
The silver-white light faded from my hands, leaving behind skin gone red and stiff from channelling too much and too fast. I flexed my fingers, wincing as circulation returned in tingles.
My hair had fallen completely loose during the working, spilling over my shoulders in a mess of chestnut waves. It was getting in my way, but braiding it seemed like too much work on a day like this. I pushed it back, probably leaving another smudge across my cheek. Sweat cooled on my throat despite the lingering chill in my bones.
Someone exhaled behind me, relief or awe, I couldn’t tell which.
“Is it...” Maren’s voice, careful and quiet.
“Sleeping,” I said. “The rune’s dormant. It’ll pass naturally now.” I reached for the table’s edge to pull myself up, and my hands slipped on the polished wood.
Maren pressed a cup into my hands before I’d fully regained my feet. The tea scalded my palms through the porcelain, but I held on, letting the heat chase away the bone-deep cold my gift always left behind.
“Drink,” she ordered, soft but firm. I obeyed, taking small sips while she wrapped the sleeping book-dragon in a clean linen cloth.
Maren moved with efficiency, her full figure radiating warmth as she bundled the creature against her chest. In her late thirties, she had warm brown skin and natural black curls she kept wrapped in colourful fabric, today’s was amber silk shot through with copper thread. Her round face wore an infectious smile, the kind that made strangers feel welcome the moment they crossed her threshold.
She’d been the first person in Abberwyn to look at me without fear after my mother died. When the other Academy students whispered and kept their distance, Maren had appeared one afternoon with tea and cinnamon buns, settling beside me in the courtyard like my reputation for dangerous magic meant nothing.
“You’re allowed to take up space, love,” she’d said. “Even the kind that scares people.”
Now she glanced toward the door, her usual warmth dimming.
The café‘s atmosphere had shifted while I’d been focused on the dragon. Conversations that should have resumed stayed hushed. A middle-aged woman near the counter watched me over the rim of her cup. When I met her gaze, she looked away fast enough to slosh tea onto her saucer.
“Magic like that isn’t natural.” The voice came from somewhere behind me, pitched loud enough to carry. “Snuffing out spells like candle flames... what else could she snuff out?”
My fingers tightened on the cup.
“Creatures have been odd all tenday.” A different voice, quieter but no less pointed. “Garden drakes snapping at owners. Something’s wrong with the ley-lines, I swear it.”
“I’m glad Lady Kelda returned to town. She arrived just in time to make things right.” The third speaker sounded almost thoughtful. “She’s been visiting the manor daily, they say. That lord who never sees anyone, he letsherin.”
I set down my cup carefully, very carefully, before the tremor in my hands could send it crashing to the floor.
Maren’s jaw tightened. She shifted closer, creating a buffer between me and the room’s growing unease with nothing but her solid presence.
“Ignore them,” she said.
But we both knew I couldn’t.
“Lady Kelda.” Maren leant close, her voice dropping beneath the swell of gossip. “You know what she specialises in, don’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Veil Magic.” Maren’s tone carried disapproval. She did have strong opinions about things that walked the edge of acceptable practice. “Illusions and memory work. They say she’s some kind of specialist, but that sort of magic has a way of leaving fingerprints,” she nodded. “You don’t always notice them at first. But records don’t quite line up. People remember things out of order. Little gaps start to form. And it can’t make something real,” she added. “It can only make you forget what was.”
Veil Magic occupied an uncomfortable space in Lumenvale society. Not forbidden, exactly, but viewed with the kind of wary respect people gave to things that could unravel reality if wielded carelessly. Most practitioners focused on the domestic arts: Brewworking to create healing teas and calming draughts, Hearthcraft to enchant homes with warmth and comfort, Creaturae Arts to maintain the bonds between humans and dragons. Magic that nurtured. Magic that built.
“The Morvain family are renowned Hearthcrafters,” someone said from a nearby table. The merchant woman who’d watched me earlier had found her voice again. “Lady Kelda’s mother designed the enchantments for half the noble estates in the valley. Self-warming hearths, windows that never let in rain, lamps that sense your mood and adjust the light...” She gesturedvaguely, as if Lysa should already know all this. “Lady Kelda inherited the gift.”
The manor these people were talking about was the Stormgarde family mansion, but everyone’d been calling it the Crumbling Manor since I was a little kid. It perched on the cliffs above Abberwyn, its grey towers visible from the lower town when the mist cleared. Once it had been beautiful, people said. A sanctuary for difficult creatures, the kind other handlers gave up on. The Stormgarde family had made their reputation there, taming the untamable. Well, something had obviously gone wrong.
Maren’s hand found my elbow. “Come on. Let’s get you properly fed before you fall over.”
