My jaw tightens so hard it aches, every muscle in my face clenches with the effort of keeping my mouth shut. I want nothing more than to tell my dear aunt to go fuck herself with a rusty garden tool, but I’ve never been one to back down from a fight, and I need to hear this confession in its entirety.
“So, you decided to hurt a defenseless child,” I say flatly, letting all my disgust and disbelief color the words.
Lenora scoffs dismissively. “I didn’t hurt you, Keisha. I simply took something you would never have cause to miss. You were barely three months old, an infant with no awareness of what was being done to you or why.”
I want to scream, to rage, to somehow make her understand the magnitude of what she stole from me. Instead, I pull harder against the leather restraints, feeling them cut deeper into my wrists while the cold stone beneath my back seems to leach all the warmth from my body.
“I found the suppression spell buried deep in our ancestors’ collected works,” she continues, lifting the torn pages again with something approaching reverence. “It was crude, incomplete, apparently even our predecessors understood that this type of magic would be far too dangerous in the wrong hands. By all rights, it shouldn’t have worked as thoroughly as it did. But when my mother tested you afterward, desperately hoping to find some trace of the power everyone expected you to manifest, there was nothing. Not a flicker, not a spark. Nothing that mattered, anyway.”
I’m breathing so hard now that the leather restraints feel like they’re cutting off circulation to my entire body. The clearing suddenly feels too small, too close, pressing in around me. The claustrophobic sensation mixes with pure rage until I can barely think straight.
Nothing that mattered.The words echo in my head like a death knell, carrying with them the weight of every moment growing up when I was told to accept my limitations, to make peace with my deficiency, to learn how to live beside something I was born too close to ever truly escape from.
I think of my parents, who loved me, but never quite knew how to look at me without seeing what was missing. The careful language, the pity in their eyes, and the constant, quiet adjustments made on my behalf. All those years of feeling broken, incomplete, fundamentally wrong, and it all comes back to the woman standing over me right now.
“You let me live my entire life believing something was fundamentally wrong with me,” I say, and I can hear the heartbreak threading through the anger in my voice.
Lenora’s expression doesn’t change by so much as a flicker. “I let you live, period. Which is more consideration than you deserved, frankly.”
That single sentence nearly blacks out my vision with its casual cruelty. The implication that she considered killing me, that letting me exist in a magically neutered state was somehow an act of mercy on her part. It’s so beyond comprehension that for a moment I can’t even form words to respond.
Harold shifts uncomfortably somewhere behind her, clearly growing more agitated by the minute. For once in his miserable life, I’m actually grateful for his inability to keep his mouth shut.
“This has gone far enough, Lenora,” he says, his voice high and strained with barely contained panic. “The town already believes there’s magical instability affecting the wards.If something goes wrong out here tonight, if people come looking?—”
“Something already went catastrophically wrong thirty-five years ago,” she cuts him off with vicious precision. “Tonight, I’m simply fixing my previous mistake. Permanently.”
Then, without any further warning or ceremony, she steps forward and presses her palm firmly against my forehead.
Pain detonates through my skull like a lightning strike, sharp and invasive and completely overwhelming. I can feel her power, cold, alien, wrong, reaching inside my mind and body like skeletal fingers, searching through my very essence, tugging at the fundamental building blocks of who and what I am. My entire body arches off the stone altar as far as the restraints will allow, every muscle straining against the bonds.
I grit my teeth so hard my jaw trembles with the effort of not screaming. “Stop,” I manage to bite out through the agony, but Lenora only presses down harder and begins to chant in a language I don’t recognize.
The words are ancient, each syllable carefully pronounced and weighted with malicious intent. They fall from her lips like strikes against bone, deliberate and measured and absolutely merciless. The pressure in my head builds with every phrase she speaks, starting low and almost manageable, then growing heavier and more invasive until I can feel it reverberating through my ribs, my throat, my teeth, the very marrow of my bones.
A cry of pain tears from my throat despite my best efforts to stay quiet. I refuse to give her the satisfaction of hearing me beg, but the sound escapes anyway.
Harold takes several nervous steps backward. “Lenora, I really don’t think this is?—”
“Shut up, Harold,” she snaps without breaking the rhythm of her chanting.
“The magic feels different,” he tries again, his voice cracking with barely controlled terror. “Something’s not right here. Maybe we should?—”
“I said shut up!” she shouts, her voice echoing off the standing stones. The wind around us begins to change in response to her raised voice and increased magical output.
Dead leaves scattered across the forest floor begin to stir and rise, lifting high enough for me to see them swirling in increasingly frantic patterns. First they move in small, lazy circles, then faster and more violently, until they’re scraping across stone in wild, chaotic spirals that seem to mirror the growing storm of power. The lantern flames climb higher, flickering and dancing wildly in the supernatural wind. The ancient trees surrounding our clearing start to sway hard enough that their branches groan ominously overhead, creaking and snapping under the magical pressure.
Lenora continues her chanting, her voice climbing higher and more urgent with every ounce of intention she’s pouring into each carefully crafted phrase. I can feel her spell taking hold, trying to wrench something vital and irreplaceable from the very core of my being.
The pressure inside my skull climbs to excruciating levels, and for a terrifying moment I think I might actually break apart under the sheer intensity of what she’s trying to do to me. The pain is so overwhelming that I can barely draw breath around it. Something happens then as something else takes hold, rising from somewhere deep within me. Something that feels furious and hungry and absolutely unbreakable, burning away the invasive magic.
Power gathers inside me so quickly I can barely hold a breath around it, building and building until I feel like my skin might split apart from the sheer volume of it. All at once, I can sense far more than just the spell trying to tear my soul apart. I canfeel the ground beneath the stone altar, the complex network of roots spreading through the earth below us, the living pulse of the town in the distance, the red-tinged spring that feeds the magical infrastructure, the intricate web of ward-lines that protect and sustain Ruby Springs. All of it is connected, all of it answering to something in me that’s no longer locked away behind artificial barriers.
Harold’s voice breaks completely now, high and sharp with genuine terror. “Lenora, what the hell is happening?”
Small rocks lift from the forest floor around us, defying gravity as they float upward to join the rotation of leaves and debris. Pebbles, fist-sized stones, jagged shards of broken earth, all of it rising as if the fundamental laws of physics have simply ceased to exist in this space. The air itself hums with magical force, so thick and concentrated that my skin prickles with static electricity. Every hair on my body stands on end.
Lenora’s chanting falters for the first time since she began, uncertainty creeping into her voice as she realizes that something has gone very, very wrong with her carefully planned ritual.
