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We’d known each other since she was brought here as a little dark-eyed twelve-year-old who could already school all of the trainers, except the then weapons master, who was also a dragon from Storm. In all the years since, she’d never had the call to her ryder. Duds were rare, but they happened. They were the flyers whose ryders may have died in infancy or simply never came to be. It was hard on them because they would never know definitively who their ryder was, just that they must be gone.

Hazel wasn’t past an age where it was a foregone conclusion. She could still be called. Her ryder might yet emerge. She had not given up hope. But I knew the pain of the hope and the wait. My circumstances were the same but also altogether different. I met my ryder, and even when she was gone, I knew she had not gone to the Goddess because our thread was not cut. I just couldn’t locate her.

Once that thread of connection links, after a pair meet for the first time, we know if it’s cut. That alone is what has kept me from going insane over the years. So, I admired Hazel for keeping herself level and becoming so invaluable. All I was able to do was sulk around the palace, doing a job I hated because it was the antithesis of who I was. But not Hazel. When the old weapons master retired, she’d stepped into his shoes. She didn’t need to meld her magic with a ryder to be useful at her job like I did. It almost made me jealous, but she deserved her post.

“She is going to keep you on your toes, that one,” she quipped.

“Believe me, I know.”

“She’s not a fan?” Hazel raised a brow.

“You always were nosy.”

“What have I got to do until I find my ryder except live vicariously through those of you who have?” She sat on the floor and waved me over to help her stretch.

I knelt behind her to push on her back. “I hope yours wasn’t raised like mine and at least knows that magic exists when you do find them.”

She craned her head back to look at me, her expression twisted into shock and then quizzical. “You’re kidding?”

“I’m not.” I let up on the stretch and sat across from her, both our legs open in a V to help each other by grabbing hands.

“She didn’t know magic existed? That’s…” She took my hand and let me pull her forward. “I gathered from meeting her this morning that her upbringing was unusual, but no magic?”

“None,” I confirmed.

“Imagine spending your entire life not knowing magic exists. I can’t. We’d die in Storm. Our lives depend on our wards and warnings from the lightning.” The fae from her kingdom were the only fae I’d ever come across that weren’t afraid of lightning. They loved it, lived in it, and harvested it like other kingdoms harvested crops.

“I don’t want to live in a world like that.” I released her arms, and we rearranged our feet so she could pull me forward.

“So, how did they explain her power if magic didn’t exist to them?”

“She doesn’t have any,” I murmured, figuring if I didn’t speak the words clearly, they would not be true.

“What?” she choked.

“It was blocked somehow, along with her bond to me, as far as we can work out. Kiera is confident it will emerge now we are together, but nothing so far.”

“Unbelievable. Where do you think her magic is? It has to be as strong as yours. How would they be able to block that kind of power?”

“I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. Our bond is still intact, but magic-wise, I feel nothing from her, and I know I felt something when we were young. She definitely had her first sparks of magic then—I felt them. Now, they’re gone.”

Hazel asked the question I was too afraid to: “Could they have done something to her to make her lose her magic entirely?”

“How? There is no way in the known world to remove someone’s magic except what a siphon can do temporarily. Don’t you think if there was a way to extract magic and destroy it, we’d know, because we’d all be living in fear of it?”

“True. It would be the ultimate weapon.”

“Exactly.”

“But I’m confident it’s there; she just can’t access it.”

“I hope the Goddess grants you the answers soon, my friend.”

We switched to doing our own stretching and were just finishing up when the other students began to join us. Zaria slipped into the back, with Kol by her side. He lifted a shoulder in an unapologetic shrug and stayed in the back where they wouldn’t be noticed.

But their anonymity didn’t last long. “Don’t try to sneak in here, Kol Asra!” Hazel called when she spotted them. “How long have you been back?”

“Not for long. Only a few days.” Kol wasn’t allowed to say much about their missions, and Hazel would know that.