Page 16 of Magical Mirage (Stonewick Magical Midlife Witch Academy #6)

The scroll unfurled slowly, the parchment stiff and bordered with a shimmer that reminded me of snake scales.

My dad’s paws were steady, but I could see something in his eyes shift.

It was almost like when someone looks at a photo of a person they lost a long time ago and stopped daring to remember.

It wasn’t grief.

It was purpose.

The script was ancient, the ink faded, but still legible under the room’s unnatural light. It curved and wound across the page in runes I only half-understood, but there was no mistaking the shape drawn beneath the text.

A wolf.

Not the crude sort you'd find on tavern signs or a coat of arms, but something more primal.

Its limbs were elongated, its jaw open mid-snarl, and its eyes etched in a way that made them seem like they saw .

Below it, lines curved outward in a spiral, and further down, a ring of symbols encircled what looked like a fire.

“I don’t understand,” I said, stepping closer. “This isn’t clan history. This is older. Pre-covenant?”

He nodded, fingers brushing the scroll’s edge. “Older than most shifter clans would admit even exists.”

I raised an eyebrow. “So it’s real, then. The pre-clan rites?”

“Very real,” he said. “And very dangerous. That’s why Malore sealed them. Hid them. Certainly hoped they'd be forgotten.”

My heart kicked against my ribs. “You knew about them when you were still part of his circle?”

“I knew of the rumors ,” he said carefully. “Nothing more. When I was young, there were whispers. Old wolves telling stories they weren't supposed to know. They spoke of a time before the Bloodlines were codified and before the Moon Bargain was made.”

Moon Bargain…

My dad paused, with his gaze fixed on the spiral inked beneath the wolf. “Back then, shifting wasn’t just something done under moonlight. It was something... invoked. Not granted. Taken. ”

“And you believed them?” I asked, though my voice lacked any challenge.

He looked up at me, the lines in his bulldog face drawn sharper by the flickering blue light.

“I had to. When I was cast out, I had nothing. No name, no pack, no anchor. And the way my father, Malore, turned the others against me…” He trailed off, jaw flexing. “I needed to believe there was something before him. Something that made us more than what he turned us into.”

The ache in his voice made my throat tighten.

I looked at the second scroll, still rolled and untouched beside the first. “And this is the proof?”

He nodded. “Pieces of it. Hidden like this. Layered under stories. Rituals erased from pack lore. All of it scrubbed clean once the clans fell in line under the Blood Oaths.”

“Why?”

“Because the ancient rites made shifters sovereign, ” he said. “Not tied to hierarchy. Not ruled by Alpha law. It meant no one could control your transformation—not the moon, not a pack bond, not even lineage. The shift came from within. You answered your own call.”

I felt the impact of those words in my chest. The idea of shifting not as a surrender to nature, but a choice. An act of will.

That had been taken away from Keegan and my dad.

“So Malore,” I said slowly, “he built his legacy on something he knew was a lie.”

“He built it on power,” my father said. “The illusion of order. The old rites, this kind of freedom, would’ve shattered his control. So he rewrote history. Made exile the punishment for any sign of inner resistance. Turned independence into corruption .”

“And when you refused to fall in line…”

“I was made an example.” His eyes stayed on mine. “Malore wasn’t the first. Generations have taken advantage of clans, but he was the first to harness the power and see what could be done with it.”

The room fell quiet. The blue fire in the brazier hissed once, low and sharp.

“And now,” I said, “it’s all coming undone.”

He gave a slow nod. “After me, it started with Keegan’s defiance. He stood with Stonewick, but Gideon twisted what was left and cursed him to shift without his consent every ten years, and of course, Gideon tried to humiliate me by keeping me a bulldog.”

“Nothing shameful about that,” I whispered.

“Agreed.”

“But now it’s in you.”

I flinched. “Me?”

“You’re his blood, Maeve. Mine. Malore’s.

But also something else. You reopened the Academy.

You stirred the old magic in the Wards and Academy before you even imagined magic this powerful.

You felt the Hedge. The blood of the wolf runs in your veins, but your power doesn’t merely come from the moon.

It comes from choice. From will. That scares Malore more than anything.

If you can awaken old magic so easily, you can expose it as well. ”

I stared down at the scroll, at the way the wolf’s form was drawn not as a beast but something else entirely. Something becoming .

“And you’re showing me this now because...?”

“Because you need to understand what Malore is trying to stop.” My dad gestured toward the spiral on the parchment. “A return to the old ways. A return to the wolves who made their own paths.”

A breath caught in my throat.

“And what does that mean for Keegan?” I asked, barely above a whisper.

“I think,” my dad said gently, “that the curse in him is only half of the story. The rest, what he becomes next, might depend on whether he follows Malore’s way… or the one lost in these scrolls.”

He reached toward the second one, but something in me tensed.

“Not yet,” I said, surprising myself. “Let me… just give me a moment.”

I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until my father reached for the second scroll and I stopped him.

He looked up at me, paws hovering over the scrolls, something cautious in his expression. He wasn’t impatient, just concerned for me.

“It’s the shadow,” I said quietly. “Isn’t it?”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.

The longer I stood in that hidden chamber, the more I felt it pressing down, not just from above us, but inside as if the weight of what loomed over Stonewick had already burrowed beneath its foundations.

It wasn’t just a storm gathering. It wasn’t just magic being pulled at the edges of the sky.

It was tied to what he was showing me now.

Bound to the forgotten pieces buried in these scrolls.

And I realized… this wasn’t just about history.

“You brought me here because it’s coming back,” I said, voice steadier now. “Whatever that thing is above the Academy, it’s not separate from this. It’s because of this.”

Frank nodded slowly. “It’s a consequence. Maybe a symptom. Maybe something worse. Perhaps something better.”

I walked toward the far wall, trying to still my thoughts, brushing my hands against the edge of a shelf as I stared at nothing.

“The Wards have been strengthening, but the gargoyles can’t rest. Everything feels…” I swallowed, “…watched.”

“Because it is.”

I turned to him. “So tell me. What is it?”

He hesitated. Not like he didn’t know, but like he was weighing whether to speak it aloud.

“I can’t give it a name,” he said finally. “Not one you’d find in our language. It doesn’t belong to one story. It’s older than stories. It’s… a consequence of forgetting. Of breaking what we were, while trying to cage it behind laws and rituals we no longer understand.”

“Then it’s a shifter thing,” I said. “Something from before the clans.”

“Not just a shifter thing,” he said. “A wolf thing. Something that comes when the line is broken.”

He stepped around the brazier and gestured to the first scroll again. The one he’d already opened. The spiral pattern beneath the wolf was clearer now in the shifting light. It wasn’t just a symbol. It was a path.

“We were never meant to bind ourselves to one moon,” he said.

“Or to a single bloodline. The original rite, this Hunger Path, meant evolution. Transformation not just of body, but of purpose . But Malore changed that. He stopped the path. Trapped it. That thing above us now? It’s the result of generations forcing themselves into shape. ”

I stepped closer, goosebumps lifting across my arms. “You mean it’s a curse?”

“I mean, it’s a backlash,” he said. “An echo. Maybe even a guardian. One that was silenced when the path was broken and has waited ever since to be remembered.”

The pieces began sliding into place in my mind, slow and careful.

Frightening.

“And now that I’ve touched that magic,” I whispered, “it’s watching me.”

He didn’t flinch. “Yes.”

“Because I reawakened the path?”

“Because the Hunger Path’s choosing again.”

I sank onto a stone bench. Breath seized in my lungs without warning.

I thought of Keegan, lying pale and quiet in his bedroom, trying to heal, struggling against a curse tied to a bloodline forged from fear.

I thought of the silver wolf, silent and nameless, arriving just in time and disappearing before questions could form. I thought of Malore, ripped away by Hedge and flame and still not dead. Not defeated.

And above us, something old was pacing.

My dad moved closer to the scroll, paws tracing the shape inked beneath the old wolf sigil. The spiral, though even that word felt too clean, too geometric, twisted in a wild, uneven curve. I studied it harder to see claw marks circling prey.

“Long before Malore, long before the clans even called themselves clans , this shape was known as the Hunger Path.”

I blinked, moving back to the scrolls. “That doesn’t sound like a path to freedom .”

“It wasn’t exactly,” he said. “It was the path you had to survive. Shifters didn’t become what they are through peace and song.

They fought their way into their power. Every ancestor we came from walked the Hunger Path first, whether through madness, through instinct, through self-denial, and emerged with their own truth. ”

“Like a rite of passage?” I asked.

Frank nodded. “But not one anyone could offer you. You had to take it. Face what hunted you from inside.”

I swallowed, watching the ink shimmer as if the lines still held heat. “And it’s been around longer than the curse?”

“Oh, yes.” His gaze didn’t leave the parchment. “The curse is young magic, Maeve. Twisted, cruel—but crafted . The Hunger Path… it’s older than language. Older than rules. And it’s waking up again.”

I looked up. “So what happens when we open the next one?”

He didn’t smile. “Everything changes.”

The Academy vibrated faintly through the wall, living, listening, always speaking.

“The town feels it too,” I said. “They just don’t have words for it.”

“They will,” he said. “Soon.”

I looked at him, the extra wrinkles around his eyes, the new weight in his haunches that hadn’t been there before Malore returned.

“I’m not ready,” I said, honest and aching.

“I wasn’t either,” he replied.

We stood there, the firelight casting us both in uneven shadows. Two figures with the same hope, the same blood, and secrets between us layered as thick as the scrolls we hadn’t yet read.

I wanted to turn back. To go upstairs, crawl back into Keegan’s arms, pretend the sun might return, but I knew.

The shadow didn’t want destruction.

It wanted reckoning.

And it had waited long enough.

I reached out and laid my fingers on the thread of the second scroll.

And the flame in the brazier flared.

Because I knew whatever was inside that next scroll wasn’t just knowledge. It was change. And once it was opened, it would rewrite everything.

I just wasn’t sure if I was ready.