Page 17 of Magical Mirage (Stonewick Magical Midlife Witch Academy #6)

I untied the thread with hands steadier than I felt. The paper gave way like silk, silent and aged, and the scroll began to unroll itself, almost eagerly, as if it had been waiting for a long time.

I half expected it to resist me, to snap shut or vanish into smoke the moment I looked too closely.

But it didn’t.

It opened.

And at first… I didn’t understand what I was seeing.

Not diagrams. Not maps or ancient rites or binding sigils.

A letter.

Handwritten, and in a script I recognized even before I consciously placed it. Arrogant strokes, precise and elegant in a way that felt forced. Like the writer had something to prove.

I had seen it once before. I hadn’t been ready to see it then. I wasn’t sure I was ready now.

My breath hitched.

“It’s from Malore,” I said.

My dad stood still.

I read aloud,

To the one who finds this,

If you’ve gotten this far, I can assume you’ve begun to undo what should’ve been kept buried. No matter. You’ll fail.

The Hunger Path is not a gift. It is a price. One that I paid. One that nearly broke me. But I survived. And in surviving, I saw what no one else would admit: sovereignty is a myth.

Freedom breeds rebellion. Rebellion breeds ruin. If the wolves are not chained, they devour each other until there is nothing left.

I watched it happen. I let it happen. Then I fixed it. I built the laws that bound us. I took the chaos and named it strength. I bore the weight that none of you could carry. And I was hated for it.

Let them hate. Let them forget. Let them believe I am the villain.

I’d rather be feared and obeyed than loved and erased.

I stared at the curling edge of the parchment, the weight of the words still settling in my bones. My throat felt dry, dusted in ash.

My grandfather hadn’t just silenced the ancient rites. He hadn’t just broken his son or cursed his lineage.

He believed in what he’d done.

“He wrote this like a king trying to justify conquest,” I murmured.

Frank didn’t say anything, but his silence was confirmation.

I kept reading aloud even though I wasn’t sure my mouth was moving.

And now, my time returns.

The boy, the shadowspawn, the cursed one you fear, is no king. He is only a match I lit in the dark. He believes he uses me.

But he walks where I send him.

And when the flames reach the threshold, I will be standing at the end of the road.

Not Gideon.

Me.

I dropped the scroll as if it burned, but it didn’t need fire to wound. A question burned deep. How did this scroll get inside the Academy? The doors were already sealed.

“He really isn’t following Gideon,” I said slowly, staring at the stone beneath my sandals. “He’s using him.”

My dad bent, as the scroll tightened back up. “He’s always been good at that.”

I met his eyes. “You knew?”

“I suspected. Gideon’s rise was too sudden. His reach too wide. And there were things, whispers I heard during exile, that didn’t match what we saw. I didn’t want to believe Malore could still be pulling strings after all this time.”

“But he is,” I whispered. “And he’s not hiding any longer. Not really. He’s waiting for the moment to step forward. And Gideon doesn’t even know he’s a pawn.”

Or maybe he did and thought he could outsmart Malore.

“Maybe Gideon is just arrogant enough to believe he’ll outwit the wolf who made the rules.”

The scroll shimmered faintly in the firelight, the ink still vivid despite its age. It wasn’t just a confession. It was a warning. A declaration. A plan.

“He planned this,” I said numbly. “The curse. The Academy’s fall. The breaking of the Flame Ward. All of it. He’s been playing the long game. Preparing for this.”

I saw Keegan in my mind with his face pale and his body exhausted from the last fight. The way he winced from shadows, from questions he couldn’t name. He was tangled in this destiny, and the roots went deeper than we’d realized.

“He’s doing it again,” I said. “Malore is going to twist it all…shifter history, the path, the magic. He’s going to take it back and call it salvation.”

Frank stepped forward. “Then we don’t let him.”

I looked at him, my throat thick.

“What if we can’t stop him?”

He turned to me, the fire reflecting in his eyes like the echo of something he used to be.

“We don’t have to stop him all at once,” he said. “We just have to make sure the next piece doesn’t fall into place.”

He touched the final scroll still waiting on the stone slab, untouched, unspoken.

Malore had written his prophecy, but now it was our turn.

I couldn’t stop staring.

The scroll sat between us on the stone slab, Malore’s cruel, confident handwriting curling like smoke through my mind. His words still buzzed behind my eyes, but they weren’t what held me in place now.

It was the question rising in my chest.

A question I hadn’t dared voice aloud before. Perhaps, because I hadn’t wanted the answer.

“Dad…” I said slowly, my voice echoing softly in the quiet chamber. “Did Grandma Elira know?”

He looked up at me with that familiar steadiness I remembered from childhood…before the curse, before the silence, before everything broke. But there was something heavier behind his gaze now. Something worn at the edges.

“I’ve asked myself that more times than I can count,” he said at last, not pretending to be surprised by the question.

He shifted his weight slightly between his paws. The kindness in his expression didn’t vanish, but it did dim.

“I want to believe she didn’t,” he said gently. “I want to. But the truth is… I don’t know.”

He let out a breath through his nose, not quite a sigh.

“She felt him cracking,” he continued. “Disapproved of the way he twisted the clans, of the way he carved his power out of fear. She warned him, once or twice, softly. Never where anyone could hear. And then… she stopped warning him. And stayed.”

I swallowed, throat dry as old ash. “Stayed and watched.”

He nodded. “Yes. And when he exiled me, when I shifted too early, when I couldn’t follow his rules, when I refused to kneel, she was already trapped here. So, I don’t know what she would have done.”

My fingers curled into the hem of my tunic.

“She loved you,” I whispered. “She told me, when we were alone, after I first came back to the Academy, that losing you was the worst pain of her life. That she couldn’t reach you in time. That she crumbled when the Academy locked her inside and she saw what happened to you.”

My dad smiled softly through his jowls, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“She did love me,” he said. “But love doesn’t always make people brave.”

Wow.

That settled between us like dust.

“I think part of her was relieved when the Academy sealed, as if the walls gave her permission not to fight anymore. She had an excuse to stop choosing.”

I flinched as the words hit harder than I expected.

Not because I thought he was wrong, but because there were times I’d wondered the same thing.

There were times when I’d catch my grandma staring out the window of the Academy with a longing so deep it felt almost hollow, as if she’d been gazing at the world, not with regret, but detachment.

Not sorrow, but distance. And when I’d told her about the good news about our first shifter coming back to the grounds in fox form, she didn’t believe me. Perhaps, she couldn’t.

There were moments when she spoke of the town, of Stonewick’s pain, like it was a tale being told instead of something she lived through.

And worse, there were times she looked at me the same way.

Like I was another story unfolding.

“I don’t know what that makes her,” I said finally, my voice tight. “I don’t know if it makes her selfish or tired or…”

I didn’t finish the thought.

“She loved the Academy,” I said instead. “She poured herself into it. She wants Stonewick to survive.”

“She does,” my dad agreed. “But I don’t know that she wants to be the one to do the saving.”

That stopped me.

I turned toward him, heart ticking louder.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… she’s spent decades being the steward of this place. Guarding its ruins. Honoring its ghosts. She wants someone to save it—yes. But sometimes I wonder if she’s just waiting for someone else to do it. You. Me. Keegan. The next generation. Anyone but herself.”

I felt something tighten in my chest. Not pain. Not yet.

Something like mourning.

“I used to think she was trapped,” I whispered. “That the magic of the Academy had locked her away. That she couldn’t leave.”

Frank was quiet.

“And now?” he asked.

I looked at him, the truth hovering like a breath between us.

“Now I think she let it keep her.”

He nodded slowly. “I’ve thought that too.”

Silence stretched, not uncomfortably, but heavy and full of questions that didn’t have easy answers.

“What if she’s hiding more than we know?” I asked, barely above a whisper.

“She probably is,” he said without hesitation.

“Should I ask her?”

He smiled, faintly. “You can. But Elira only tells the truth when it suits her.”

I looked back at the scroll as Malore’s words burned into my mind like embers.

“She wouldn’t side with him,” I said, more to myself than anyone else. “She couldn’t. ”

My dad’s silence stretched long enough that I had to look at him again.

We were standing on layers of choices, stacked so high we couldn’t tell anymore which ones were deliberate and which were out of survival.

And in the middle of it stood Elira, the keeper of secrets, steward of ruin, and my grandmother.

The woman who taught me to ask questions.

And the one who might’ve buried answers I needed most.

“What now?” I asked, my voice barely steady.

My dad turned to the final scroll still rolled on the stone, untouched.

“Now we read the rest,” he said. “And decide what to do before Malore steps out of the shadows again.”

But neither of us reached for it.

Not yet.

I’d always wondered why Grandma Elira kept so many things to herself.

Not just the dangerous secrets or the forbidden ones, those I could almost understand.

Magic required caution, after all. But the rest?

The small truths, the half-memories, and the names she never said aloud were what always made me curious.

She held them all behind her eyes like glass beads, polished by time, rattling in her silence.

I knew she loved me. I didn’t doubt that.

It was in the way she touched my shoulder when she thought I needed grounding, or in how she remembered how I took my tea, even after only seeing it once.

She looked at me sometimes like she saw the pieces of my father, her son, and it had broken her just a little. And still, she loved.

But love wasn’t always enough to make her open.

Sometimes, I’d see it in her face when a question lingered too long in my throat, or when I got too close to something she didn’t want me to find. Her expression would tighten, just enough to warn me off. She was not unkind, never cruel, but closed.

Now I was beginning to wonder if it was fear that made her quiet…or guilt.

Perhaps both.

And maybe I wasn’t the only one she’d been keeping in the dark.