Page 177 of Magical Mischief

It had asked me to see its broken pieces and choose to stay. In return, I showed mine.

To name what had been lost, and to rebuild anyway.

To gather the women who had been overlooked, set aside, dismissed…and remind them that they were still magic. That it wasn’t too late.

And in doing so, I would remember that I was too.

The butterfly lifted from my hand, spiraled once into the air, and vanished into the trees beyond the garden.

The crystal in my palm warmed again, quiet and steady.

I didn’t know what came next.

I didn’t know who the first student would be, when the doors would open, or what would rise from the egg in the dragon wing.

But I knewthis.

I knew the Ward was healing.

I knew I wasn’t alone.

And I knew, for the first time, that the woman I had become, standing in the middle of a fading garden with magic in her hands, was the same woman who had once made tea for a man who never saw her.

She had been there all along.

She just needed a place to land.

And wings of her own.

The magic had always been inside me, but now I was brave enough to use it.

The shimmer returned slowly.

First, as a glint on the edges of the archway, a glimmer of gold that caught in the corners of my eyes and made me blink. Then the light thickened, wrapping around the stones like morning sun through mist. It wasn’t dramatic. Not a sudden flash or jolt of magic. It was gentler than that, like the Ward was waking up from a long, hard sleep.

I slowly turned in the circle's center, watching the air stir. The wind carried the scent of warm earth and something sweet I couldn’t place—maybe honeysuckle, maybe something older. The dry stalks in the garden shifted, and I swore I saw the faintest sheen of green at their roots.

The shimmer passed through me, warm as breath.

I stood still, my heart quiet, and the red crystal tucked close to my hip. And then, without warning or fanfare, I laughed.

It started as a chuckle, light and sudden, catching me off guard. Then it grew.

Because, honestly, itfigured.

“I didn’t even cast anything,” I muttered, pressing a hand to my heart. “Not a single spell. No incantation. No formal circle. I didn’t even bring chalk.”

Just a dragon’s gift and a heart full of fear. A hedge witch walking through life with a vague idea of how magicshouldwork and a bellyful of half-forgotten dreams.

“I’m terrible at spell work,” I added, laughing softly as I walked to the edge of the garden path. “Ask Nova. I always skip steps. I forget the names of herbs. I talk through the parts that are supposed to be silent.”

A butterfly swept past me, wings glowing in the now-restored shimmer of the ward.

“But I’m a hedge witch,” I said aloud, more to the garden than myself. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

We weren’t meant to stay in lines. We weren’t meant to follow every rule or recite spells from a page. Hedge witches walkedbetween.Between the wild and the warded, the sacred and the chaotic. Between doubt and belief. We imagined. We wandered. We stood in doorways and whispered to both sides of the veil.

And sometimes, just sometimes, we healed a garden without casting a single spell.