Page 17

“Maeve!” Twobble gasped, eyes wide, breath shallow.

He skidded to a stop in front of me, panting like he’d sprinted the entire length of the west wing and back again. His sparse green hair stood in every direction, his cloak had come unfastened at the shoulder, and his entire expression screamed urgency.

I reached for his shoulder to steady him. “What is it? What did you find?”

But before he could answer, before even a single word made it past his lips, the air shifted.

I felt it first in my chest. A flicker. A sudden tension, like the entire room inhaled and forgot how to exhale.

Twobble’s head jerked toward the ceiling.

“What was—”

The sound cut him off.

A pop, sharp and unnatural, echoed through the grand foyer.

Not a small magical spark. Not one of the usual student mishaps.

This was deeper.

Thicker. Like the crack of pressure against stone.

A magical earthquake.

The floor beneath us rippled. Not visibly, but I felt it in the arches of my feet, the tremble of energy threading upward through the polished stone. A few of the students nearby froze mid-laugh. Several turned, their faces pinched with confusion.

The air was changing.

Then— bang.

A pulse of light flickered near the high archway that led to the corridor between the Maple and Library wings. Pale, silvery, and cold.

Twobble backed up into my side.

“Maeve,” he whispered, grabbing my arm.

The laughing stopped.

All across the foyer, students fell into a hush that only came when every instinct, magical and mortal, went suddenly alert.

“Did someone just cast something?” one girl asked, voice trembling.

“I didn’t…no, I didn’t do anything…” another stammered.

“No one cast anything,” I said firmly, loud enough to carry. “Everyone, stay calm.”

But the magic in the room wasn’t listening to me.

Bang— again.

This time, the eruption was louder as if something was trying to break through.

The temperature dropped.

A gust of air whooshed through the grand entry, scattering papers, lifting cloaks, and yanking loose a ribbon from someone’s braid.

I turned toward the corridor where the light had shimmered.

Nova came sprinting through the far end just then, her expression grim.

“Everyone out of the foyer. Now!” I hollered.

Students jumped at my voice, and a few hesitated. But when the chandelier above us flickered, then shuddered, they started moving.

Fast.

Students' shoes scraped and satchels were grabbed. Rising murmurs of fear replaced laughter.

“Maple Wing dorms, now!” Nova snapped to one group. “Bella, go with them. Check for residuals!”

Bella, already half-running, waved a hand and muttered a chant under her breath that sent a wave of warmth spreading behind her, gently but firmly pushing students back.

Ardetia appeared next, stepping out of a shadow like she’d been born from it. Her face was a mask of calm, but her eyes were glowing faintly. That was never good.

I turned back to Twobble, still clutching my sleeve like a child in a thunderstorm.

“You came to tell me something,” I said over the rising noise.

He nodded frantically. “I think it might be connected. I was going to tell you—”

CRACK.

This time, the sound was different.

Something in the very foundation of the building echoed. A piece of the stone railing up above snapped with a spiderweb fracture and landed in a clean chunk on the floor below, missing a student’s foot by an inch.

Twobble yelped and ducked behind me.

Nova was yelling something, but my ears were ringing now. The light above the foyer window dimmed then flared.

Silver. Cold. Familiar.

No. Not familiar.

Wrong.

This magic didn’t belong here.

I knew it before my mind had even caught up.

I’d felt it in my dream.

I turned to Ardetia. “Can you isolate it?”

She didn’t answer. Her lips were moving in a whisper of words I couldn’t hear, her hands weaving a sigil into the air. The lines glowed black and violet, the edges fluttering like moth wings.

Twobble tugged on my arm again, frantic now. “Maeve, it’s a—”

BOOM.

Not from outside.

From the ceiling.

Cracks raced across one of the upper beams, and dust rained down in fine, shimmering flakes like powdered ice.

Nova spun, looked at me, and said, “Get them out. I’ll trace it back.”

I nodded. “Don’t go alone.”

“I never do,” she said, and was gone, disappearing through the cracked corridor, cape flaring behind her like smoke.

Stella appeared next, breathless, eyes wide. “What in the heck is going on?!”

“Later,” I called. “Help me move them!”

The last of the students were ushered out now, a few clinging to each other, some crying softly.

Frank herded stragglers with sharp barks and nips at heels, his bulk protective and unwavering.

Ardetia took a position near the central staircase, anchoring something old and powerful with just her stillness.

Twobble and I remained near the center.

Then, for just a moment, everything stilled.

The chandelier stopped rattling.

The air evened.

The chill faded.

It was like the building had exhaled.

I turned to Twobble, kneeling slightly. “Tell me now. What did you find?”

He looked me dead in the eye.

“There’s a symbol,” he whispered. “Hidden on the ceiling of the corridor leading to the Butterfly Ward. It’s dark. And wrong. And it wasn’t there yesterday.”

My blood ran cold.

A symbol.

Inside our walls.

A rune?

Planted. Hidden. Waiting.

I opened my mouth to ask what it looked like…

And that’s when the chandelier, with a noise like cracking bone, snapped from its mount and began to fall.

The chandelier cracked loose with a shriek of metal and old enchantment, and for one heart-shattering moment, it hovered above the foyer, suspended in time before it began to fall.

Everything slowed.

Not in the magical way. Not in the cinematic way. Just that real, awful slowness of something inevitable happening too fast to stop.

Students screamed from down the corridor. Twobble shouted something beside me. I didn’t think.

I moved.

Straight toward it.

I didn’t have a spell on my lips. Nothing prepared. No elegant incantation, no precise handwork. Just an instinct that was deep, sudden, and louder than thought.

I raised my arms.

The chandelier stopped.

Not with a flash. Not with a gust or spark.

It simply...stopped.

Hung there, swaying slightly, as if some invisible hook had caught it just before the point of impact. Its glass crystals shivered, and a few drops of enchanted wax trembled mid-air, caught in the same strange pause.

My breath was ragged. My legs locked in place. And my arms, still outstretched, were burning with something I didn’t understand.

Not heat.

Not weight.

It was like holding something through memory. Like the magic wasn’t flowing from me, but through me, from somewhere older. Somewhere I hadn’t touched until now.

Somewhere that felt like the Academy itself.

The chandelier wobbled in the air again, just slightly. My knees buckled.

Then Ardetia was beside me.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to.

With a wave of her hand and the murmuring of a spell so low I could barely hear it, she guided the chandelier down with a slow and gentle ease.

She touched nothing, but the fixture slid itself to the ground like a glass boat finding still water.

The moment it settled, the breath I’d been holding ripped out of me like I’d been punched.

I dropped to one knee.

The foyer was quiet again, except for the faint rustling of dust and the metallic sigh of the chandelier cooling against the stone floor.

Twobble rushed to my side. “Maeve! Are you, did you… what did you do? ”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

Ardetia crouched beside me, her cool hand pressing against my shoulder. “Where did you learn that?”

“I didn’t.”

Her eyes searched mine, unreadable as always, but I saw the faintest narrowing of her gaze. Not suspicion. Not fear. Recognition.

“You channeled something,” she said softly. “Not spellwork. Not structured. You moved beyond realms again. Between here and then, hedge witch.”

“No,” I said. “It was just...there. It felt like it wasn’t mine.”

“Not all power is,” she said.

I swallowed hard. My whole body buzzed, not with adrenaline but with the residue of something that had passed through me and hadn’t quite left.

“You stepped into the moment of before and managed to pause in the moment of the next.” Ardetia stood tall and still, turning to the students watching wide-eyed from the far corridor.

“Time travel?” I whispered.

“In a sense.” She glanced at the group of onlookers, and my gaze followed.

“All is well,” I told them. “You are safe. Return to your dorms or the dining hall. Avoid the central stairwell until we say otherwise.”

They moved slowly at first, murmuring to each other, but they listened.

Twobble hovered next to me like a second shadow.

“I saw you,” he whispered. “Maeve, you didn’t cast anything. You just…held it.”

I nodded, though I didn’t understand it either. I had no name for what I’d done. No spell in any book that could describe the sensation that had taken hold of me.

I looked down at my hands, half-expecting them to glow or tremble.

But they were just hands.

Shaking a little, but normal.

Except now they weren’t.

“Come,” Ardetia said, not unkindly. “We should speak with Nova.”

I stood slowly, legs unsteady, and glanced once more at the chandelier on the ground that was whole, intact, and gleaming faintly in the dimming light.

I’d stopped it.

Somehow, I’d stopped it.

But it hadn’t been just me alone.

It had been the Academy.

And something deeper still.

Something I wasn’t sure I was ready to face.

But I would. Because now I had to.

I turned to Twobble. “Tell me what you’ve learned.”