Chapter Twenty-One
The Academy’s halls had grown welcoming again with energy. Not haunted, exactly, just brimming with life. It felt as if someone had stirred up the dust of a hundred years and left the door open to see what might wander out.
I wasn’t looking for anything in particular.
Just… walking. Breathing in the quiet.
Sometimes that was enough. Sometimes that was when the Academy showed me something I’d never dreamt.
I rounded a corner near the old knitting nook and almost collided with a blur of brown coat and maple leaves.
“The trees are following me,” Bella muttered, yanking her scarf free from the doorknob.
She looked up, saw me, and froze.
“Don’t,” she warned with a smile.
She looked like she’d gotten into a scuffle with a maple tree, and she didn’t come out on the winning end of it.
“What? I haven’t said a word… yet.” My brows lifted.
“You’re thinking it.” She wiggled her finger. “I can see it.”
I held up both hands. “Thinking what?”
She tugged her coat straight. One of her boots had bits of moss stuck to it. A leaf clung to her hair, and she looked nothing like the graceful fox form I’d grown accustomed to.
It was….refreshing.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Tree trouble?”
She stared at me, exasperated. “Maple grove. I thought it was a shortcut. It was not.”
“I’m assuming it involved roots.”
“It ate me, Maeve.” She shivered. “It was alive.”
I snorted.
“I’m serious! I stepped into what looked like a hollowed-out path, and the tree closed around me. Trapped. Fully stuck. Like one of those sticky flytraps but with bark.”
“You okay?”
“Now? Sure. Then? No. I had to call for help. I would’ve yelled, but the tree muffled my voice like it had manners.” She shook her head. “And you know who showed up first?”
“Twobble?”
Her eyes narrowed on mine. “How’d you know?”
I cleared my throat. “He told us.”
“Well, he just left me hanging. I don’t understand what he has against me.”
That image nearly killed me.
“And,” she added, “guess who heard me next?”
I already knew.
“Keegan.”
She closed her eyes. “Kill me.”
“Was he smug about it?”
“No,” she said, then made a face. “Worse. Calm. He just… reached in and pulled me out. Didn’t even raise an eyebrow.”
“Classic.”
“I swear I could hear the tree laughing behind me.”
We walked together after that. Slow steps. The kind you take when you're not in a hurry to get anywhere but don’t want to turn around.
“Feels different in here today,” she said after a while.
“Yeah.”
I didn’t say why.
Couldn't. The secret sat curled in my chest.
The dragons.
The nest. That soft heartbeat beneath the floor.
“You ever think the Academy gets lonely?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” I said. “But not in a sad way. Just… waiting. Maybe like my grandmother.”
Bella nodded, as if that made perfect sense.
I wanted to tell her. About the egg. The shimmer of light on scales. The way the dragon looked at me made it seem like it already knew everything I hadn’t figured out yet.
But I didn’t.
I knew I couldn’t.
“So,” she said, brushing her hand along the wall, “anywhere you’re heading, or just letting the stones guide you?”
“I’ve been thinking about the Maple Ward.”
She gave me a look. “Well, I think I found part of it.”
I laughed. “I think you confirmed my thoughts on the Ward.”
“Like what? It’s hungry?”
“Not sure. It keeps circling back in my head. Like a song I only half remember. I still haven’t learned about it yet or visited it.”
“From what I saw of it, I’m not a fan,” she said. “It smells like rain, but not in a nice way, like wet metal and old fruit. Spells don’t even behave right in the grove. I tried to get myself out of its clasp, but the limbs wouldn’t budge.”
“With a smell like that, it means something’s buried.”
She didn’t argue that. “Secrets, probably.”
I nodded, and we turned another corner. Moonlight spilled through a stained-glass window, slicing across the hall in patches of gold and violet. I slowed, watching the color shift across the floor.
“I’ve been dreaming of trees,” I said, not sure why I said it out loud. “Not forests, just one. Big. Hollow. It has something inside it, but I never see what.”
Bella stopped walking. “The Maple Ward is calling you.”
“To get stuck like you?”
She smirked. “Maybe it wants to tell you something.”
We stood there for a beat, saying nothing. The Academy creaked once, just faintly. A door opened somewhere behind us with no one around to open it.
“Let me know if you do decide to explore,” she said. “Not because I want to join you. I just want to know what to tell the rescue team.”
I chuckled. “Fair enough.”
We parted ways a few halls later.
The walls narrowed a little, and the ceiling dipped low like it always did near the older parts of the building.
I could feel the Maple Ward getting closer, which made no sense since Bella got trapped in a grove near my cottage.
And I knew, somehow, it had been waiting for me.
Since I wouldn’t listen to its whispers, it let out a scream, and Bella just happened to be the target.
I pressed my palm against the wood, half expecting it to push back. It didn’t. The door to the Maple Ward wasn’t locked, but it felt like it should’ve been. The latch gave with a quiet click, and the door opened inward without sound, as if it had been oiled recently or hadn’t moved in a very long time.
The smell hit me first. Damp wood. Earth after rain.
I stepped inside.
The room wasn’t what I expected. Then again, nothing in the Academy ever was.
A tree stood in the center of the chamber.
Not just any tree—a maple, massive and ancient.
It reached toward the high arched ceiling, its limbs gnarled and twisted like old hands frozen mid-reach. The leaves were few and far between. Just a handful clung to the uppermost branches, curled and yellowed, barely moving even though there was no breeze.
It looked…sick, in need.
I stopped in the doorway, mouth slightly open.
The rest of the chamber had all but given itself to the tree. Roots pushed through the stone floor as if they’d grown bored with the dirt beneath and wanted to see what lay above. They’d wrapped around benches and reading desks, split flagstones, curled up the walls like ivy gone wild.
This wasn’t just a tree that had grown into a room. This room was built around a tree, and the tree was dying.
I took a slow step forward, boots crunching gently over loose bits of bark. The air felt heavy. Not in the way of danger, but in the way of something grieving. Of something holding on past its time.
The trunk was massive, easily twice as wide as I could reach. Its bark had faded to a pale gray in places, and one side bore a deep scar, as if lightning had struck it and the wound never fully closed.
Something in my chest pulled tight.
I walked to it. Slowly. Carefully.
And when I reached the base, I rested my fingertips against the bark.
Cool.
Still living.
But only just.
I closed my eyes for a breath and tried to listen—not with my ears, but with whatever part of me the Academy had started awakening. The same part that could feel the Wards when they flickered, or the subtle way the stones shifted underfoot when a lie was spoken nearby.
Nothing.
No voice. No hum. Just silence.
I opened my eyes again and let them fall to the roots.
And that’s when I saw it.
A sapling was nestled between two massive roots near the base, nearly hidden under a drift of dry leaves and fallen bark.
Small.
Fragile.
But alive.
Its trunk was no thicker than my thumb, and its few leaves were a deep reddish gold. They caught the light that filtered through the glistening windows and shimmered faintly, almost pulsing.
I crouched beside it.
The air was different here, warmer, somehow.
The sapling didn’t look like it should be thriving. The room was dark and cold. The roots above it were too thick to let much water through. And yet, here it was.
Growing.
Trying.
I reached out but didn’t touch it. Just let my hand hover, feeling the faint energy coming off it like warmth from a sunstone.
The big maple, it was old.
Fading. Its magic had dimmed to the edges of what it could hold. But the sapling…
The sapling was new.
Maybe the tree hadn’t been grabbing at Bella for help.
Maybe it had been trying to show us this.
Trying to be seen before it was too late.
A shiver worked through me, not from cold but from the weight of it all. The Maple Ward wasn’t just one of four. It was a piece of the entire system. A leg of the table holding the whole balance of the Academy and maybe even Stonewick upright.
And this one was falling apart.
No wonder things had started unraveling.
I straightened slowly, eyes moving back up to the twisting branches above me. It looked like a tree caught mid-collapse. Beautiful, even now…but in the way abandoned houses can be beautiful.
Full of memory. Of things that used to be.
My heart ached unexpectedly as I moved carefully around the base, tracing how the roots branched outward in jagged paths.
Some were cracked and brittle. Others still hummed faintly under my boots.
I didn't have a plan yet.
Not even close.
But I knew one thing. The Maple Ward was trying to survive.
It was trying to pass something on.
And whatever it was… it wasn’t done.
The thought settled into my bones. Solid. Quiet. Certain.
I glanced back toward the sapling.
“You’re not ready yet,” I whispered. “But you will be.”
There was no reply, of course. Just the soft creak of an overhead branch shifting slightly, almost like a sigh.
I let my fingers brush over the old tree’s bark once more before leaving. The door didn’t resist. It stayed open as I stepped through and closed behind me with a soft click.
Back in the hallway, everything looked the same. But nothing felt the same.
Bella’s story about the tree grabbing her wasn’t just mischief. It was a cry. A last reach. Not to be saved, maybe, but to be noticed.
Well. Now I’d noticed.
And I wasn’t going to forget.