Chapter 25 Hoping to Add “Hero” to My Transcript
Hoping to Add “Hero” to My Transcript
“This is your home, Barbie. It will always protect you.”
I’m five years old, running through the halls, trying to hide from bedtime.
Hurried steps sound behind me, the clicking of Robin’s heels as familiar as these corridors.
I know all the best places to go. I hide in them sometimes to watch the students and teachers.
I’ll be a student at the school next year. Then I’ll have plenty of friends.
For now, it’s just me and Robin, who wants me to finally go to sleep. And she’s getting closer.
I turn a corner, then burst into a closet, beneath the spiral staircase.
The door whispers closed behind me, and I curl myself into a ball, on top of a folded-up tapestry coated in a layer of dust. Stale air tickles my nostrils, but I scrunch my face to keep from sneezing. That would definitely be the end of this game.
I put my hands over my mouth to keep from breathing too loudly. I sit very still.
I tense as a single footstep sounds right in front of the closet… before disappearing.
I smile beneath my palms. I got her! She didn’t find me… I’ll never have to go to sleep; I can just stay awake forever!
Just when I think I really fooled her, the door flies open. The carpet beneath me unfurls like a tongue during a doctor’s exam (I try to hide from those, too), sending me right toward her.
“There you are!” she says as I crash into her legs.
I race to my feet. “I don’t want to go to bed! You can’t make me!” I yell over my shoulder. I keep running. She sighs and shakes her head.
Even then, I knew running and hiding was useless. This was her school. She had magic.
She would always find me.
And back then… that used to be an almost comforting thought.
I land back in Swancrest in a burst of light.
My feet hit the ground with a thud, the necklaces’ charms clashing together. My heart hammers as I whirl around, expecting Robin to have sensed me coming somehow, to find her waiting for me—
But all I find is quiet.
I’m in a hall at the center of the school. It isn’t far from the dormitories.
Callie. Sunny.
Are they okay? Fingers trembling, I risk a second to check the compact, and there they are in the mirror, still trying to find a way out of their rooms.
I have to help them escape. Then hope they can help me end this.
Slowly, I inch forward, turning the corner, pulse racing.
No one is there. The corridors are dark and empty. Not even Robin’s birds are around.
Strange.
Robin controls this entire school. She must know I’m here. She must be feeling my steps through these halls like pinpricks against her magic.
But still—nothing.
The only sound is the howl of wind beyond the thick school walls… A storm is raging just beyond them, worse than any I’ve ever heard before in Heartland.
There are no yells for help. No screams.
Part of me almost believes that what I’m seeing in the compact isn’t real… until I reach the end of the passageway, turn toward the balconies that look out into the courtyard—
And see that every single window has been bricked over, as though the walls have overtaken the glass panes. I press my palm against the cold rock, but it’s sturdy, coated with a sheen of magic.
I swallow, then continue toward the spiral stone staircase that leads to the dorms.
That’s when I finally hear something.
A single squawk, sharp and piercing, echoing through the hall.
Slowly, I turn in its direction. I squint into the darkness.
Then shrieks are shredding my senses, and I’m screaming, crouching to the ground, hands over my ears, as the sound bounces through my head.
My eyes widen as I finally see the source of the mayhem.
The small, twittering, helpful birds that populate the school—Robin’s eyes and ears—have morphed into massive beasts, hardened into metal, with feathers as sharp as blades.
And they’re all racing toward me.
I try to drag myself away from them, still on the ground, but it’s too late.
Before I can move a single inch, they’re on me, in glimmering flashes of silver and gold. Then, the fabric at the back of my neck is in one of their giant beaks, and I’m dragged into the air.
I bellow as the beast flies me through the corridors, fabric choking my throat. It turns effortlessly, fast as lightning, expertly navigating the halls. I finally reach for my magic to set myself free, to fight against this creature’s hold. But when I focus on that seed of power in my heart—
It’s gone.
I draw in a shallow breath, trying to stay calm even as the castle walls blur around me in streaks of dark gray. I try again, focusing on the pink glow at my center, clearing my mind of anything else, just as Lune taught me.
Still nothing.
My chest clenches in panic.
My compact—I squeeze it in my hand, using it as an anchor…
Yet all it does is let off one small burst of light… before guttering out.
What was once a strong ember is just ashes.
I was wrong. Robin’s magic isn’t just strong enough to beat mine.
It’s strong enough to suppress it.
We veer sharply up to the private quarters, and within a moment my bedroom door is flung open… and I’m being thrown inside, tumbling onto the ground.
The door slams shut behind me. The room is pitched in darkness, not even a candle for light.
“Wait!” I exclaim, banging against the door. I reach for the handles—but they’re gone. It’s just a smooth expanse of wood.
The beasts’ squawks grow fainter and fainter.
My windows.
I race toward the three glass panels, stumbling in the dark, not really even knowing what I’ll do if they open since my room is so far up, just needing some way out of here.
But it doesn’t matter. I rip aside the thick pink curtains to find the beautiful sunset-colored stained glass is gone, replaced with a layer of stone that’s thick and jagged beneath my fingers, roughly hewn together.
My room has been turned into a prison. I—
“Welcome back, Barbie.”
My entire body tenses. I know that voice. Of course I do. I heard it every single day for my entire life here, for as long as I can remember.
Slowly, I turn to face Robin.
She’s not in my room, though. Not really. Her form is just a shadow, a translucent shade of sparkling onyx like a smear of night, a shred of her magic materializing before me. A subtle glow of pink highlights her form, lighting her up, the only recognizable part of her.
“Robin. What—what have you done?” I cry out, a slight waver in my voice I wish wasn’t there.
She just looks me over, eyes sharpening as she takes me in, then widening just the slightest bit in relief, as if she truly expected I wouldn’t have returned in one piece.
“Only what you forced me to do,” she says evenly. Her voice is toneless, the typical warmth when she addresses me all but gone.
It’s like speaking to a stranger. And I suppose she is one—she’s been lying to me for practically my entire life.
The Robin I thought I knew would never have done any of this.
And part of my heart—it just turns to dust under the truth that the woman who raised me, the person I loved like a mother…
Is not at all who she pretended to be.
And now she’s blaming me for all this.
No. I shake my head, eyes narrowing. “I didn’t force you to turn Swancrest into this… prison!” I wave my hand around at the locked door, the stone-covered windows.
Her face remains impassive. “You did. Because you couldn’t listen to the rules,” she says simply, circling me.
My hands ball into fists. “Maybe you shouldn’t have set so many to begin with.”
She just tilts her head. “The rules were in place for your benefit. To keep you safe.”
“No, they were put in place for your benefit. To keep me naive. To keep me ignorant of everything you never wanted me to discover myself!” My voice comes out in a roar. I haven’t raised my voice at her since I was a child. She almost startles in shock.
I don’t back down. I take a step forward toward the apparition, anger fueling my bravery.
“I know you and my mom are from Dreamland,” I continue, my voice steadily rising. “I know you had something to do with her death. And I know I have magic!”
At my words, Robin’s expression finally breaks for just a moment, revealing a flash of fear, before it smooths again. Still, I see I’ve managed to unnerve her.
I must be right. She did have something to do with my mom’s death.
Was she really behind it?
“You have no idea what you know,” she says, her voice as firm as the fortress around us.
The foundation trembles as thunder rages outside. The storm is getting worse.
She won’t trick me again. “What did you do to my mom? Did you lock her up, like you locked me in here? Did you hurt her?”
She flinches as though she’s been struck. “I would never hurt your mother.”
“Then what happened?” I demand.
She says nothing.
The words explode out of me. “What happened to her?”
“Her magic happened to her!” Robin finally exclaims in a low growl, darkness seeping from her, the shadows lengthening, the storm outside raging.
“She didn’t put limits on how she used her magic or where.
She didn’t listen to the warnings. She went off and did what she wanted, wantonly, recklessly, without thought to the consequences…
and it was her end. When enemy forces were upon us, she threw herself headfirst into the danger and they… they…”
A tear slips down her cheek and she shakes her head, clears her throat. Her expression turns back to stone.
“I vowed I would never let the same happen to you. I suspected you had the same magic in you as your mother: boundless—but dangerous. So I put rules in place, safeguards, in hopes you would never discover it. To protect you from yourself, Barbie.”
I blink.
“To protect me?” I look around at the stone covering the windows, at the door without a handle. “Is this protecting me?”
For a moment, her expression almost looks sad. “It is. You don’t see it, but it is. I’m helping you. Just as I helped you by suppressing your magic, until your disdain for it proved enough of a choke hold all on its own.”
My eyes burn.
Not in sadness… but in fury.
“You tried to… extinguish me,” I say, my words thick with emotion.
Robin shakes her head. “No, I—”
“You smothered me. You snuffed me out. You stifled me. I had magic all this time… and you choked it.”
“I controlled it so it wouldn’t smother you,” she says, her voice sharp as a blade’s edge.
A trace of pain flitters through her expression. It’s gone a moment later.
Robin straightens, her face smoothing. “But it seems I gave you too many liberties. I won’t make that mistake again.” She looks around my room. “Like this, you’ll be safe,” she says almost to herself, motioning to my makeshift prison.
Then she vanishes.
“No!” I say, running toward where she was.
But every hint of her is gone, and I’m plunged back into darkness.