Chapter Twenty-Five
The pull came on gently, guiding me somewhere I already wanted to go.
The library.
I didn’t announce it or explain myself. I turned and let my feet carry me down familiar corridors until I found my way there. The library greeted me with its usual layered calm, ink and old paper, polished wood, and the faint spark of magic that lived between the shelves rather than on them.
My shoulders dropped the moment I crossed the threshold.
“Thank you,” I murmured, not sure who I was thanking exactly. The Academy. The room. The version of myself that always knew where to go when everything felt too loud. The book sprites?
The lights brightened just enough to see by, lanterns glowing warmly as if they understood I wasn’t here to rush. Tall shelves curved overhead, impossibly high and yet intimate, packed with books that leaned and whispered and pretended they didn’t care who passed by.
And then the sprites noticed me.
They emerged one by one from between spines and ledges. They were small, quick, and made of ink-smudged fingers that loved fluttering pages. Their eyes were bright with purpose. One zipped past my ear with a pleased chirping sound. Another tugged gently at my sleeve.
“I know,” I said softly. “I know. I need help.”
That was all it took.
They scattered like sparks, darting up shelves, heaving volumes free with extraordinary teamwork. Books thumped softly onto the long table at the center of the room, stacking themselves into neat, eager piles.
Orcs of the Old Marches.
Boar-Bound Warbands and Their Habits.
Woodland Creatures: Allies and Adversaries.
Forest Kin and Feral Armies.
“All right,” I said, rolling up my sleeves. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
I spent the next while reading.
And reading.
And reading some more.
The books were thorough. Painfully so. Orcs were covered in exhausting detail—tribal structures, battle strategies, the kinds of magic they tolerated versus the kinds they despised.
The mondo boar entries were unsettling in a different way, filled with diagrams and notes about armor grown rather than forged, creatures bred for endurance and momentum.
Woodland creatures were a mixed bag. Allies sometimes. Enemies often. Never neutral.
I learned a great deal.
None of it helped.
Because every answer circled back to the same place. Force. Territory. Conquest. These books explained how orcs moved, fought, and survived.
They didn’t explain why they were moving now.
I pushed my chair back with a sigh and pressed my fingers to my temples.
“This isn’t it,” I said quietly. “This isn’t quite what I need. Although it was all very useful.”
A sprite hovered near my shoulder, tilting its head, then zipped away and returned with another book, setting it carefully in front of me.
Motivations of the Power-Hungry.
I snorted. “That’s a little on the nose.”
I opened it.
The pages were full of broad theories and cautionary tales, all variations on the same theme. Control. Legacy. Fear of being forgotten. Fear of losing relevance. Fear of death.
I read through the chapters until my eyes blurred, made it to the end, and closed the book gently.
“That’s not enough,” I whispered. “Close but not quite.”
The library remained quiet, but not empty. I could feel it listening, waiting for me to ask the right question instead of the urgent one.
Footsteps sounded behind me then, light and familiar.
“Mom?”
I turned, and Celeste stood at the edge of the reading area, her expression careful, like she wasn’t sure whether to interrupt or join. Her hair was pulled back loosely, her eyes bright with curiosity that hadn’t dulled even after everything she’d seen.
And in her open palm sat a very annoyed toad.
Her dad.
He ribbited sharply as if to underline his displeasure at being carried into a library. He had never been a man who enjoyed reading.
I laughed despite myself. “You brought him.”
She shrugged. “He wouldn’t stop hopping toward the stairs. I figured if he was going to follow me anyway, I might as well keep an eye on him. Little did he know this is where we’d be.”
The toad puffed up indignantly.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him. “This is a no-hopping zone, and quite frankly, we can’t trust you not to pee on the pages.”
He blinked.
Celeste stepped closer, peering at the piles of books. “Research?”
“Yes,” I said. “And failing spectacularly.”
She set her hand carefully on the table and let the toad hop down onto a clear patch of wood. He settled there, eyeing the sprites suspiciously as they flitted past.
“Looking for something specific?” she asked.
“The Priestess,” I said. “Or rather… what she wants.”
Celeste nodded slowly. “That’s what I was wondering too.”
I studied her face, struck again by how natural it felt to have her here in this space, with magic and history layered around us as if it had always been meant to be this way.
“These books talk about armies,” I continued. “About strategy. About destruction. But none of that feels like the point.”
She leaned her hip against the table. “Because armies are tools.”
“Yes,” I said, relief blooming at the shared understanding. “Exactly, but not the intent.”
The toad ribbited softly, as if agreeing.
Celeste glanced at him. “He’s very opinionated.”
“He always was.”
She smiled, then grew thoughtful. “So, what if she doesn’t want Stonewick destroyed?”
The thought stopped me cold.
“What if she wants it claimed?” Celeste continued. “Or reshaped. Or… inherited.”
My pulse quickened.
“She’s ancient,” Celeste went on. “And she’s powerful. But she’s also tied to bloodlines and legacy. That matters to people like her.”
I swallowed. “You think this is about succession.”
“Or correction,” Celeste said. “She might believe something here belongs to her. Or was taken from her.”
The warmth at my hip pulsed.
The sprites stilled, hovering midair as if they, too, were listening.
I reached out and squeezed Celeste’s hand. “That’s… very perceptive.”
She shrugged, a little uncomfortable with the praise. “I’ve had a lot of time to think.”
I looked around the library again, at the shelves that had always given me comfort, and realized what I’d been missing.
I wasn’t supposed to be reading about orcs.
I was supposed to be reading about her.
The Priestess.
Not her methods.
Her desire.
And for the first time since Celeste had asked the question that started all of this, I felt like I was finally standing in the right room to answer it.
The thought came quietly, the way the most dangerous ones always did.
Dragons.
I didn’t say the word out loud. I barely let it finish forming in my mind before I felt the instinctive pull in my chest, the reflex that had grown there ever since the Academy trusted me with something so old and so fragile that even thinking about it felt like touching a live ember.
They were my responsibility.
Mine.
They never were, not up here anyway.
They lived in the spaces between things, between myths and silence, between what people assumed had gone extinct and what had merely gone into hiding. The Academy guarded them fiercely, not with Wards that screamed their presence, but with absence.
At least, that was how it was supposed to work.
My gaze drifted to Celeste, who was kneeling by the table, her attention split between her dad and a sprite that had taken a liking to her sleeve. She didn’t know about the dragons, but she knew the Academy held secrets. And keeping those secrets away from my daughter protected her.
The Priestess knew about lineage, about inheritance, and what should pass quietly from one generation to the next.
What if she knew about the dragons, too?
The thought made my stomach twist.
I’d told myself the secret was safe. That only Elira had known, and even among the old magic families, the dragons had faded into storybook exaggerations and scholarly footnotes. The Academy had done its job well enough that the truth was obscured beneath centuries of distraction.
But then again, I’d also believed for most of my life that my magic didn’t exist.
I leaned back in my chair slowly, careful not to startle Celeste or draw attention to the way my thoughts had turned inward and sharp.
If the Priestess was assembling an army, it wasn’t because she wanted to smash Stonewick to rubble. That would be the simple option. Orcs and boars were blunt instruments. Sure. They created pressure and distraction…maybe instilled a bit of fear, but they cleared paths.
The question was paths toward what?
Dragons didn’t fight wars.
They ended them, but at what cost?
My fingers curled against the edge of the table.
If even a whisper of their existence reached the wrong ears, if the Priestess suspected, truly suspected, that the Academy still sheltered them, then everything made sense. The urgency and careful escalation rather than open confrontation.
She wouldn’t storm the Academy for dragons.
She’d force it to reveal them.
I swallowed, the weight of it settling squarely on my shoulders. Elira hadn’t just trusted me with their care. She’d trusted me with restraint, and so did the Academy.
And now my daughter’s magic was waking up.
Now, vampires gathered on the steps without fear.
Now, orcs pressed forward.
And the Academy itself had begun choosing when to intervene and when to step back.
I wasn’t sure anymore that the secret was as contained as I’d believed.
I looked at Celeste again, at the way she laughed softly when the toad tried to hop away and failed, at how natural she looked in this place. The Academy didn’t flinch around her. The library didn’t resist her presence, and that scared me more than the orcs ever could.
Because if the dragons recognized her too, if they sensed the bloodline shifting, the inheritance awakening, then secrecy alone wouldn’t be enough. Dragons weren’t passive Wards. They were living, thinking beings, and chose whom they trusted.
And what if they were choosing her?
The thought was equal parts awe and terror.
I forced myself to breathe slowly, grounding the way Nova had taught me, the way Elira’s voice still echoed in my memory. Don’t borrow tomorrow’s fear. I had plenty of danger to deal with in the present.
Right now, the danger was knowledge, too much and not enough.
And whether the Priestess was already counting on me underestimating her reach.
I reached out and rested my hand lightly on the table, feeling the wood warm beneath my palm, the Academy steadying itself around me. Whatever came next, I couldn’t afford to panic. Panic was loud, and panic drew attention.
Dragons survived by being patient, and so would I.
But as the library breathed quietly around us and the sprites resumed their gentle fluttering, one uneasy truth lodged itself deep in my chest and refused to move.
Secrets didn’t stay secrets forever.
And when they surfaced, they always changed the shape of the world, or at the very least, the path of many.