Chapter 4-Serena
“What the hell is with this weather? Three days and I think it’s rained for every single one of them.”
The words left my mouth in a shaky exhale as I stood at the tall, arched window of my dorm room at the Asgarheim Runevald Institute.
The glass trembled beneath the assault of wind and rain, and lightning forked across a sky that wasn’t quite the same color as the one I’d grown up beneath.
The sky here bled green and violet through storm clouds—aurora light threading through darkness like veins beneath skin.
It was beautiful.
It was ominous.
It was nothing like home.
And I didn’t know if that was good or bad.
I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to steady my stomach, grateful that I’d finally stopped dry heaving.
The second I had stepped through the doorway hidden in the Pine Barrens—the access point to Asgarheim located in New Jersey, with magic that warded it against human perception—my insides had revolted.
Traveling to a parallel dimension via magical portal was, in a word, trippy.
The forest had folded.
The sky inverted.
The air tasted metallic.
And then the veil tore.
“Veil-sickness,” Ursula had called it gently, her hand steady at the back of my head while I lost what was left of my dignity onto the cobblestone path just outside the West entrance.
You heard that right.
The Institute was an actual castle.
Not metaphorically.
Not like an old European building with character.
This was the real deal.
Stone towers. Iron gates. Rune-carved arches that glowed when you passed beneath them.
The kind of place that looked like it had been pulled straight out of a myth—and then made older, darker, and very, very real.
And I had thrown up on it.
Multiple times.
“Okay, okay—breathe,” Ursula murmured, pushing my hair back again as I gagged. “First crossing hits some people harder than others.”
Some people.
Great.
“Define harder,” I croaked.
She winced in sympathy. “You’re… uh, trending above average.”
Fantastic.
“Thanks,” I muttered weakly as she handed me a napkin.
Poor girl.
Her first impression of me? A chubby Jersey girl who face-planted into another realm and immediately projectile-vomited like the portal had personally offended me.
Not exactly giving powerful Witch energy.
More like possessed raccoon behind a Wawa.
By the time the worst of it passed, my entire body felt wrong—like my bones had been shaken loose and put back slightly out of alignment.
The air here was heavier, thicker, charged with something I couldn’t quite name yet but definitely felt.
Magic.
Not hidden.
Not subtle.
It was everywhere.
In the stones beneath my feet.
In the air I breathed.
In the way the sky above the castle shimmered with ribbons of green and violet light—even during the day.
Ursula stayed with me as we walked—well, as she walked and I sort of lurched—toward the dormitories.
“Well,” she said, trying to keep things light, “at least the weather’s kind of similar to back home? If you lived in Washington State or something.”
I huffed a weak laugh.
“Florida’s got humidity and Jersey’s got attitude. This place has whatever the hell that ominous looking sky is. Reminds me of The Nothing from that kid’s movie.”
She smiled at that.
We stepped inside the dormitory—a long, vaulted hall lined with flickering sconces that weren’t candles so much as contained flames, hovering in midair. The stone beneath my feet pulsed faintly, as if aware of every step.
I tried not to think about that too hard.
“I’m just gonna—bathroom,” I mumbled, already veering off.
“Second door on the left,” Ursula called after me.
I barely made it before leaning over the sink, splashing cold water on my face and trying to will my stomach to settle.
When I finally looked up—I froze.
Not because of what I saw.
But because of what I didn’t.
For the first time in as long as I could remember there was no shadow standing behind me.
No flicker of something not-quite-there in the mirror.
No whisper curling at the edges of my hearing.
Just me.
Pale. Damp. Wide-eyed.
Breathing.
“Okay,” I whispered to my reflection. “Okay, that’s new.”
It should’ve felt like relief.
Instead, it felt like standing in a room that had always been crowded… and suddenly wasn’t.
Too quiet.
Too empty.
I swallowed hard and forced myself to brush my teeth, rinse, repeat the motions of normalcy even though nothing about this place was normal.
Because that was the thing I was still trying to wrap my head around.
Magic wasn’t hidden here.
Back on Earth, it was something people denied. Or mocked. Or whispered about behind closed doors.
And the ones who knew—really knew—they hid it.
Protected it.
Buried it beneath skepticism and science and anything that made the world feel safer.
Here?
It was out in the open.
Practiced.
Taught.
Expected.
And I—I wasn’t crazy.
God.
That part still hit the hardest.
All those years. All those doctors.
All those quiet, careful voices telling me I was imagining things.
And now?
Now I was in a castle in another realm, surrounded by Witches and creatures I didn’t even have names for yet—and somehow that made more sense than anything I’d been told before.
“Um—here.”
I turned to see Ursula in the doorway, holding out a steaming mug.
“I brought you peppermint tea.”
Steam curled from the plain ceramic, and I took it like it was sacred, inhaling deeply.
Warm.
Grounding.
Real.
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it.
Ursula leaned against the doorframe, watching me with that same steady calm she seemed to carry everywhere.
She was the opposite of me in every way.
Composed.
Confident.
Certain.
I followed her to the common room where we sat and sipped in silence.
“Kitchen Witch,” she’d told me earlier when I’d asked.
Potion adept. Herb specialist. Twelve generations of her family had studied at Runevald.
She belonged here.
I still felt like I’d slipped through a crack I wasn’t meant to find.
“They really shouldn’t make people go through the portal alone if they get this sick,” she said after a moment, frowning slightly.
I huffed a quiet laugh.
“Yeah, I’ll be sure to leave a review. ‘Great school, almost died crossing dimensions, would recommend with Dramamine.’”
That got a smile out of her.
But even as we joked, my mind drifted.
Because it wasn’t the sickness that lingered.
It wasn’t even the shock of everything I’d seen since arriving—the levitating lights, the runes that pulsed like they were alive, the girl in one of my classes whose eyes had glowed gold when she got annoyed.
No.
It was the sound.
That roar.
It had rolled across the sea just before we crossed fully into this realm.
Deep.
Raw.
Agonized.
Not quite animal.
Not quite human.
Something ancient.
Something furious.
Something in pain.
And it had hit me—physically—like a punch straight to the chest.
I’d staggered. Gasped. Grabbed onto the edge of the portal frame like it was the only thing keeping me grounded.
No one else had reacted.
No one else had even noticed.
But I had.
And the worst part?
It hadn’t scared me.
Not the way it should have.
It had called to something in me.
Like it recognized something in me.
And for the first time in my life I felt like maybe I wasn’t all alone in the world.
Maybe it wasn’t just me and my dark little secret.
No, I hadn’t told anyone what I could do yet. Didn’t really understand it myself.
Necromancer.
That’s what the admissions letter had called me, but what was it? What did it really mean?
I hadn’t a clue. But experience had taught me not to mention my so-called gifts unless I wanted people to shun me.
Or worse.
My fingers tightened slightly around the mug.
“You okay?” Ursula asked softly.
I blinked, forcing myself back to the present.
“Yeah,” I said, quieter this time. “Just adjusting.”
Adjusting to magic being real.
To Monsters being real.
To the fact that I was one of them.
And to the unsettling, impossible truth that something in this place—
Something powerful—something broken—had made itself known to me the moment I arrived.
I hadn’t imagined it.
I knew I hadn’t.
And somehow, I had the feeling—it knew me, too.
The dorm door opened, and two more women entered the dorm, dragging luggage behind them.
Apparently, admissions week was a whole thing. Because of the scarcity of portals and the need to space everything out, new arrivals would be filing in for days.
And this was a four-person suite. Not the double I had envisioned.
Great.
Not.
I valued privacy.
Silence.
Locked doors.
But here we were.
“Hi, I’m Sapphire. Empath.”
She was tall and luminous, strawberry-blonde hair falling in soft waves, skin pale as winter milk.
“I’m Emery. Soothsayer.”
Short red curls. Amber eyes. Calm, assessing gaze.
Everyone had accents.
Soft Irish lilt.
Low Scottish tones.
Ancient vowels.
And then there was me—aggressively American.
I sounded like Louie DePalma in those late-night cable reruns of Taxi.
Which, admittedly, had been my survival strategy.
When you grow up seeing ghosts, you either scream or you find distraction.
For me, distraction came in the form of syndicated television at three in the morning.
Some people call that the Witching hour.
For me, it was prime rerun hour.
Ghosts were most active at night.
Especially at 3:00 a.m.
Especially when the house was quiet.
Especially when fear had nowhere else to go.
God, how I begged for a television when I was ten.
Miraculously, Aunt Gabby and Uncle Patrick gave in.
After I told Grandpa and Grandma about the dead woman in the black dress standing in the hallway watching them open presents one Christmas Eve.
They never visited again.
But I got a TV and cable.
So that was something.
“Want to explore before calling it a night?” Ursula asked.
I nodded, pulling on my raincoat.
My stomach had settled, but my nerves hadn’t.
And honestly, there was so much I still hadn’t seen.