Chapter 13 Velra
~Velra~
Pregnant.
It didn’t compute.
I couldn’t quite… I didn’t know how to… I just didn’t know.
“This can’t… no… I’m part Wraith, this shouldn’t be possible.”
But it was possible and while I’d been struggling to process it, elation had greeted me, so much happiness and excitement. With no apparent need for processing.
From them, at least.
From my men.
The look in Cassius’ eyes as the revelation had hit him had been undeniable.
Even without the flood of hope and joy through the Soul Brand that I’d felt from him, despite him trying to soften his reaction a little to give me time to breathe with it, hadn’t been needed.
I’d seen it all over him. This was amazing to him. A gift.
Even Sylas had rolled with it, really. He’d slipped into magical research mode, into action, all that zeal and urgency for this child. He thought it was a miracle as well, a salve of sorts to his whole life spent around so much death and loss and fucking pain.
And I got that. I really did.
He’d already completed the spellwork to help me and the baby, both shielding the pregnancy completely from outsiders, while allowing us to feel it.
He’d determined a way to feed the baby his necromantic energy and the precise right amount that would only help, not harm in the least. One night it had taken him to figure that out, then a few hours for the concoction he’d given me to digest to mix.
Even by his standards, that had been an incredibly fast turnaround time. So, yeah, he was all in.
Lazriel? Well, he’d responded as I’d imagined he would—giddy with it, then intensely protective, then needing physical proximity, even spending many hours lying with me as I’d slept for a while, then studied, just listening to the baby’s heartbeat.
It had been extremely difficult for him to leave my side this morning to go to class.
Thankfully, some dirty sexual promises from Sylas had helped to cinch it and send him off out of the dorms and back into the heart of Wraeven Academy.
He had back-to-back classes with his favorite professor, Drenn Voxe, to start the day and take it well past midday actually with the length of each, so that had also lent a hand.
It was really what Lazriel needed—to return to normalcy.
Things had been bad enough with everything else going on without him being held and tormented by that madman, Victor Halrow.
This… returning to classes, would give him some stable ground to walk on, a tether.
A focus. And one that wasn’t all war and terror.
We all needed this time to recalibrate, take a step back, get our bearings.
And part of that for me was trying to reconcile this absolutely shocking pregnancy news.
“You are with child. Congratulations. A child is a great blessing. And they will be so very fortunate to be born into so much love.”
Those words spoken by Remnant had been whirling around my head.
Because that was really the heart of it, wasn’t it?
Whether the baby would actually be blessed to be born into this?
Into this fucked-up world with still so much prejudice, so much hatred and fear toward those who didn’t fall within the parameters of what was deemed acceptable.
And this baby… it would fly in the face of all of that, defying the rules of magic, bending supernatural law, unnerving the balance.
And on top of that, to have me as a mother… was that a fucking blessing?
My own parents hadn’t exactly set an example for me to follow. I hadn’t witnessed a healthy or even safe dynamic when it came to that between a parent and a child.
So what if I couldn’t bring that?
What if I fell short?
What if I ended up hurting my own flesh and blood in deep-seated ways like had happened to me? What if I tainted this? All of it?
And with my men already so on board, what if my failure tainted what the four of us shared as well?
I jolted as my own magic zapped me.
At least it forced me from my thoughts and snapped me right back to class—where my head should have been the entire time.
The Art of Spellbreaking taught by Professor Isla Delina, an esteemed sorceress.
She’d spent centuries as a member of the Guardian Movement, then moved into teaching a couple of years ago, wanting to both share her knowledge and also head off any young magic-wielders who were approaching their magic dangerously.
I guess she’d seen a lot of that during her tenure with the Guardian Movement.
Better correcting it at the root, than having to do so in some brutal battle that ended with once promising magic-wielders being beyond saving and imprisoned in The Void.
It was a nice sentiment, but catching the rot early wasn’t always enough to prevent its spread. We’d come up against so much of that lately with Victor, Morien, Puritas, my parents. They’d gotten a taste of it and they’d run with it. It had stayed with them and it would never leave. It just was.
Another zap from my magic had me glaring at the swirling tangled mass of purple threads, frost threads, and my shadow magic gliding through it all as it levitated over my desk.
The professor had instructed us to release our power—or each facet of it, for the hybrids in the class—and then she’d used a device that had looked a lot like a laser pointer that had erupted with a shot of her peach magic at ours and caused it to tangle.
It was a way of representing a complicated spell that needed unraveling.
The key to unraveling it was different for each student, something she’d fused into the magical device she’d used.
To solve the problem, we had to do the spellwork with formulas, symbology, and magical laws, and then set about physically unraveling it using our power.
Since coming to the Academy, I’d done several of these in her class, and I’d rarely had a problem. Definitely not my magic zapping at me. Jeez.
“Velra.”
I looked up to see Isla now at my desk—she was one of those chill professors who had their students call them by their first name only.
Her black curly hair cascaded down the back of her strapless turquoise top. It gave way to a white lace skirt, the whole thing punctuated with a bold jeweled-toned beaded statement necklace and a pair of turquoise stilettos that glittered as she walked.
“This isn’t as straightforward as the previous problems.”
Crap. Something I would have registered properly if I hadn’t been slipping in and out of concentration since I’d sat down.
“Yeah, I’m getting that,” I answered with a frustrated breath, yet managing to grin through it—guess that was kind of my thing lately.
I looked down at the spellwork I’d done.
“This is sound. It should be working. Unraveling the Dark Fae aspect first—the purple threads—because it’s the foundational aspect of my power. ”
“Is it?”
“It always has been.”
“As we’ve begun to learn throughout this course, power set can shift. For hybrid beings like yourself, but also those wielding a single power like me. But my strengths and the way my power manifests, especially in different circumstances, alters over time. It evolves. As has yours.”
I frowned, looking between her and the wild magic tangled sphere levitating above my desk. “You’re saying my frost and shadows—my Wraith aspect—has become stronger.”
“Not quite.”
I sucked in a breath as the realization hit. “They’ve become even.”
“Melded comfortably, yes. Fully compatible. Given equal weight and trust by you.” She smiled.
“You’ve balanced your hybridized magic. This magical tangle is linked to each student’s instinctual responses.
So, in order to untangle it, you must look beyond the spellwork itself and also draw on that.
The spellwork is the door forming, but the instinctual aspect is the key. ”
She gestured at Draz, a vampire-sorcerer hybrid near the back of the class who had always been really volatile with his magic and his temperament, angering easily and hissing at other students aggressively several times.
Most had seen only rage, but to me I recognized the frustration and vulnerability of having to achieve balance, of having to navigate different sets of abilities, often ones that seemed to contradict each other.
I watched as he levitated a trail of blood through his tangled sphere and then entwined it with his aquamarine magic. His fangs were dropped and he was hissing, but peacefully, and I saw the tangles coming out.
Isla guided me to look at another student, this one a sorcerer, not a hybrid.
I jolted in surprise as I watched his yellow power implode the tangles, executing a supremely controlled blast not to unravel the problem, but to blast his way through it.
It was Sven, a usually very reserved student, hesitant in his ability.
And here he was solving the problem that way, trusting in himself and essentially transcending the problem entirely.
Doing it his way.
Just like Draz had been.
It clicked perfectly for me then.
“Got it,” I told Isla.
She gave a nod, then stepped away to help a Light Fae student with her tangle who seemed to be similarly stumped as I had been.
I definitely liked Isla’s way of teaching. She guided, she didn’t lecture. And she read her students and where they were at really well. If you struggled, it wasn’t a failing or just something you needed to work harder at to get over, it was a full introspective catharsis.
Her patience also melded well with mine.
I wasn’t always that way with myself. In fact, I’d been pretty brutal, especially in the past. But not to others.
With my men, I brought that in my interactions with them, not as a strenuous thing I needed to work at, but a natural thing. And it had served us well.
Then, with this baby, being a mother… I could see it. Something positive I could bring.
That being the case, there could definitely be more that I could bring as well.
I smiled, then sucked in a breath and focused on the tangled magical sphere.
Here goes nothing.
I called my frost to the fingertips of my left hand, something I’d seen Sylas do—something so specific, where he could channel his magic just into a very specific area in a surgical way.
I held it steady without any trouble at all.
Emboldened, I then let it stream carefully directly in front of the sphere at its center.
My shadows swirled, emanating from my very being, rather than just my hands.
It kept my right palm free wherein I then streamed my purple Dark Fae power all into the same spot, my shadows encircling the frost and purple magic.
I pushed harder, then watched as it happened.
A door made of shadow, frost, and my Dark Fae power formed right there.
I flicked it forward and it connected directly with the sphere.
The tangled mass was sucked through it, then it all absorbed into the door itself, and I watched as the door grew in size and vibrancy, as I didn’t just untangle, but I created something new from the mess instead.
I sank back in my chair, a wide, unstoppable smile spreading over my face.
There was hope to be had.
A whole fucking lot of it.
And I was done allowing all the traumatic hellscapes of late undercut that for me.
I wouldn’t go back to that.
To the cold.
To the despair.
To the self-loathing.
I was so much more than what our enemies had tried to turn me into.
Our foursome was so much more than that.
And this baby would live and breathe that. I’d make damn sure that was all our child knew—that hope reigned above all else.
No fucking matter what.