Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
The ceiling is unfamiliar.
I stare at it for a full three seconds before I accept this as part of my life now. Different ceilings, different rooms, different locations, same groggy disorientation every time.
At least this one has warm stone arches and soft lamplight instead of the cold, clinical hum of the Destiny Sphere.
I catalog details without moving: pale stone walls, a narrow window with thin curtains shifting in a draft, the faint smell of herbs and beeswax.
Arcana Academy's recovery ward, I'd bet on it.
"She's awake."
Violet's voice is tight with relief, and then four faces crowd into my field of vision. Asher. Wylder. Lily. Violet. All of them looking at me with that particular flavor of exhausted worry that I know means they've been sitting here a while.
"Am I dead?" My voice comes out rougher than I'd like.
Asher laughs. "Alive, baby girl. Very much alive. You just powered up." He drops into the chair closest to the bed. "Congratulations, by the way. Second affinity. Very dramatic reveal, ten out of ten."
I push myself up onto my elbows and immediately notice the change. There’s a pressure, low and dense, sitting inside both ears like they need to pop.
I work my jaw experimentally, but nothing happens.
I try again. Still nothing.
I look past Asher to where Wylder is standing at the foot of the bed. He has his arms crossed, and that carefully neutral expression he wears when he's been frightened and is pretending to be holding it together. "Have you ever heard of someone developing a second affinity?"
He exhales slowly and unfolds his arms. "Developing one, no. Most witches with multiple affinities manifest them all at once. The thing is, when that happens, the affinities share the available power. Each one ends up weaker than it would be if a witch only had the one."
“So, half my power will go to spirit magic and half to the new one?”
“Historically, yes, but Dr. Thorne's working theory is that yours don't share. He thinks each of your affinities has its own full measure of power, independent of the other."
I let that settle. "And that's what caused the chaos?”
"Yes. Two fully powered affinities occupying the same space, neither yielding to the other." He meets my gaze and shrugs. “The mechanics of it arriving months after the first are a mystery. It’s different from anything on record. He's being careful about drawing conclusions."
"Where is he now?"
"Reaching out to other practitioners. Anyone who might have seen something close to this before."
I work my jaw again. The pressure sits there, fat and stubborn, completely unmoved by my efforts.
Violet squeezes onto the edge of the bed and Lily appears on my other side, and I stop thinking about my ears long enough to register that they both look like they've been crying.
I sit up fully and hold both hands out, one to each of them. "I'm okay. I just needed an extremely inconvenient and unplanned reboot. I'm good now."
"You didn't wake up." Lily's voice is smaller than usual. "They kept saying you would and you just—didn't."
"Until I did." I look between them, these two faces I'd burn down anything to protect. "I'm here now and I’m okay.”
Lily lets out a watery laugh and squeezes back hard. "I was so jealous of you guys getting your affinities. Now, I’m not so sure I want mine."
"It’ll be fine. By the time yours comes, we’ll have it all figured out." I release Lily's hand and look at Violet properly. "How's the storm magic? Are the healers here getting you sorted?"
Violet brightens immediately, sitting up straighter. "So much better, actually. The conduit really helped to start with, and then they worked with me on the actual source of it rather than just managing the overflow, and it's—yeah. I've got a real handle on it now."
Lily's mouth twitches. "It does still get a bit dark and rainy when she's annoyed."
"I'm working on it." Violet turns the glare on her sister with precision.
"Good progress," I say, mostly to head off whatever Lily was about to say next.
I look at Asher, then Wylder, and let the gratitude I feel come through plainly because I don't have the energy to dress it up right now. "Thank you. Both of you. For getting me here. For—" I gesture vaguely at the fact that I am alive and intact. "Again."
"You can repay me," Asher says immediately, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, "by telling me what the second affinity is. Because I have been sitting here for hours wondering, and it is genuinely hurting me."
I hesitate, the memory of the world blazing white still very fresh. "I basically exploded the last time I reached for it. I’m not sure I’m ready to try that again yet."
"Dr. Thorne said the settling process is complete," Wylder says. "He was clear about that before he left. The danger of the overlap is resolved."
I work my jaw again. The pressure shifts infinitesimally but doesn't release. "Right now it honestly just feels like I'm on a plane and my ears won't pop. It's been like this since I woke up."
Asher chuckles and points at me. "Oh, that's what you keep doing. I wasn't going to say anything because of the whole near-death experience, but yeah, you've been doing that jaw thing, and I genuinely had no idea what was happening. I thought you developed a strange facial tic."
“No. It’s just very distracting."
“So, what do you think about trying again with the affinity? Dr. Thorne gave you the all-clear.”
I turn my attention to Wylder. “What do you think?”
He shrugs. “You’re going to have to access it sometime. It seems to me that doing it while you’re already in the infirmary is a good call. We’ve got help if we need it.”
Yeah, but he’s not the one that will explode if this goes badly. Of course, I keep that to myself because he’s only trying to help.
And he’s also not wrong.
Better here than in Emberwood.
I take a breath. Hold it. And then I reach—very carefully this time—and approach the warm stream of power with more respect than curiosity.
My ears pop.
The sensation is immediate and extraordinary. The draft through the open window doesn't just touch my skin—I feel it as something dimensional, layered, a thing with pressure and direction and weight.
I can feel the difference in the air between the window side of the room and the wall behind me. The density of it. The movement of it.
"I feel the air," I say slowly, looking at Wylder. "The breeze, the atmospheric pressure… Is that a wind affinity? Because it feels like more than just wind."
Wylder's brow pulls together in that particular thinking way. "Wind affinity is possible. But wind witches don't typically describe air pressure. Atmospheric awareness might mean it’s something different."
"Oh, this is incredible." Asher is already on his feet. "Okay, okay, so wind. You could carry things with it. Light objects, maybe heavier ones if you get strong enough. Push people back in a fight. Redirect spells coming at you—"
"Asher—"
"Flying." His eyes go wide. "Poppy, you could fly!"
"Let's absolutely not get ahead of ourselves."
"Wind witches can't fly," Wylder says, with the patient firmness of someone who has worked very hard to remain reasonable.
Asher points at him triumphantly. “But you just said it's probably something more than wind. So, the rules are different. Flying is on the table."
Wylder opens his mouth. Then, closes it.
Asher's astonishment feeds my soul. Despite everything that has gone wrong in the past week, I find myself turning the idea over in my head.
The pressure I can feel through the window. The weight and direction of the air…
“Honestly, as fun as it would be to dive into thoughts of flying, that will have to wait. I still need you guys to tell me what happened in the cave. And I need to tell you what Tharuzel said to me while I was possessed.”
Wylder frowns. “Maybe we should wait until you’re fully recovered. Your system has been through enough stress for one day.”
Asher nods, looking uncharacteristically serious. “Yeah, let’s hold off on that and focus on this moment, right here, right now.”
My chest tightens as my stomach knots. “Now I’m sure I need to know what I missed. I can tell by your reactions it’s bad, right?”
Wylder lets out a long sigh. “Yeah, it’s bad.”
The quiet of the infirmary feels suddenly very fragile.
Lily shifts on the edge of my bed. Violet, sitting cross-legged in the chair beside Asher, turns to look at Wylder like she already knows what he's about to say.
Maybe she does.
"Tell me everything," I say. "I remember the fight breaking out and Tharuzel walking out of the wall, and then… not much else."
Wylder exhales slowly and swaps places with Violet, so he's sitting next to my recovery bed. He leans forward with his elbows on his knees, and the grim look of defeat in his eyes nearly does me in. "Very soon after he appeared, you were no longer you."
His expression remains careful, his voice controlled and neutral. "Your eyes were wrong. Completely black. And your voice… well, it wasn't your voice."
"He possessed me."
Asher has gone very still in the corner of the room, his usual restless energy completely absent. He's staring at the wall just past my head, and that fact breaks my heart more than anything so far.
"What did I do? Asher? Why can't you look at me?"
"Tharuzel used you to demonstrate a point." Wylder continues, his green eyes steady on mine. "It wasn't about him trying to win the fight at this point, Poppy. He was showing us he could hurt you. That he held the power to control you."
A cold, hollow feeling opens somewhere behind my sternum.
"He tortured you." Asher's voice is flat, but he still isn't looking at me. "You were screaming, and then suffocating, and then, with a flick of his wrist, he snapped your bones, and then with a thought, he healed them and broke them again."