28. Quill
Quill
The Purity Front witches dragged me down at least two flights of stairs, through several corridors, and into sections of the Pyre estate that I was certain nobody had stepped foot in for years.
And with each step, Aeron was further and further away.
My dragon mate was chained, trapped, and in pain.
A stone felt like it had settled in the pit of my stomach as the realization sank in.
There was nothing I could do to help him.
He was the strong one, the one with real magical power, and a family history to prove it.
And I was the son of a couple of potion makers, a nobody even amongst other witches.
I didn’t go to Widdershins on a scholarship or a trust fund or because my parents were well-connected.
I went there out of desperation to get better at my craft, to save my family from the ruin I saw marching toward us faster and faster every year as our products became obsolete.
And now it was all gone. Widdershins Academy had fallen. My mate was captured. Undead walked the earth once more. And soon, the Elder Council would be no more.
What little hope I had was gone.
The dungeon they threw me into wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined.
I thought it would be all iron bars and stone walls.
Instead, it turned out to be a massive storage room in the basement with a heavy wooden door.
It was still ancient, still stank of mold and dust, but not exactly the castle dungeon I was expecting.
The room itself was piled high with boxes and crates, clearly long forgotten and covered in dust. In the damp corners of the room I noticed a few of them were sprouting mushrooms as the boxes decayed.
I had a feeling I was going to be forgotten just like those boxes if Morgana had her way about it.
One of the witches shoved me inside and I stumbled forward, catching myself against one of the dust-covered crates.
“Don’t bother trying to get out,” he sneered, his comrade smiling beside him. “We did our research on you and your family. No power, no connections, no exceptional gifts.” He leaned forward, his eyes full of disgust. “Weak ass witches like you give the rest of us a bad name.”
“We’re not even gonna bother warding the door,” his friend chuckled. “A lock will be more than enough to keep someone like you inside here.”
“I can’t see what a powerful dragon like Aeron sees in someone like you. But that doesn’t matter. He won’t be alive much longer, anyway.”
I tried to pretend like those words didn’t shake me down to my core. I’d thought them myself plenty of times.
The sound of the lock clicking into place echoed through the storage room like a death knell. I stood alone in the darkness, listening to their footsteps fade down the corridor, and felt something inside me break.
They were right. I was weak. I’d always known it, but hearing it confirmed so brutally drove the point home in a way that made me feel like I was two inches tall.
My parents had known it too, which was why they’d been so against me going to Widdershins in the first place.
No amount of education could fix the lack of magical talent that ran through our family.
Back then, I hadn’t been ready to give up.
But now I was starting to think I had no other choice.
I moved deeper into the storage room, my eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light that filtered through a small, grimy window high up on one wall.
The dust was thick enough to choke on, and I could hear the soft skitter of rodents in the corners.
It was cold too, making me feel like I’d been buried alive.
Which, considering that I was about fifteen feet underground at the moment and would most likely be left to rot here, was probably true.
My arm throbbed where Morgana’s magic had caught me.
I pulled my sleeve back carefully and examined the wound in what little light was available.
It wasn’t deep, but the edges looked wrong somehow, discolored and almost burnt.
Corrupted magic. I’d read about it in my studies but had never actually seen it before.
I tried to remember what the textbook had said about treating it, but my mind was too scattered, too focused on the image of Aeron chained to the floor of that foyer.
What was she doing to him right now? Was he still conscious?
Was he in pain? The mate bond pulled at me, a constant ache in my chest that felt almost physical.
I could sense him somewhere above me, could feel the faint echo of his distress through whatever connection bound us together. It made me want to scream.
I sank down onto one of the crates, sending up a cloud of dust that made me cough violently.
My hands were shaking, and I realized it wasn’t entirely from fear.
It was anger. Hot, pure, crystalline anger at how completely and utterly helpless I was.
At how I’d let myself be dragged down here without putting up even a token resistance.
At how useless I’d proven to be when it actually mattered.
For years, I’d worked myself to exhaustion trying to improve my craft.
I’d spent countless nights in my parents’ shop, mixing potions, studying old grimoires, pushing myself to be better than my natural talent would allow.
And for what? To be dismissed by some witch I’d never met as weak and unremarkable?
To be locked in a basement while my mate was tortured?
I stood up abruptly, pacing the length of the storage room with restless energy. There had to be something I could do. Some way to escape, some way to fight back.
I moved toward the crates, my fingers trailing across their dusty surfaces as I searched for anything that might be useful.
Tools, weapons, anything at all. But most of what I found was just old household goods.
There was tarnished silverware, broken furniture, and books so waterlogged they fell apart at the slightest touch. All of it was useless.
Then my hand brushed against something different. Metal. Smooth and cool beneath the grime.
I pulled it free from a rotting wooden box, coughing as dust erupted around me. It was a small vial, ornate and sealed with wax. My heart began to race as I wiped away the accumulated filth and held it up to the weak light filtering through the high window.
The liquid inside shimmered with an opalescent glow.
My breath caught. I knew this. I’d seen my mother make this exact potion countless times.
Magical Accelerant. On its own, it was completely useless.
But when it came to potion making, it was practically a required ingredient for any good apothecary.
It had the ability to take the magical property of any potion and increase it tenfold with just a few drops.
In most cases it was used sparingly because it was a costly potion to make.
Not to mention, it could have disastrous side effects.
Too much in a healing potion might create cell growth out of control or simple herbal potions might become so strong that they kill the drinker.
I rooted around in the crate, looking for more vials that might be stored. There was nothing in the first box, so I moved to the second. After ten minutes I was sweaty, dirty, and covered in grime from head to toe, but I hadn’t found another potion. This was the only one, seemingly lost to time.
I held the vial up to the light, turning it slowly in my hands.
The potion inside caught the weak rays of sun filtering through that grimy window and threw them back in fractured rainbows.
My mind was already racing through possibilities, calculations, dangerous ideas that would have made my mother pale if she could see me thinking them.
I could make something. Not just any potion, but something that might actually do some damage. Something that could give me a fighting chance.
The problem was, I needed ingredients. I couldn’t just work with what was in this storage room. I needed the right components, the right base, the right—
My eyes landed on the corner of the room where there was an old decorative pot that had been long forgotten. That would probably make an okay vessel to brew in. The pot was ceramic, old enough that I worried it might crack if I subjected it to too much heat. But it would have to do.
Next, I needed a heat source. I couldn’t exactly ask for a stove down here in this forgotten basement.
But as I looked around the storage room more carefully, I noticed something I’d overlooked before.
There were old oil lamps spilling out of one of the boxes, their wicks still intact despite the years of abandonment.
Not ideal, but fire was fire. I could work with that.
The real challenge was the ingredients. I closed my eyes and tried to think like a potion maker, tried to channel everything my mother had taught me about improvisation in the apothecary. What did I have access to down here?
I knelt down in the corner where the mushrooms were growing out of the rotting boxes.
My mother had shown me once how certain fungi could be used to amplify magical effects.
These were common, probably toxic to humans, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem if I knew what I was doing.
I carefully harvested several of the larger specimens, setting them aside on a relatively clean crate.
Then I turned my attention to the mold. The storage room was absolutely coated in it, green and black patches covering nearly every surface.
Mold was dangerous in potions. Most apprentices were taught to avoid it at all costs because it could spoil hard work in an instant.
But mold also had its own magical properties.
It was patient, easily spread, and persistent with a toxic edge.
It could be distilled down to create a treatment for curses and magical maladies, but unfiltered, it did exactly the opposite.