Three

The sun didn’t so much rise as it did turn the persistent Highland fog into a blinding, achromatic glare. For Gwen, the light was an interrogation.

She sat in the Aurelius common room, a cup of Earl Grey cooling untouched on the low mahogany table. Her silk robe was cinched tight, but no amount of luxury could hide the bruised shadows under her eyes or the way her hands minutely trembled. She had spent the last twelve hours being the machine she was raised to be, but the gears were grinding on grit.

The night had been a blur of high-stakes logistics. It had started with her frantic summons to the Dorm Leaders—the kind of emergency call that bypassed all social niceties. She had personally woken the on-call patrol teams, her magical finding-letters delivering her voice like whip-crack in the dark dormitories, forcing them to the perimeter to bolster the wards. She had stood in the predawn cold, directing the flow of magic into the silver-etched stones, correcting any missteps with her own resonance when her peers fumbled due to their sleep-heavy exhaustion.

Then came the meeting in Chancellor Eddow’s office. The meeting felt less like an inquiry and more like an autopsy of Gwen’s burgeoning career.

The room smelled of old parchment, strangely pungent herbs, and the unexpected scent of molasses—likely the hobgoblin kitchens below venting their morning tarts through the ancient stone flues. Gwen had stood flanked by the four Dorm Leaders, her spine a rigid line of professional distance that felt like a fragile glass rod. When Eddow had called for Will and Cal, Gwen had watched the boys enter—Will still in that earth-stained flannel, looking like he’d crawled out of a grave.

As they gave their accounts of the Dullahan, Gwen hadn’t been listening to the words; she’d been watching the Chancellor. Eddow hadn’t looked horrified. He hadn’t even looked surprised. He had looked at Will with a heavy, sombre recognition, like a man watching a predicted catastrophe finally hit the shore. He’d expected this. The moment the ‘Chosen One’ stepped beyond the protection of the walls, the darkness had come to claim him.

“A tragedy,” Eddow had whispered, his eyes fixed on Will. “But perhaps an inevitable one.”

Gwen’s teeth ground together at the memory. Inevitable. To the Chancellor, it was destiny; to Gwen, it was a tactical failure. Now, in the hollow silence of Sunday morning, the weight of that failure sat on her chest like a leaden plate. A first-year Vapour—a girl from Dorm Sidereal who had just wanted a taste of rebellion—was dead. She had died while Gwen was the Community Service Chair. She had died on Gwen’s watch. And all Gwen could do about it was send lilies.

The girl’s status didn’t matter to Gwen’s internal auditor. Her perfectionism didn’t differentiate between a high-born Ink and a lowly Vapour when it came to a tally of failures. A student was lost, and the ledger was written in blood.

The hallway outside the office was a cathedral of ribbed vaulting and cold marble, where the shadows seemed to stretch and watch. Alistair Thorne, the fourth-year Chairman of the Aurelian Circle, was waiting for her near the busts of the school’s founders. He looked impeccable in a charcoal-grey waistcoat, the gold Ouroboros pin glinting against the dark wool.

Gwen’s eyes were drawn to a curious new addition: a marble-sized iron pendant dangled from the dragon’s serpentine tail. Its dull, pitted surface looked out of place—almost primitive—against the polished lustre of the gold.

“Gwenhwyfar,” he said, his voice a smooth, cultured baritone that carried the weight of a dozen generations of sorcerous rule. He didn’t look angry; he looked disappointed, which was far worse.

“Chairman,” she replied, inclining her head just enough to acknowledge his rank without appearing cowed. This was his second year in the role, a feat that deserved her acknowledgement, even if there was little respect behind it.

“A messy business,” Alistair said, stepping into her path. He adjusted a cuff-link with exaggerated boredom. “The Chancellor is concerned about the optics. As am I. The Circle is meant to be the pillar of stability for this institution, yet here we are, explaining away a decapitation before the first month is out.”

“I am conducting a full review of the wards,” Gwen said, her voice tight. “It won’t happen again.”

“I certainly hope not. Especially given the…correspondence we’ve received.” Alistair’s expression darkened slightly. “The Council received a letter this morning.” He held out the unfolded parchment, the brief message scrawled in a vivid, aggressive red ink. “It was a warning, Gwenhwyfar. A claim that the moors were only the beginning—that the ‘Rider’ has more work to do.”

She read the cruel words: The harvest on the moors was but the first reaping of a rot you invited. Magic is a heavy burden, and the Rider will remove those unworthy of carrying it.

Gwen’s heart gave a sharp, cold thud. “Does the Chancellor know?”

Alistair let out a short, dry laugh. “I assume from your expression that Chancellor Eddow didn’t share the fact that he received a Red Letter of his own? No? Well, I’m not surprised. The Chancellor has always been selective with his confidences. It stands to reason he wouldn’t trust a first-year—even one of your standing—to handle the weight of such business.”

He leaned in slightly, the iron pendant on his pin swinging like a pendulum. “But don’t let it trouble you. I’m sure you’ll have an opportunity to prove yourself to him soon enough.”

His words were much like the letter in her hands—a warning.

“Until then,” he said, his tone lighter with false pleasantry, “maintain perspective. We have three hundred first-years this term. Statistically, losing a single student—and a Sidereal Vapour at that—is hardly a collapse of the system. In any other year, it would be a footnote.”

“Such a shame the numbers are… shifting,” he said. “The Vapours are already looking for reasons to claim the Circle is ineffective.” He patted her shoulder—a gesture that felt more like a brand than a comfort. “Be more diligent, Gwenhwyfar. See that you don’t disappoint the Circle again.”

A slap in the face would have been kinder.

He turned and strode away. Gwen stayed frozen, her fingers curling into the fabric of her skirt. He had dismissed a human life as a statistical footnote—one out of two hundred—and yet, the cold logic of it was exactly what she had been raised to believe.

She looked toward the Chancellor’s closed door. Eddow was keeping secrets. Alistair might be right that the Chancellor wouldn’t trust her. But neither did Alistair. As usual, it was safer not to trust anyone.

The school was already a hornet’s nest of rumours. In the dining halls, the whispers were a deafening hum. They blamed prejudiced security. They blamed the haunted moors. But Gwen knew where the blame truly lay.

She looked out the window at the distant, mist-shrouded crags. This was Will Holloway’s fault. He was a lightning rod for disaster. If he hadn’t been out there, would the Dullahan have been summoned? She doubted it. He was the target, and everyone else was just collateral damage in his Chosen One narrative.

But the question that kept her blood cold was how.

Raising a Dullahan wasn’t a feat for an ordinary disgruntled student or a hedge-mage. It required a deep, necro-anatomical knowledge—a specialty that was highly secretive and scorned as unethical. Summoning a creature that close to Cairn-Gait was another mystery. Even the areas around the campus were warded against infiltration. Someone had reached through the wards, or perhaps from within them, to call a herald of death to their doorstep.

Gwen stood, her movements stiff but determined. Her reputation was fractured, her position threatened, and her conscience—the small, quiet part she tried to drown in structure—was screaming.

She would find out who had summoned that rider. Not for the girl who died, and certainly not for Will Holloway. She would do it because she was Gwenhwyfar O’Dorchaidhe, and she did not allow her masterpieces to be defaced by monsters.

*

It was only the second week of classes, and the Great Lecture Hall felt less like a classroom and more like an ossuary. The usual high-bred chatter had been replaced by a low, vibrating hum of anxiety that tasted like static on the tongue. Every time the heavy oak doors creaked, heads snapped back, eyes wide and searching for a threat that hadn’t yet been named.

Gwen sat in her usual spot, her spine a frozen rod of iron. She had spent the morning applying an extra layer of concealer to the shadows under her eyes and buffing her nails until they shone like mirrors. Even if her insides were a chaotic mess of guilt and exhaustion, her exterior would remain a fortress of Aurelian order.

Then, the seat beside her—the one Sloan usually occupied—creaked.

Gwen didn’t look. She didn’t have to. The scent of rain and woodsmoke announced him before he even spoke.

“Hey,” Will said, his voice low and surprisingly gentle. He leaned in, his shoulder far too close to her silk-clad arm. “I’ve been thinking about that night. That shield you threw—it was incredible, Gwen. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He grinned, oblivious that she wasn’t reciprocating his enthusiasm. “There’s gotta be a reason that thing was there. If the Dullahan was really looking for me, or if—”

Gwen turned. Slowly. Her grey eyes were as cold as the loch in midwinter, her expression a mask of bored, aristocratic disdain. The whiplash was instantaneous, the swing of a wrecking ball bashing through his attempt at bridge-building.

“You might be the Chosen One, Holloway, but I am not your lackey,” she said, her voice a lethal whisper that didn’t reach the desks behind them. “I am not your researcher, and I am certainly not your friend. You made your feelings about Aurelius—and me—perfectly clear at the sorting. Do not mistake my professional duty for a personal invitation.”

Will flinched as if she’d physically slapped him. The connection he thought they’d shared on the moor—the shared breath, the frantic check for marks—was being incinerated before his eyes.

“Gwen, I thought—”

“Go back to your Vapour friends and that hand-me-down Whitley,” she interrupted, her lip curling in a way that made her look like a beautiful, starving wolf. “Gossip with them about your ‘weird feelings.’ I have a reputation to salvage because I was too busy playing bodyguard to a wannabe hero to realize another student was being hunted.”

Will stood, his face flushing a deep, humiliated red. He didn’t say another word. He just grabbed his battered notebook and retreated to the back row, his shoulders hunched.

Sloan appeared a moment later, her nose wrinkled in genuine disgust. She stared at the empty seat Will had vacated as if he’d left a layer of radioactive sludge behind.

“Absolutely not,” Sloan muttered, walking around Gwen to sit on her other side. “I’m not sitting in the Vapour residue. That’s a one-way ticket to a bad-luck streak.”

Gwen didn’t answer. She was staring at her parchment, her hand trembling so slightly only she could feel it. She felt the weight of a gaze from the side and snapped her head toward it. Bryn Hall was staring at her from three desks away.

“What?” Gwen snapped, the word a jagged shard of glass.

Bryn flinched, but she didn’t look away. There was an annoying, earnest light in her eyes that Gwen wanted to extinguish.

“I just wanted to thank you,” Bryn said softly. “For saving Will and Cal. They’d probably be dead if you hadn’t helped.”

The appreciation hit Gwen like a physical blow to the stomach. It was the first kind thing anyone had said to her since the girl from Dorm Sidereal had been found. The guilt she’d been suffocating flared up, hot and stinging. For a split second, the mask slipped.

“That’s my duty as the Community Service Chair of the Circle,” Gwen said, her voice regaining its polished, chilled tone. “And as an Ink. Protecting this place is in my blood. It wasn’t about them.”

Bryn tilted her head, her expression a mix of confusion and pity. She looked at Gwen as if she were a puzzle with a missing piece—wondering how someone could be so diligently brave and yet so hollowly cruel in the same breath.

Before Bryn could respond, the heavy doors at the front of the hall slammed shut. Professor Prospero strode to the lectern, his black robes snapping like a crow’s wings.

“I know all of you have heard rumours,” Prospero barked, his voice instantly commanding the room’s fractured attention. “I know you will have heard the early details from your Dorm Leaders. I have just received an update: the Circle has recommended a curfew, and the Chancellor has agreed. No one—and I mean no one—is to be outside the campus walls after sunset. That is, nineteen-thirty.”

A collective groan rippled through the hall, a mixture of frustration and fear.

Gwen let out a slow, silent breath of relief. The curfew had been her suggestion—a desperate attempt to wrap the school in the structure it so clearly lacked. If she couldn’t stop the monsters, she could at least lock the doors.

“Now, settle down,” Prospero commanded, his eyes sweeping the room, lingering for a fraction of a second on Gwen. “We have things to learn. And in this new world, knowledge is the only shield that won’t break.”

*

Gwen watched the slow, agonizing unravelling of the Chosen One with the clinical detachment of a jeweller examining a flawed diamond.

Over the week, the atmosphere at Cairn-Gait had curdled. It was no longer just the damp Highland chill that made students shiver; it was the way they looked at Will Holloway. She saw him in the library during the lunch hour, tucked into a corner that smelled of ancient rot and wet stone. He was elbow-to-elbow with Bryn, who was frantically sketching diagrams that looked insulting in their simplicity—circles and arrows attempting to explain the elegant, lethal geometry of resonance to a boy who seemed to be drowning in it.

Gwen would have bypassed them entirely if they hadn’t kidnapped Scottish Folklore: Separating Myth from Truth. It was the only definitive text on pre-Victorian necromantic traces, and she needed it to cross-reference the residue the Dullahan had left on the moor.

She smoothed her wool blazer and marched over, her heels clicking a rhythmic, aristocratic tempo against the floorboards. She nodded toward the book, her expression a mask of frosty poise. “Are you using that as a prop, or do you intend to actually read it?”

Bryn looked up, her curls a wild halo of frustration. “We were getting to it,” she said, her voice thin. She had three basic tomes on necromantic magic on her other side—the kind of primers that only a child or a rootless Vapour would need to reference.

“Don’t you Inks have some secret private library?” Will snapped. He didn’t look up from the margin he was currently defacing with a leaden pencil. Green eyes, hard and bloodshot, flashed behind his tortoiseshell glasses. “You can wait your turn like everyone else. It’s called being equals, Princess.”

Gwen’s jaw tightened. She wanted to bite back, to remind him that equality was a myth for those who couldn’t achieve excellence. But she hesitated when she noticed his fingers trembling against the page. And he was oddly wearing his flannel collar popped up in an ineffective attempt to hide more of his shattered scar. He was overwhelmed, a live wire stripped of its insulation.

It was easier to blame him for being reckless than to mourn the girl who had died. So, Gwen simply turned on her heel and retreated to the Circle Sanctuary, her chest tight with a conflict she refused to name.

In their afternoon Modern Curses, Will looked like a ghost of the boy who had smirked at her during the sorting. His laissez-faire casualness had been replaced by a dejected desperation. He was hunched over his desk, torturing a pen cap between his teeth, one hand wielding a neon-yellow highlighter like a weapon while the other filled every margin with illegible, frantic notes.

Good, Gwen thought, though the sentiment felt hollow. At least he’s finally acknowledging the weight of the crown he’s wearing. But the school was already crowning him with something else: blame.

Newblood students whispered that Will was a jinx; that the girl had died simply because she’d stood in his orbit at the party. The Vapours claimed the Dark One’s followers were hunting him, making everyone near him collateral damage. Even the Inks had started a more malicious rumour: that Holloway had summoned the Dullahan himself, a clumsy, accidental call from a boy who had more power than pedigree.

It was a mess. And Gwen watched it settle onto Will’s shoulders, brick by brick.

He fell asleep in Wednesday’s Intro to Linguistics of Power, his head hitting the desk with a thud that echoed. Professor Purnell had shredded him, accusing him of treating the sacred languages of spellcraft like a nap-time story.

Then came the ‘Frog Incident’ in Biological Alchemics. Will was supposed to change a specimen’s skin from green to brown—a basic transmutation exercise. Instead, the frog had erupted into a fire-breathing nuisance that scorched Professor Roe’s eyebrows.

By Thursday, the tension moved from the classrooms to the Moors.

The Highland mist clung to the heather like a damp shroud, thick and tasting of peat. Professor Prospero stood on a jagged outcropping, his dark cloak snapping in the wind as he surveyed the line of students.

“The Will-o’-the-Wisp is not merely a light, but a test of equilibrium,” Prospero’s voice boomed. “Too little intent, and it vanishes. Too much, and it burns. You have ten minutes to catch one and bring it back to the starting line. Do not—under any circumstances—cross the ward boundaries. The Moors are older than your bloodlines, and far less forgiving.”

Near the starting line, Sloan was busily marking a tally on a floating piece of parchment. She looked triumphant, her cream cable-knit sweater tucked into a tailored charcoal silk skirt, her golden curls impeccably defying the humidity. Beside her, Estelle looked like she’d sucked a lemon to match her yellow mohair balloon-sleeve sweater and oxblood plaid wool skirt.

“I can’t believe it,” Estelle hissed, frantically braiding her damp hair over one shoulder. “How did Bryn Hall snatch hers first? It’s a fluke. A statistical anomaly.”

“And Cal?” Charlotte added, leaning against a mossy stone that looked like a grave marker. She was a vision of morose elegance in layers of black silk and a wide leather corset belt that cinched her waist with an almost illusory narrowing effect. “Losing to a Whitley who spends more time in an alchemy lab than a library is an embarrassment. We’re losing the lead. Gwen,” she said, her dark eyes shifting to Gwen, “fix the scoreboard. I’m tired of seeing the Vapours smirk.”

Gwen re-checked her leather satchel—an essential stock for on-the-go spell-casting. This was her element. She’d been wise enough to secure her hair with a brown velvet ribbon—all the better to beat Holloway without a stray strand out of place. The delicate shape of her chocolate-brown silk shirt a complementary contrast to the sharp lines of her high-waisted, brown tartan trousers.

Will looked terrible. There were heavy, bruised shadows beneath his green eyes, and his hands were twitching. His flannel shirt was frumpier than usual, smelling of woodsmoke and too much burnt coffee.

“Ready to lose, Princess?” Will asked, though the usual spark in his voice was replaced by a gravelly fatigue.

“Ready to watch you fail,” Gwen replied coolly. She pushed her sleeves above her elbows and rubbed the muck off her loafers onto a grassy patch. All the better to run fast and beat Holloway fair and square.

Prospero dropped his hand. “Begin!”

Gwen moved with the fluid grace of a fencer. She didn’t chase the wisp; she reached out with a low-frequency hum, a tether of aether designed to draw the blue-white light toward her like a moth to a candle. She was inches from the capture when a sudden, violent surge of power erupted to her left—a ravenous, untamable roar that made the hair on Gwen’s arms stand up. And it was coming from Will.

Too late. Instead of the delicate Snare of Air, Will unleashed a raw, concussive burst of pure, unrefined intent. His curse-marked skin flickered a violet hue in a blink—so quick Gwen doubted her eyes. The wisp shrieked—a high, glass-shattering sound. The blue light curdled into a sickly, neon fuchsia.

The creature ignited into sparks of light and heat, spinning wildly in the air as it continued to shriek in a frenzy. The damp earth surged into a suffocatingly dense, grey fog that swallowed the light. Within a heartbeat, the sounds of the Moors—the wind, the distant murmurs of students—were gone. The world became an empty, freezing tomb.

“What did you do?” Anna Martin cried out, her voice thin with terror. “This—it’s impossible.”

They were standing in a clearing of dead, silver trees that looked like frosted needles reaching out of the earth. The air tasted of copper and forgotten things.

“I don’t know…I’m sorry,” Will stammered, his face pale.

“This should be impossible,” Anna repeated, her hands trembling. “These are tame wisps. Bred in captivity.”

“What are you saying?” Marcus asked, suspicion and concern making him still.

“It’s like…Will’s magic made them feral,” Anna explained. “Imagine turning a chicken back into a dinosaur. Will made an itty, modern animal into its scariest, most powerful form. Just because his magic…I’m not sure—touched it wrong?”

“Nice work, Chosen One,” Marcus said with a resentful sarcasm. He looked pale, his shoulders slumping as if the very air was heavy.

The frenzied wisp darted through the silver trees, its light flickering like a dying strobe. Behind it, five more appeared, their lights an angry, pulsing red. They circled like vultures, the fog tightening around the group until every breath felt like inhaling wet wool.

Gwen stepped to the edge of the clearing. Ahead, a path of glowing white stones appeared, winding into the dark.

“We have to get back,” Marcus said, stepping toward the path.

“Don’t!” Gwen snapped, grabbing his arm. “If you follow that path, you’ll be lost.”

“We’re already lost, O’Dorchaidhe,” Marcus said, worry and frustration making his tone bitter.

“More lost,” Anna warned, eyes wide and voice quivering. “The kind of lost that even Professor Prospero might not be able to save us from. Trapped in the space-between-spaces.”

Gwen combed through her pouch for a mint sprig—for increased energy—her mind racing through Confronting Natural Magic: Trapping and Containment. “The safest bet is to try the textbook method. We make it dizzy—disorient the magic that’s disorienting us. Stand back.”

She cast the spell—a precise, corkscrewing bolt of silver. It hit the central wisp, but instead of wobbling, the creature simply absorbed the light and grew brighter, its shriek rising again to a glass-shattering pitch. Gwen tried again, a more powerful variant, then a third. Each time, the spell was swallowed whole.

The fog drew nearer, shrinking the clearing. All Gwen had done was feed the wisps. Anna sank to her knees, looking grey and exhausted. Marcus leaned against a silver tree, his eyes drooping. “I’m so…tired,” he muttered.

This place was draining them.

“It’s not working,” Gwen whispered, her chest tightening around her heart, squeezing too tight to breathe. This was the traditional solution. The only solution she knew. If she couldn’t solve a simple classroom exercise gone wrong, how was she ever going to be a curse breaker?

The realization hit her like a wall of bricks on her chest: what good was she if all she could do was memorize the instructions? Being a curse breaker was her purpose. All she’d ever wanted to be. But she couldn’t even out-think one silly magically-boosted wisp.

Panic, cold and sharp, began to claw at her throat. Her hands shook. Her brain spun in her skull. She could feel the fog drinking her energy reserves. She might have more to give than Anna or Marcus, but at this rate, even she’d be useless in a few minutes.

Even ordinary wisps were tricky. It was precisely why Prospero used them in his training sessions—so students could learn to face the indomitable resonance of old magic. Now, thanks to Will, these wisps had devolved to something extraordinarily wild. She didn’t know how to escape this.

The paths moved. The white-stone path gone. Two more stretched in opposing directions—one a modern, paved road and the other a winding, mulch-covered walking path. The clearing of the safety of the shank again, tempting them to wander into greater danger.

“It’s too strong.” Gwen could feel the energy of floating flares, eager to burn the first person who tried to approach.

I’m a fraud, she thought. I’m just a girl with a famous last name whose memorized the rules.

“Gwen.”

Will’s voice was steady, cutting through the static in her head. He stepped beside her, looking remarkably vibrant compared to the lethargic forms of Anna and Marcus. His endless reserves were shielding him from the drain.

“C’mon, Gwen,” he said softly, his green eyes searching hers. “We all know you’re the only one here who has a chance of figuring this out. Look at it like you look at everything else. You’re not going to let that tiny thing beat you, right?”

His confidence in her—the absolute, unearned certainty in his voice—stilled the frantic spinning in her mind. She took a breath, the copper taste of the air grounding her. She stopped looking for a page in a book and started looking at the magic.

“We can’t treat it like a wisp anymore,” she said, her voice returning to its clinical chill. “You’ve super-charged it with your own resonance.” She twisted her silver signet ring. Think, Gwen. It had too much energy to handle by any ordinary means.

Like a curse. Her hands stilled.

“We treat it like a curse,” she realized, weight lifting from her chest. “It has too much resonance to overpower, so we need to drain it. Bring it down to our level.”

“So, we drain its battery?” Will asked.

“Siphoning is the only way,” Gwen agreed. “We need to drain the excess power back out to stabilize it. But…I can’t do it. My reserves aren’t big enough to contain the boost you gave it, and in this in-between space, there’s nowhere to ground the energy. It would burn me from the inside out.”

“Can I do it? Will asked. “My magic did this. I’ll take it back.”

“You don’t know how to siphon magic, Will,” Anna groaned from the ground, her voice a mere ghost of itself. “What if you make it worse?”

“Can we do it together?” Will asked, looking at Gwen.

Gwen hesitated. The thought of integrating with his untamed magic was unsettling. But Marcus let out a low moan, his skin looking ashen grey as he kneeled. Her own legs were weak. She resisted the temptation to close her eyes and let herself fall. The red-glowing wisps circled closer, sensing their vulnerability. The fog already pooled around their ankles.

“It’s either win with me or lose alone,” Will said, stepping into her space. “And I know you hate to lose.”

“Fine,” Gwen snapped, her pride finally bowing to necessity. “I’ll anchor the spell. You fuel it—but Holloway, don’t you dare overcharge it.”

“I’m not making the same mistake twice,” he whispered. “Trust me.”

Irritation prickled up her spine, but Will had already aimed a blackthorn twig at a red glow in the fog. Gwen stepped beside him, wrapping her hand around the thorny stem. The contact was electric. The heel of her hand pressed against his knuckles, her silk sleeve brushing his flannel.

“The blackthorn can’t direct your magic on its own,” she explained, her breath hitching as his power pulsed against her skin. Her palm itched. “I’ll be containing your reckless magic with mine to make it precise. It will feel like I’m caging you. Let me—or we’re never getting out. Got it?”

“As you command, Princess,” he murmured.

As the siphon began, she felt the roar of the wisp’s power being pulled through them. It was a violent, tumultuous vibration that whistled like a wild windstorm. She acted as the filter, the narrow neck of the hourglass, directing the frantic energy back into the deep, seemingly bottomless well of Will’s magic.

The wisp fought back. The resonance rebounded, a howling, torrential pull that should’ve collapsed Gwen’s lungs. But Will didn’t flinch. He didn’t even seem to feel the strain. He looked at her, waiting for direction, seemingly unaware that he was siphoning the power of the very threat that was buckling her knees.

She felt like she was trying to hold a hurricane in a canvas bag. Her palm burned, but Will remained as unyielding as a thunderstorm, swallowing the wisp’s comparably futile resistance.

Finally, the shrieking stopped. The red glow faded back to a submissive, pale blue. The silver trees shivered and dissolved. The searing heat under her palm was too much, and she snapped her hand away, stumbling until Will caught her arm to steady her.

The earth breathed deep, and the moors swallowed the fog. They were back. The damp Highland air smelled of heather and rain once more. Anna and Marcus collapsed onto the grass, gasping as their strength slowly returned.

“There they are!” Sloan’s voice cut through the silence. “I told you she’d find a way out.” Beside her, Charlotte looked almost disappointed that there hadn’t been a more dramatic catastrophe.

Professor Prospero approached, his eyes lingering on the blue wisp now hovering peacefully in Gwen’s capture-snare. The rest of the class rushed forward, showering Gwen with praise for rescuing the group from the Chosen One’s blunder.

Marcus opened his mouth, his eyes flickering toward Will, who simply shook his head and tossed the used-up blackthorn twig into the thicket.

Will looked at Gwen with a small, weary smile—a silent acknowledgement that the credit was hers to keep. “Nice save, O’Dorchaidhe,” he said, loud enough for the nearest students to hear.

Gwen didn’t correct them. She stood in the centre of the adulation, the win tasting sour. She had panicked. Stumbled like a peryton foal taking its first steps. She had wanted to prove she could beat Will Holloway, but instead, she had survived because of him.

*

By the Friday Defence Seminar, the ‘Wisp Incident’ had solidified into a damning rumour: the Chosen One had no control. He was a hazard. No one wanted to be his duelling partner. Especially after a few arrogant Inks brave enough to challenge him became victims of his disarming charms—instead of losing their gems or twigs, they were tossed across the room like ragdolls.

No one cheered.

It took the heat off Gwen’s and the Circle’s security failure, but the ‘win’ was a lie. It was sloppy. Unearned. Perfection meant winning by merit, by out-studying and out-training every person in the room. Regaining her reputation simply because the student body found a more convenient scapegoat was nauseating. She wanted to beat Will Holloway at his best, not watch him be dismantled by the pettiness of a frightened mob.

At the Friday evening Circle meeting, the consensus was reached: the curfew was bad for morale. The Chairs voted to return the students’ freedom. Gwen hated it. Every defensive instinct she possessed screamed that the Dullahan threat still lingered in the Moors. But she needed the Council’s support for her long-term ambitions. She couldn’t be the ‘Paranoid First-Year Chair.’

She reported the decision to Chancellor Eddow via a magically-sealed missive. An hour later, the Dorm Leaders delivered the news: the 19:30 curfew was officially over.

Gwen didn’t join her friends to celebrate the regained freedom. Her excuse was that she was studying, which Sloan begrudgingly accepted as reasonable. Much better than the truth—Gwen was in no mood to party. She’d re-read the same paragraph three times, unable to focus, her thoughts returning to the Dullahan. Every evening that week, she’d ordered her volunteer squads to re-check perimeter wards, especially the renowned ‘sneak-out spot.’ But the wards were humming, secure, and unbreakable. Proof that the Dullahan hadn’t breached the wall; it had been invited to wait for the opportune moment.

Gwen stared out the tall windows from a cozy armchair in the Aurelius common room, watching the mist roll back over the moors. Students already spilled out, laughing, desperate to forget. But her eyes drifted toward the Cairngorm dorms.

She wasn’t worried about him, she told herself. She just wanted a fair fight. And it was hard to fight a boy who looked like he was already half-buried.