Seraphina’s POVI left Professor Dryden’s workshop with more than just my training scroll in hand.I left with a question I didn’t know how to answer.It chased me down the corridor like a shadow, slinking behind my steps, curling beneath my ribs.Could I trust him?He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t pried. But he’d seen too much, and I knew it. And worse—I knew he was right. I was racing time. I was fighting like someone afraid they wouldn’t survive the next turn. And that meant I couldn’t afford to be careless.But trust wasn’t a lesson they taught in theory class.So I didn’t go straight back to my dorm.I didn’t retreat into silence.I did something unexpected.I asked for advice.First came Evangeline.Technically, she was still my handmaid—Ambrosius’s second appointment after Linnea. But that title had always been misleading. Evangeline wasn’t just someone who carried my cloak or fetched me tea.She was a strategist in disguise. A support officer assigned under the veil of domestic serv
Seraphina’s POVHaving a dedicated mentor didn’t mean we were suddenly transformed into reclusive, specialized arcane scholars like the postgraduate students in the east wing. We didn’t spend our days holed up in enchanted laboratories, tuning wands or deciphering historical spell matrices until our hair grayed.We still had to attend foundational classes.Elemental Theory. Magical Ethics. Interdisciplinary Spell Design. Even Chrono-Rune Structure, which I had hoped I’d never see again.It was almost comforting, how unchanging some parts of Loisage remained. Even after everything that had happened, the classrooms still smelled faintly of chalk and phoenix ash. The ink still stained your hands for days, and the enchanted chalkboards still wiped themselves clean mid-argument, as if bored with our slowness.But of course, the theory wasn’t where Professor Dryden’s attention focused.He could recite hex law backward and dissect were-form mutation charts in his sleep. That wasn’t the point
Seraphina’s POVCorwin’s schemes had been disrupted—at least for now. With the worst of the chaos contained, and Loisage having completed its internal audits and managed to calm the surviving students, it was finally time for me to return to school.For once, I wasn’t running from danger.I was going back to something like normalcy.Or at least, the version of normal that existed for someone like me—Moonbane blood, Moonbane legacy, and Moonbane losses.But I didn’t leave the Riddle estate empty-handed.And no, I’m not talking about Ambrosius’s infuriating half-smile or the cloak he draped over my shoulders “because it looks better on you than in my closet.” He had a strange way of showing care—always with some kind of mockery wrapped around the edges.But beneath the teasing, there had been something else. Something real.And more than that—there was the Blood Mirror.I’d been thinking about the mirror long before the siege.The Blood Mirror wasn’t just a relic. It was Moonbane’s last
Seraphina’s POVAmbrosius updated me on the outcome of the meeting not long after it concluded. The sweep had been swift and surgical. Every traceable faction tied to Corwin had been neutralized—either scattered, silenced, or stripped of power.Still no sign of Corwin himself.Of course not.He was a coward. And cowards always knew how to slip away when the knives came out.“Be patient,” I told myself.Funny. That used to be his line—soft, clipped, infuriatingly calm.Now I said it to myself like a chant. A warning. A shield.But honestly?Even knowing that a hunter needed patience to snare their prey, it was difficult to accept. Every day spent waiting, strategizing, adjusting the board, was another day Corwin and Diantha got to waste the very wealth they’d stolen—resources that should’ve belonged to others. To the families they betrayed. To Moonbane.To me.
Seraphina’s POVMaybe survive wasn’t the right word.We won.Not in the neat, heroic sense. But in the way that matters: the monsters were dead, the sanctum broken, and Ambrosius was still breathing beside me. The cursed laboratories Corwin had been using—twisted remnants of some earlier, crueler era—were now smoking ruins. Destroyed, cleansed. His creatures, erased.Only one thing had escaped.Corwin himself.That slippery bastard had slipped through the cracks again, cloaked in the stink of spelllight and cowardice. He was still out there, somewhere, licking his wounds, planning his next move.But for now, the trap was broken. Ambrosius, though injured, had survived. So the mission—this mission—was over.For now.Later that evening, I found Ambrosius in one of the lesser-used war rooms in the Riddle estate. It was one of the smaller ones, cluttered with maps both ancient and recent,
Seraphina’s POVI wasn’t supposed to know where he’d gone.That was the entire point, wasn’t it?Ambrosius had given me one of his looks—that maddeningly quiet, sharp thing—after the trial, and said, “Rest. The worst is over.”It hadn’t been a lie.It had been a command dressed as comfort.I didn’t rest.Because the worst wasn’t over.It had barely begun.I knew the signs.I’d seen the way Evangeline’s posture stiffened when I mentioned Corwin’s name. The slight delay when I asked if Ambrosius was still on estate grounds. The bare hesitation when I requested a briefing on the decoded messages from Linnea.And then there was the silence.The kind that fell around someone powerful when they no longer want to be watched.Ambrosius wasn’t hiding from his enemies.He was hiding from me.I found t