All Chapters of The Last Warden: Chosen by Four : Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

Wren Hale had spent six years learning that the safest way to survive foster care was to be forgettable.Not sullen enough to get flagged for extra attention. Not bright enough to get singled out in a classroom where teachers had learned not to invest in kids who might be gone by the next placement. She kept her grades steady, her opinions quiet, and her bag packed light enough to move on short notice, because in six years and four different houses, short notice was the only kind of notice she’d ever gotten.She was seventeen, aged out of the system in every way that mattered, and entirely unsurprised that nobody had come looking for her when her last placement ended two months ago. She had a room at a transitional shelter, a part time job restocking shelves, and exactly enough savings to make it to her eighteenth birthday without anyone’s help. That was the plan. It had been the plan for a while.The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which felt like an insult somehow, as if anything life

Three weeks into her first term, Wren had learned exactly two things about her own supposed magic. It refused to show up when she tried to summon it on command, no matter how many hours she spent in the practice yards attempting the basic exercises every other first year could do without thinking. And it apparently had opinions of its own about when it preferred to appear, opinions nobody had bothered consulting her on. She’d tried meditation exercises a kind upperclassman had suggested, tried the breathing patterns from her elemental theory textbook, tried simply wanting it hard enough in the dark of her room at night. Nothing worked. Whatever lived inside her clearly answered to a different set of rules than the ones this school seemed built around.She was still failing every practical exam. She’d stopped expecting otherwise.What she hadn’t stopped doing was walking the back corridor between the library and her dormitory after evening study hours, mostly because it was faster and

Headmaster Aldric did not believe in gentle explanations, and he proved it within the first ten seconds of all five of them standing in his office.“Sit,” he said, though only Wren actually did, perched on the edge of a chair that felt too formal for whatever was about to happen. The four heirs remained standing behind her, close enough that she could feel their attention pressing against her back like a physical weight. The office smelled of old parchment and something colder underneath it, like the room had been holding its breath for longer than she could guess. Aldric studied her for a long moment before he spoke again, and when he did, his voice carried none of the careful diplomacy she’d have expected from a man who ran a school this old.“Alliance Elite Academy was not built to educate supernatural students, Miss Hale. That has always been a convenient byproduct.” He folded his hands on the desk in front of him. “It was built four centuries ago for exactly one purpose. To watch