Page 164 of Magical Mission
And I saw, for the first time, the boy he might have been. The fracture beneath the cruelty. The yearning for understanding twisted into something terrible. But standing before him, I felt the thread in my chest tighten.
Answers were not always healing.
Sometimes, they were chains.
I turned away, remembering Keegan’s words.
It wasn’t my job to fix someone who didn’t know they were broken.
The shimmer rustled behind me like a cloak being drawn.
I faced the path to the Academy.
And though no voice spoke, the air around me saidCome not because you’re told—but because you choose. Come because you are ready to become what no one else can be.
My pulse quickened, and my knees shook, but I stepped forward.
And as I did, the other paths faded—not in anger, but in quiet reverence.
Because they were never meant to be chosen.
They were meant to beseen.
And the path opened before me like a breath finally exhaled.
“No,” I whispered, the word surprising me even as it left my lips.
It echoed in the shimmer around me, not like a denial, but like a challenge.
“I don’t agree with this,” I said louder now, facing the path that had tried to close behind me. “I don’twantto choose just one.”
The path pulsed, confused. Perhaps even irritated.
“I wantallof them,” I continued, taking a shaking step back toward the center where the paths had met. “I want my daughter’s comfort. I want Keegan’s strength. I want Gideon’s answers. I want the Academy’s legacy.”
The shimmer wavered, shifting from gold to silver to a deep, roiling violet. The sky overhead seemed to buckle.
And something cracked, not a sound or a physical shatter, but something inside the path gave way.
The pedestal in the center, where the blank parchment had waited, crumbled into dust. The mist around me explodedoutward as if shoved by a hurricane wind, and every path that had faded reappeared in a blinding surge of color and magic.
But they no longer stood apart.
They were movingtowardeach other, merging as the path twisted under my feet. Roots rose like veins, and trees from different timelines clawed through the ground in fast-growing spirals, as their branches knitted together into impossible canopies. The shimmer itself thickened into columns of light—some hot with sunfire, others cool with starlight. My bones ached under the weight of it.
“Maeve!” someone called, but I couldn’t tell if it came from outside or inside.
Or from myself.
The vision of Celeste didn’t vanish. Nor did Keegan. Nor Gideon. Nor the echoing silhouette of the Academy. They began to bend, to blend, like reflections in rippling water as my body burned in a painful heat of decision.
A piece of Keegan’s shadow folded into the stones of the Academy. Celeste’s laugh drifted like birdsong into the trees. Gideon’s knowledge, dangerous and dark, threaded through the roots that I stood on.
I stood in the center of it all at the breaking point as they bound together.
The shimmer screamed now, not in pain, but inresistance.
One path.
