Page 83 of Awakened Ash and Alchemy

Now, as the realization trickled over Angela like a wave, along came the shame for all those years of dismissing her aunt’s stories with an overdramatic eyeroll. Laughing at her aunt’s folklore remedies. Refusing to see what her aunt had gently tried to share with Angela all her life.

Pity her aunt’s tarot cards didn’t predict her trip to Paradox.

But then, as she lowered her head with shame, Angela realized that even if they had, she would’ve ignored it.

She had a lot to make up for with her aunt.

“Now, if we all turn to page one hundred and forty of the textbook,” the professor called from the front of the room.

Angela turned to the page she had already read.

That was the problem.

Aunt Claudine had wrapped these same principles in folklore and herbal lore that she had also learned from her mother before she could ride a bike. The rest was from overhearing conversations with strangers who paid for advice as customers at their apothecary bookstore for as long as she could remember.

Angela had dismissed all of it because she had never believed.

Now here she was, at thirty years old, stuck in a classroom as the lecturer droned through material she could have summarized more efficiently, while the eager students leaned forward in the front row, lapping it up. The bored ones filled the middle seats. And the rebels occupied the back—which was where she had planted herself, all alone.

Yet, every one of these kids possessed a visible magickal ability. One student lifted their quill without touching it. Another coaxed flame on his fingertips with nothing but concentration. Some required wands. Others required spells.

And here she was—the anomaly.

“Aunt Claudine would be in her element in this room,” Angela muttered under her breath as she leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. She missed clock-watching to know how long she had before the break.

High school had bored her as a teenager. But here, now as an adult, it was worse because that old restless streak rose inside her, the one that had always questioned authority.

Outside, the day was offensively beautiful. That remarkably cozy cornflower blue had embedded itself in the sky like a blanket stretched over green fields that made her think of some oil painting of Scotland that only needed an ancient crumbling castle to complete the image. Rich, when she was sitting inside a castle watching the way the sunlight draped itself over soft hills in a way that made the stone walls of this place feel heavier. There had to be more secrets in that thick forest that edged the valley than here in this room, the one she called The Forest of No Hope.

After six days trapped behind these castle’s stone walls, she missed her daily walks. Even with the traffic humming along the road beside her small local park, that was nothing more than a heavily mowed landscape of trees and woven paths, it gave a sliver of nature. That park had dogs that eagerly greeted her, their familiar owners smiling or waving, and children she’d watched grow from their parents’ first careful pushes in strollers into reckless preteens speeding past on bikes.

Her local park wasn’t perfect. There were days the trash cans were rank, and you didn’t visit after dark. Not with the glow of smokers clustered beneath streetlights, and the low thrum of music that resulted in spills of empty beer cans at the base of freshly graffitied walls. But it was so normal that none of it looked out of place because it belonged to her world.

And here…

“What I’d give to be outside in the sunshine rather than trapped in here.” Her eyes lifted toward the ceiling where they had no fans or vents. Not even a fire alarm or a sprinkler system.

“Miss Duboise.”

She looked to the front of the room, at the professor who was obviously bored with his job from his monotone that put people to sleep. But she shouldn’t be thinking like that as an adult. Right?

“Do you have something to share?” the professor asked carefully.

Angela knew that tone; they’d been warned. Everyone had. Under the Captain’s protection, it seemed no one was willing to risk upsetting her.

“I do. But it’s not about magic.” She sat higher in the ridiculously uncomfortable chairs. Hadn’t they heard of ergonomics in Paradox? Oh, right, they probably had healers who got rid of arthritis with the wave of a wand.

“Please ask. We’re here to help.”

“Okay, well, if there was a fire in this room,” she said, gesturing to the ceiling, “what’s the contingency? Do you have any fire alarms? Where are the fire extinguishers? Or sprinklers? What if someone miscalculates one of these flame demonstrations or a science experiment goes wrong?” Did they even do science?

Of course, the students turned to look at her, then back to the professor, some rolling their eyes with the obvious message as if you didn’t already know.

“These rooms are heavily warded against such occurrences, I assure you,” the professor replied. “Flame cannot spread. And we extinguish most magical mistakes through spell work, or the wards will activate to contain it.”

“So, no hope of the fire alarm tripping, huh?” She had tripped a few in her time to skip classes—mostly gym and biology. No one ever suspected that the quiet girl with the perfect attendance record would do such a thing, chalking it up to a simple systems error.

Fire alarms. Drills. Sprinklers. Liability forms. All of it was an invisible infrastructure that was so normal in her world that no one thought twice about it.