Chapter 176: the magic beneath my skin

Chapter 176: The Magic Beneath My Skin

POV: Astrid Vale

I walked into Witchcraft Fundamentals determined to do things differently. No forcing, no commanding, no pushing toward a result I’d already decided on. Professor Mirelle Veyra waited at the front of the room beside a table lined with small copper bowls, each holding a thin thread of faintly glowing energy.

"Partner exercise," she announced. "One of you will release a small amount of magic into the bowl. The other must detect it, then redirect it into the grounding circle at the center of the room. Gently. If you grab, it will scatter."

Eliza paired with me, and she performed her half so smoothly it was almost irritating. She sensed the energy the moment I loosened it, guided it across the table with two fingers, and dropped it into the circle without so much as a flicker. When our roles reversed, I stared at the bowl and felt nothing at all.

"Come on," a boy behind me murmured to his partner. "She’s been at this for a week and she can’t even find it."

"Maybe witchcraft isn’t for everyone," his partner whispered back.

I didn’t turn around. Arguing would only make me tense, and tension was exactly what kept swallowing the feeling I was chasing. Instead I closed my eyes and thought back to the assessment, to that jagged grinding sensation before the construct tore itself apart. Not the result. Just the feeling.

The room had gone quiet around me, and I was still reaching when something across the classroom shifted.

A girl near the window had been guiding her own thread of energy toward the circle, and it wavered, thin and uneven. I felt it before I opened my eyes, a stutter in the air, like a note played slightly off key. Her partner hadn’t noticed. Eliza hadn’t either.

The thread snapped sideways, flaring bright.

I was moving before I’d decided to. I didn’t throw my own magic at it, because every instinct told me that would only make it worse. I simply listened. Beneath the flare I could almost hear it, a low, ragged hum, searching for somewhere to go. I turned my palm toward the grounding circle and let the sound pull that way, as though I were showing water where the drain was.

The energy swerved, slid across the floor, and sank into the circle. The flare died.

For a long moment, nobody spoke. The girl by the window stared at her hands, shaking slightly, then looked at me.

"Miss Vale," Professor Veyra said, crossing the room. "Explain exactly what you felt."

"I’m not sure I can." I swallowed. "It was like I could almost hear it. Underneath her magic. A kind of sound that went wrong before it flared."

She studied me without any expression I could read. "That’s an unusual sensitivity," she said at last. "Not mastery, and I won’t pretend it is. But unusual. Document it, in detail, every time it occurs."

"Yes, Professor."

She walked away without another word, and the boy who’d doubted me kept his eyes on his desk for the rest of the lesson.

Eliza practically vibrated with excitement the moment we stepped into the corridor. "Astrid, that was incredible. Do you realize how rare it is to sense a disturbance before it happens? Have you felt anything like that outside this class?"

"My senses have been sharper since Sapphire woke up," I said. "Sounds, scents, small changes in the air. But I honestly can’t tell which of it comes from her and which might be, I don’t know, magic."

Eliza tapped her chin. "Then don’t assume they’re the same thing. Keep two records. One for what feels like wolf, one for what feels like witchcraft. If they overlap, we’ll see it in the notes instead of guessing."

"That’s smarter than anything I’ve come up with."

"I know," she said cheerfully, and I laughed, though privately I wondered why my abilities seemed to be growing in such tangled, unusual ways, and whether the answer would be something I wanted to hear.

Reed and Xander were waiting by the training grounds after classes, and I told them everything while we walked.

"Was anyone hurt?" Reed asked immediately.

"No. It settled before it did any harm."

"Good." He exhaled, some of the tension leaving his shoulders.

"You surprised an entire classroom," Xander said, delighted, turning to walk backward so he could face me. "Teach me the trick."

"You’re a Lycan prince, not a witchcraft student."

"Royalty should never stop learning useful tricks."

"You’d set the building on fire."

"Possibly. But I’d look magnificent doing it."

Reed shook his head at his brother, then looked at me, his voice quieter. "I knew you’d improve without needing to prove anything to anyone. I’m glad it came easier today."

I smiled at him, warmth settling in my chest, and Xander, who could never leave a quiet moment alone, stopped walking and held out both hands in the middle of the path.

"Reflex test," he said. "Right now. I try to tap your shoulder, you try to stop me. Winner gets bragging rights."

"You just want to see if my new sensitivity helps."

"Obviously. I’m a scholar."

I accepted, and we squared off on the grass. He feinted left, and I caught the faintest shift in the air before his weight moved, a sense of where he was about to be rather than where he was. I stepped aside and caught his wrist.

He stared at his own hand in my grip. "You cheated."

"You proposed the challenge," Reed said from the sidelines, entirely unmoved.

"That’s irrelevant."

"It’s extremely relevant."

I let go and grinned at Xander’s offended expression. Winning even one round against him felt better than it probably should have, and he grumbled about a rematch the whole walk back.

That evening, I curled up on my bed with my notebook and wrote it all down. I compared the sensation from the assessment, that jagged wrongness, with what I’d felt in class, the ragged hum beneath another student’s magic. Different moments, different circumstances, but they shared a single detail, and I underlined it twice.

Both had started before I understood what was happening.

I didn’t know what that meant. I wrote it down anyway, without inventing an explanation to fill the gap.

As I closed the notebook, Sapphire stirred inside me, not in warning and not with an answer, just a quiet awareness, like someone turning their head to listen. I paused with my hand on the cover, wondering if learning to control whatever I was becoming would mean listening more carefully to myself, rather than simply pushing harder.