"Why didn't you just tell me you were straight?" The words still felt like broken glass in my mouth, sharp and stupid and hopeless. Rowena had said them quiet, final — the kind of quiet that slams doors you never meant to open. I'd expected a no. I hadn't expected the calm with which she folded me away, sisterly and gentle and absolute.
Humiliation is heavy. It sits in your chest like a stone and makes every breath an effort.
So when Godric — with that relentless, awkward, well-meaning optimism of his — popped his head around the library archway five minutes later and asked, all warm and blunt: "You alright, Sera?" it was like someone shoved a torch into that stone. "Are you sure you're okay?" he pressed, stepping forward.
I didn't plan to react. I planned to be cool, to be composed, to swallow the hot shame and vanish back into my notes. But shame makes you rude and brittle. Rejection makes you sharp.
He stepped closer. I saw worry in his face, not the teasing grin he usually wore. Sympathy is the worst thing to give someone who just had their heart handed back to them with "no." I felt every eye in the library on me — ached to disappear — and something raw and fierce rose up instead, bright and volcanic.
"Don't," I snapped. The word sounded small and deadly in the echoing space. He froze, then opened his mouth like he was going to say something else, and then the air did this terrible, physical thing: the world tilted with my anger, and my magic answered like a blade.
One moment Godric was there, alive and annoyingly concerned. The next the stone behind him exploded outward in a cascade of dust and mortar. He shot through the wall like a human cannon, bellowing as the world rearranged itself around him. The castle swallowed him up and spat out a suspiciously Godric-sized hole through the opposite corridor — a rectangle of ruin with a pair of boots flailing at the far end.
There are few sounds I'll never forget: the ripping of wood, Godric's indignant yelp, the collective intake of breath from a hundred frightened throats. For a heartbeat I didn't feel anything but a thin, delicious, awful triumph. He'd shut up. He was stopped. No one would guilt me now. No one would tell me to breathe. No one would look at me with pity.
Then silence settled like a bad spell.
People are merciless in their compassion. They scatter when someone becomes dangerous to be near. Helga froze mid-soup ladle at the sound and then quietly retreated to the kitchens. Salazar stopped mid-plotting and melted into a shadow in the corridor. Rowena's face — the face I wanted to fold into my arms and fix — had gone pale and small and horrified. She had been at the far window when the wall turned into a jigsaw of plaster and a boot, and she didn't move to help Godric; she didn't speak. Her eyes found mine for the barest second, full of something like regret and fear, and then she turned away.
"Seraphina," she whispered finally, as if the name alone had weight enough to hold us apart. She didn't approach. She didn't call for aid. She only said my name the way you say the name of a friend who has just fallen into a fire and you can't climb in after them.
Godric emerged a moment later, half-caked in dust, hair more askew than usual, glaring at me with one eyebrow permanently higher. He landed on his feet like a born fighter — embarrassed more than beaten — but the hole he'd made through the castle was literal and obvious and would take months of golem labor to mend properly.
No one came near me. The great hall, usually full of the confused chaos of children and the founders' endless bickering, folded inward like a shell. The students peered from doorways, eyes round, whispering. The older ones gave me wide berth. Even the youngest — children of five who'd once treated me like a bedtime story — watched me with the wary eyes of creatures who'd smelled a thunderstorm.
I should have felt powerful. Instead, the power tasted like ash and guilt.
"Why?" Rowena asked from the doorway where she'd retreated. She didn't scream, didn't accuse. She simply asked the question every single one of us should have been asking: why would someone you care about do this? Her knuckles were white against the parchment she'd been holding.
Because she told me she couldn't love me back. Because the blood in my ears roared. Because I am a child in a woman's body and a genius with too much power and not enough practice at losing. Because I am stupid and furious and I wanted to make the world look as broken as I felt.
I don't remember walking. I only remember the weight of my hands against my temples and the sudden, desperate need to be alone. I fled to the highest turret I could find — the one with a narrow slit-window that looked over the valley — and sat with my knees against my chest until my breathing returned.
Below, muffled and distant, the castle groaned. Godric's laughter, when it came, was thin and brittle. He was fine. He'd laugh it off later, probably, with that stubborn pride of his. But what I'd done had changed things. It had put literal cracks in the place I'd worked my whole life to protect. It had put cracks in the simplest, most fragile thing of all — people's trust.
Helga knocked on the turret door quietly and left a wrapped bowl of stew and a note folded on top. Her handwriting was soft. You're not the only one who gets hurt. Don't be lonely for that. That was Helga: gentle, steady, impossible to bristle against. I didn't open the door.
Night came and the castle settled into a brittle silence. I lay awake and thought of Rowena's voice, of how it had sounded when she said sister. How that one small word could be both balm and blade.
I am sixteen. I have raised walls and sentient staircases and students. I have the power to blow Godric through three walls and the childishness to do so. I have to learn to be better than my worst reactions. I have to learn to take humiliation without breaking things. I have to learn to be the leader this place deserves.
Anger still thrummed under my skin like an electric insect. But somewhere beneath it there was a colder emotion anchoring itself: a resolve that hummed with the same frequency as my magic. I would not let this define me. I would not let my shame become an excuse to destroy what I love.
For now, though, the castle bore the evidence of my temper. The children whispered. The founders kept their distance. And I sat alone in a turret window counting the stars and promising myself, quietly and fiercely, that when I came down I would try to fix what I had broken — both in stone and in people.
But first, I would sleep. Tomorrow I would face them all. Tomorrow I would accept whatever came — scorn, scolding, or forgiveness earned on the hard road.
Tonight I only listened to the wind and the fragile, guilty beating of my own heart.