HOLLOWMERE – Ivy Blackwood

She could identify her mother’s contributions now; they had a specific quality, a density that was slightly different from the others, the magical equivalent of a distinct handwriting style. She followed it. It intensified as she moved deeper into the east-lower corridor, gathering toward the door. The West Wing entrance was as she’d left it — iron-banded oak in a stone arch, sealed with ward-work so dense it felt almost physical. Like pressure in the air before you reached the door itself. She stopped six feet away and looked at it in the afternoon light filtering through the corridor’s narrow windows.

The glow was different in daylight. Subtler, less obvious without the surrounding dark. But still there — still the low, resonant reaction of the seal to her presence, her mother’s magic recognising the bloodline and responding. You came back, it said, in the way it said things, which was not language but frequency. Not words but the specific quality of meaning conveyed in the bones rather than the ears. She took one step closer.

The glow brightened. Not dramatically — fractionally. But present. Responsive. She took another step. Four feet from the door now, and the resonance between her own magic and the seal had intensified to the point where she could feel it as a sensation in her chest — not the bond, which had its own distinct character, but something adjacent to the bond. The seal had been built on a ward bond. Her mother had built it with the ward bond’s completion as the mechanism. The seal and the bond were, at some deep level, part of the same structure.

She reached out and placed her hand on the door. The effect was immediate and comprehensive. The ward-work under her palm lit — not the subtle glow from a distance but a full activation, her mother’s magic and her own meeting at the point of contact and resonating with the combined force of two things calibrated for each other finally occupying the same space.

She felt it run from the door through her hand and up her arm and into the centre of her chest where her own magic lived, and her Sealing power responded with the instinctive recognition of a person who has just been handed something that belongs to them. The door knew her.

Completely. Down to the frequency of her bloodline, down to the specific quality of her Mercer magic and the four-anchor bond and every element of what she was. The warmth of it was extraordinary.

The wards had been screaming for six hours. Not loudly—nothing so crude as sound. The academy’s ancient wards did not speak, not in any language a person could transcribe or quote at dinner. They pressed, like the sensation of a room holding its breath, like pressure behind the eyes that refused to become a headache. Cassian Aldric had grown up inside these walls, had learned to read the academy’s moods the way other men learned to read weather.

He knew the difference between the low hum of wards cycling through their nightly maintenance and the sharp, intent awareness radiating through the stone floors of the East Spire right now. Something was coming. Someone. He stood at the tall window overlooking the valley approach, his back deliberately to the room and the three other men in it. Below, Hollowmere’s grounds stretched in the last copper light of late afternoon—formal gardens gone slightly wild at the edges, the old yew hedges that lined the drive grown so tall they arched overhead like a tunnel, green and ancient and utterly still in the windless evening.

Beyond them, the river. Beyond the river, the narrow stone bridge. No car had crossed it yet. But it would. “You’re doing that thing,” Theo said from behind him, “where you stand very still and pretend to be a gargoyle.” “I’m not pretending.” “The brooding. The window. The very deliberate not-turning-around.” A pause and the soft sound of Theo setting down a glass.

“She’s not here yet.” “I’m aware of that.” “You’ve been standing there for—” “Theo.” Silence. Cassian appreciated that Theo, for all his endless commentary on everything else in existence, understood when a single word was enough. It was one of the few things he consistently appreciated about him. The room behind him was the Spire’s private study, a space technically belonging to no house and therefore claimed by all four of them since their third year—by unspoken agreement, the way most things between the four of them worked.

High ceilings, exposed stone, the kind of chill that no amount of firelight fully solved. Books stacked horizontally across shelves that had run out of vertical room decades ago. A long table with four distinct zones of occupation, each recognizable if you knew them: Lucian’s side was meticulous, papers squared, ink in a specific position, nothing placed without intention; Theo’s was architectural disorder that somehow produced results; Beckett’s had nothing on it except a single closed notebook; Cassian’s own was stacked with correspondence he had been dealing with for the last three months, most of it relating to a scholarship committee, most of it shredded after reading.

A good room for thinking. A poor room for the conversation they were about to have.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 29d666a19210de4f
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,364,962 bytes (2.255 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 200
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 312.06 minutes
• Total Words: 62,413
• Total Characters: 358,353
• Average Words per Page: 312.06
• Average Characters per Page: 1791.77

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