A dark and glittering power lay hidden in the Tower, something feral and savage, something that devoured your heart once it laid its corrupting stench upon you.

There had to be some dark and corrosive power, I lied to myself, because how else could I explain away the icy disdain carved into Aiden’s face? His familiar warmth had chilled, turning his eyes into steely, predatory pinpricks. Revulsion curled his lips into a bloodless sneer, and everything felt wrong—so wrong—as if I were trying to breathe underwater.

I pushed down my anxieties, swallowing hard at the lump in my throat as I plastered on a wavering smile.

“Aiden,” I said, softly. “It’s been so long. I’ve missed seeing your face.” I still did. I missed the Aiden that easily smiled at me, not this stranger that looked at me as if I were a slug trailing slime across his shoe.

We stood in the shadow of that accursed Tower, my fiancé and I. I was a speck of dust next to the Tower’s soaring, indifferent presence. It thrust from the earth, a dreadful spire as imposing and piercing as a pillar of ice. Long ago, untamed and ancient powers had carved it into being from bone-white stone. A watchful, alien intelligence lurked behind its stone façade, as if were embedded with thousands of oppressive eyes; and each of those eyes was now crawling over me, breathing in the essence of me, worming through every word I spoke.

The surprised delight of this morning’s breakthrough had me scampering to see Aiden. Raw excitement powered my steps as I ran to the Tower without a thought, paying little heed to my appearance—which, I realized ruefully, had been a mistake. Aiden, clad in his well-appointed mage’s cloak, was clearly embarrassed by my bedraggled, haphazard state. Beads of sweat dampened my brow, and an unsophisticated dress clung to my skin, sticky with perspiration.

My hand brushed in vain at the more unwieldy strands of my hair, accidentally ensnaring my engagement ring in the process. I had not taken it off it during the five years that had passed since Aiden had given it to me. The simple ring was his first major working, wrapped up in layers of protection magic to keep me safe.

On the day he entered the Tower, he held my hands gently within his own and cried at the thought of our separation. “Please, wait for me,” he pleaded, kissing each of my fingers as tears dripped off his freckled nose. “The first thing I am going to do after joining the Magority is marry you. Just wait for me.”

What a difference from today.

“Why have you come?” he said, his voice oozing with contempt.

I eyed the Tower apprehensively. “Can we go somewhere else to talk?” I asked. Somewhere where its prying eyes wouldn’t see us.

“No,” he said flatly. “I’m busy.”

I flinched. “I’m sorry for not making an appointment, but this is important. I’ll come back later—”

He sighed, pushing the air out his lungs with a frosty huff. “And I’m sure I will be even busier later. Just tell me whatever it is now and be quick about it.”

As he spoke, I sneakily glanced over his body, reading his mana root, hoping to find some wayward spell or aberrant mana residue that would explain his current attitude. But, no matter how carefully I looked, there was nothing. No enchantment. No ensorcelling. Just Aiden, looking increasingly put-upon. I wondered whether I done something to upset him. While the distance had grown between us these past few months, he had never been this outwardly hostile before.

“Have I done something wrong?” I finally asked.

Aiden’s eyes narrowed in frustration. He pinched the bridge of his nose and grunted. “Did you come here to waste my time? Do you think my work is a game? I realize you have limited comprehension of the great workings that we attend to each and every hour, day after day, all to keep your kind safe . . . but, regardless, you should know I don’t have time to stand here chatting. Please leave.”

I recoiled at the sharp sting in his words. His dismissal stamped out the exhilaration that had sent me racing to find him in the first place.

I was proud of Aiden when we discovered he had a mana root worthy of the Tower—but it had never made me feel any less of myself that my own stunted root marked me as a non-mage. And I certainly wasn’t about to feel inadequate now. Not with my breakthrough. Yeah, fine, maybe I didn’t know what was going on in the Tower because Aiden never would tell me, but he didn’t know what I had been up to, either. At least I had been trying to keep Aiden a part of my life.

I was tired, then. I didn’t want this stranger. I wanted Aiden, my Aiden, but I was starting to suspect that person only lived in my memories. Aiden had entered the Tower. And he had been devoured. Whoever had emerged was so entirely transformed that I struggled to find even a ghost of his former self.

Why bother with this anymore? The traitorous thought bubbled to the forefront of my mind. I had known Aiden for nearly twenty years and suddenly those twenty years were crumbling to ash.

“Do you even love me?” I asked.

His dark eyes glinted like poisonous beetles.

Before he could answer, a sickeningly sweet laugh flitted through the air, pouring into our ears like thick syrup. I shuddered.

“Aiden, my love, who is this?” a simpering voice cooed.

I ignored the interloper, but it didn’t stop her from gleefully wafting towards us. She was a vision, as if one of the ancient powers had deigned to descend upon the earth once more—as she should be, with so many enchantments dripping from her face and hammered into the flowing fabric of her robes. Begrudgingly, I was forced to accept her talent as an enchantress. I wondered if she realized, though, that she was ruining herself with some of the harder-hitting spells coating her body. Their cheap magics were causing her mana to go all pimply and boil-like lesions marred the tips of her mana root, raw and angry. It would start impacting her spellcasting soon, if it hadn’t already.

It took her half a second to judge the situation between us. Her eyes hovered a moment too long on my engagement ring, but for some reason the sight of it caused her to erupt into peals of laughter reminiscent of the tinkling of bells. “Too cruel,” she gasped between giggles. “Aiden, my love, this is the most hilarious thing I’ve seen in years.”

Aiden remained silently standing at her side, looking at nowhere in particular, his face a neutral mask.

“Your manners leave something to be desired though,” she said, thrusting a quick finger at me before I had a moment to react. “You should properly greet your betters.”

I felt my back curling under the weight of unseen hands until I was nearly supine and groveling at her feet.

“All is forgiven,” she cooed as I remained kowtowing before her. She tapped my chin with a slippered foot. “I suppose you can hardly help it, being a fish and all.”

I winced, hardly expecting such a dirty word to slide its way from between such beautiful lips. “Fish” is a rather insulting term for people like me—the non-magics living in a magical world, like fish out of water.

The taunt fell flat at my feet, like it always did. That was the rub of it, the joke of our kingdom. We were meant to be equals, but what could we—us fish—do when one of mages of the Magority attacked us? Nothing. We were fish in a barrel, waiting targets. They could kick us, enspell us, curse us and . . . and nothing. We had to take it. If we complained, they could addle our brains, destroy us from within before we even knew what had happened.

The Crown, of course, had outlawed any non-consensual spell casting; yet the Crown itself also had its neck laid bare under the foot of the Tower. The threat of Ilyria loomed ever-present, and the warrior mages provided by the Tower were the nation’s first line of defense. Heaven forbid the Crown tried to clamp down too hard and our mages left to join our enemies’ forces. So we lavished upon the Magority, pampered and appeased them like ungodly lapdogs, and willingly allowed ourselves to be trampled into the dirt. Meanwhile, the Tower turned a blind eye to the casual misuse of magic against those too weak to defend themselves.

“Aiden, you’ve been too kind,” the syrupy-sweet voice slithered through the air. “You can’t keep these fish close to you. You’ll be seen as a fool. Allow me to handle it.”

I was still held prone by an invisible force. I couldn’t see Aiden’s response, but he must have nodded because a moment later, that golden laughter was once more tittering throughout the air.

Cruel fingers of magic pushed at my body, pulling me upright. A bead of mana pooled at her fingertips.

Trapped, I thought.

A fish on a hook with nowhere to flee.

The Tower, Aiden, this would-be psychopath. I was being pressed down into nothing between them. A dry leaf tossed about in a tempest’s wind. Even though we were outside, it felt as if there were not enough space for me—just another nameless casualty about to get wiped off the page, an extra in my own life.

I stifled down a cackle.

Yeah, right.

I’m Sophia Lombardi, I thought.

I’m the main character.

As if I would let this ridiculous, fluttering, simpering mess of silks and fabrics playing at being a grand enchantress take me out.

I was about to eat this witch alive.

The Tower wanted a monopoly on magics? Wanted to churn out loser magician after loser magician too drunk on power to care about this world and the people living on it? Fine, let them have their magics.

While they could.

This was my secret. This was what I had raced to tell Aiden.

The second a spell left a mage’s finger, I could do something no other mage, living or dead, could do: I could hijack that spell and hold it hostage. And I could pop it like a bubble.

It didn’t matter which spell. It didn’t matter who cast it. It didn’t matter with what intention or for what purpose. So long as a spell existed, I could render it as inert and common as a piece of dirt, as flaccid as a limp noodle.

“Snap your own neck,” she commanded. She chucked a spell of compulsion at me.

I pushed the merest sliver of my mana at the acid-green glob of a spell—clearly, compulsions were not her forte, because this diseased-looking lump was not what a compulsion should look like—and the evil-intentioned spell popped like an exploding frog. Even the suddenly stoic Aiden had to respond, flinging a sleeved wrist up to protect against the stinking globules of mana residue that splattered against the pair.

Embarrassment flamed her supernaturally beautiful face, the splendor of her visage diminished, somewhat, by the reeking chunks of failed mana slowly bleaching her left eyebrow white.

She flung another deadly spell at me.

I countered, breathing quickly through my nose. I jabbed at the spell with the finest needle of mana. It squelched as it exploded, eerily whining as it died.

“This isn’t . . . I don’t . . .” she said in confusion, before rapidly firing off another set of equally fatal spells.

I popped them as easily as bursting bubbles in the sink.

The scent of caustic magical residue polluted the air. It prickled at my skin uncomfortably, the way the sky must feel just before lightning struck.

“Kinah, stop!” Aiden finally said. “Your mana root is clearly out of balance!” His pristine robe was now dotted with constellations of sludge from the exploding spells. His sleeve took the brunt of it. It looked as though he had been vomited on.

“Don’t shout at me!” The enchantress sobbed, fat tears leaking down her cheeks as if she were the victim in this situation. Her mouth hung open, eyes wild and bulging.

Who’s the fish out of water now? The thought purred in my mind.

“Well, this has been fun,” I said. “But I’m going to go now as it wasn’t in my plans to be insulted, burned, squished, or exploded to death today.”

Aiden still stared at me with those hateful eyes, the shadow of the Tower lurking within them, even though he, Mr. Mighty Mage himself, was the one covered in the equivalent of magical dung—the burnt excrement of his companion’s botched spell casting.

How did you end a two-decade-long friendship? I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have thought it was being blasted to death, but the attempt and Aiden’s wholehearted failure to stop his psychotic friend until after her seventh try to kill me—and only then because his clothes were getting dirty—clearly sent a message.

I pushed two unsteady breaths out of my lungs.

Okay. Fine. Message received. I sure as hell wasn’t about to waste any more time fighting for the waste of space known as Aiden Hirst.

“What a disappointment you’ve turned out to be,” I told Aiden.

And from Aiden—nothing. Not even a sign of recognition that he had heard a word I said. Kinah just stupidly sobbed, moaning between breaths, “don’t shout at me!” as if she were under attack.

Time for me to leave. I didn’t spare Aiden another glance.

A dark and glittering power might have lain hidden in the Tower, but something equally dark and glittering lay within me.

And I was tired of hiding.