To ruin an Omega - Chapter 326: As above, so below 1

Chapter 326: As above, so below 1

MADELINE

Sunlight fell through the tall stained glass windows, the kind that stretched from floor to ceiling and caught dust motes like they were something precious. The training hall smelled of cedar and cold stone and faintly of something burnt, the residue of a hundred spells gone wrong by students who were not me.

I was eight years old and standing barefoot on a practice circle chalked into the wooden floor.

My grandmother sat in a high-backed chair at the far end of the room with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, watching me the way she watched everything. Like she already knew how it would end. Like she was just waiting for the world to catch up to what she had already decided.

The other children were struggling.

I watched them from the corner of my eye. Bren had been trying to pull a flame for the better part of ten minutes and the most he had managed was a spark that died before it finished being born. The girl beside him, whose name I always seemed to forget, was weeping quietly because her water bowl had not so much as rippled. They were working one element at a time, the way the instructor had told us to.

Simple, slow and careful.

But that wasn’t me.

I had already done fire.

I had already done water.

They were sitting in my palms, both of them at once, and something inside me understood without being told what they wanted to become together.

I brought my hands toward each other slowly. The flame touched the water and I felt the reaction before I saw it. There was a loud hiss. Then a bloom of white that rose toward the ceiling in a soft, rolling column. Steam.

Clean, as it was real and most especially , it was mine.

The room went quiet.

Then my grandmother stood up.

She crossed the floor in long, unhurried strides and when she reached me, she did not speak right away. She looked at what my hands had made, the last wisps of it still curling in the air between us, and then she looked at my face. Something in her expression shifted.

My young self had half expected surprise. But she was not surprised. Not even a little bit. This looked more like satisfaction. The particular satisfaction of a woman who had already placed her bet and was watching the horse come in.

She pulled me into her arms without warning.

She smelled like rose water, cedar and something older underneath, something that lived in the wood of our house. I pressed my face against the stiff fabric of her dress and felt her hand cup the back of my head.

“You,” she said, “are going to be a great Blossom woman.”

I pulled back enough to look up at her. “Really?”

She nodded. Not the perfunctory nod of someone being kind. This was a slow, deliberate nod of someone stating fact.

“Of course,” she said. “The Blossom women have always run things. And when you grow up, you will be one of those women.”

I turned to look at the wall behind the instructor’s chair. It was lined with portraits, the way all the important walls in Primrose were lined with portraits, a long row of faces looking down at the room with the particular gravity of people who had been painted at their best. Supremes. All of them Supremes, going back generations, the gold plaques beneath each frame catching the light.

Thing was… They were all men.

Every one. Going back as far as I could see. And there at the end, the most recent, the largest frame, hung my father’s face.

I stared at it for a long moment.

My grandmother followed my sight. I felt the slight shift in her posture before she spoke.

“Ah,” she said.

That single sound held a whole conversation in it.

“Primrose hasn’t had a female Supreme,” I said.

“No,” she agreed. “It hasn’t. Yet.”

I kept looking at my father’s portrait. He was painted in formal robes with his chin lifted and his expression arranged into something meant to communicate certainty. He looked like a man who had never doubted himself for a single day of his life.

“But it could be you,” my grandmother said. Her voice was quiet and absolutely certain. “I know it can be you.”

I looked back at her. “Why? I’m sure there are better witches and there will be better witches.”

“Because you are filial,” she said. “Filial to your family. Filial to your house and your coven.” She reached out and tucked a strand of hair back from my face. “And you have impressive mana for a child your age. Those two things together.” She paused. “That is what makes a Supreme. Not just power. The willingness to use it for something larger than yourself.” Her eyes held mine. “As long as you never change. As long as you are always willing to do what is necessary for your family, for the Blossom house, for this coven. That devotion, Madeline, that is the thing that will make you great.”

I thought about the steam still fading in the air above us. I thought about the way it had felt, bringing those two forces together, the way everything in me had understood instinctively what they wanted to become.

I smiled.

And I hugged her back.

***

I woke up crying.

Not the soft kind. The kind that was already halfway through before I was fully conscious, the kind that came from somewhere deep and animal and had nothing to do with choice. My chest was heaving and my face was wet and for a moment I did not know where I was or why the memory had broken the way it did, tender and bright at the edges before it just went poof.

Then I felt the ropes.

They bit into my forearms, rough and tight, wound in overlapping coils that dug into the skin every time I breathed. My wrists were bound behind me, the angle awkward and aching. I was sitting upright in a chair and when I tried to move, the chair did not shift. It was fixed to something beneath me.

The room was dark.

Not dim. This was pitch black. Maybe even worse. Because my eyes kept reaching for something to settle on and yet it found nothing. I waited, letting my vision adjust, blinking slowly against the blackness.

Rocky walls. That was the first thing I noticed. Then a ceiling I could barely make out, high and uneven. Even that looked like more rock. The floor beneath the chair legs was stone. The air was cold and tasted like soil, deep and old and untouched by any window.

Cobwebs hung thick in every direction I could half-see, dense ropes of them curtaining the walls, draping from the ceiling in long grey sheets. Not the light abandoned cobwebs of empty rooms. The heavy kind. The kind that meant nothing living had moved through here in a very long time.

It felt like a cave. It smelled like the underneath of the earth.

I pulled a breath in through my nose and tried to think.

Fire. I needed light. A small flame, just enough to see by, nothing complicated. I pulled toward that part of myself where my mana lived, the steady reservoir I had been filling since I was eight years old standing barefoot on that chalked circle.

It ignited.

And then my entire body ignited with it.

The pain hit me from the inside out, searing through every nerve from my hands to my spine to the back of my skull, and the scream that tore out of me was not something I chose to make.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!”