And afterward?
Afterward, I slipped away.
Up stairwells that whispered secrets.
Through corridors that shifted just slightly when I wasn’t paying attention.
To his rooftop sanctuary where the wind howled like something ancient mourning the world below.
That was where I belonged.
With him.
My roommates teased me about it endlessly.
But I didn’t mind.
Ursula, Sapphire, Emery—they were good people.
Good Witches.
And in a place like the Asgarheim Runevald Institute, where Monsters and magic coexisted in uneasy balance, that mattered more than I ever thought it would.
Thank God for Ursula.
Seriously.
If it weren’t for her, Professor Calderwood, the potions master, would have kicked me out already.
I kinda sorta wasn’t paying attention during his class. Or the Herbology one after.
Okay, I wasn’t paying attention at all.
We were cultivating night-blooming roots—rare, sensitive, magically reactive—and I clipped the damn thing straight to the root like a complete idiot.
Oops.
The plant shrieked.
Yes.
Shrieked.
Ursula dove in, muttering under her breath, hands glowing faintly green as she worked to salvage it.
I just stood there, holding the shears like a criminal caught mid-act.
Because I hadn’t been thinking about plants.
I’d been thinking about Raven.
About the way he looked at me.
The way he said Unnasta Minn like it meant something deeper than just a word.
I finally looked it up for myself.
Old Norse.