To ruin an Omega novel Chapter 326

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. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

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.

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