I was standing in an empty field of clean snow. No mountains, no buildings, no people as far as I could see. Nothing but nearly black clouds above me. The ground shook. Curse green lightning crackled overhead. Cracks appeared around my feet that glowed, the snow beneath me fell and took me with it.

I startled awake with something warm and wet on my face.

Still groggy I wiped at my face and saw streaks of red and green on my hands.

Oh crap.

I stumbled out of bed to find the ComMirror. My nose was bleeding and the curse mark was leaking.

Gross.

What a terrible start to my Saturday.

I hurried down the stairs and to the lower floor to the bathroom.

The water was a gross muddy brown as I washed my face and hands. My eyes flickered pink in the mirror.

My wrist felt like it was bruised.

I really shouldn't have pushed my magic so far yesterday. But it was worth it.

Things can work if my eyes glow. At least the runes did. That had to be a good sign, right?

I looked up to see my eyes that were somehow both green and yellow at the same time looking back at me. The pink had faded. For now.

I poked at the curse mark, the skin was tender and ached at the spot where the scars stopped and the mark began. The area beneath my eyes started to itch.

I exited the bathroom with a heavy sigh.

I trudged back up the stairs to the main room and sat down on the large window sill and leaned against the stained glass. My legs were straight against the cushions as I looked out over the field and trees.

One more week done. One step closer.

I can handle this.

(*********)

My first clue that something was up was a brief headache that lasted for only a few seconds before an envelope appeared in the air above me and nearly landed on my face.

I caught it and saw Vivian Hearth's signature on the outside.

There was a note and a map.

Please meet me at the temple of Athena at your earliest convenience.

Probably what the map was for.

My grandmother must have learned from her last attempt to give me a map because this one actually brought me to my intended location. Nestled behind a door near Banshee Tower was a medium sized temple room with a few rows of benches and a statue of Athena with a large stone offering bowl at her feet.

Vivian was placing what looked like bones in it.

She turned around to face me.

"Good morning Serafina."

"Good morning."

"Your eyes seem to have gone back to normal."

"For now. They might still flicker here and there for the next couple of days. Everything I know so far tells me the worst has passed."

"Good. But I'd rather not tempt the Fates to cause mischief. We won't be prodding at the curse today."

"That's probably a good call. The curse was leaking green stuff this morning."

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Vivian Hearth's look of worry was oddly touching in a way I wasn't sure how I felt about.

I shrugged, "It's not doing it now."

Her expression didn't change.

I rubbed at it. The red and black gloves of Dragon Tower thankfully were more than enough to hide the curse.

Her eyes narrowed on the motion.

"I'm worried." She announced it flatly. I hope she wasn't expecting that to be a surprise. It was a fairly worrying thing. "I've been rethinking our approach."

"But we are still planning to break it or remove it, right?" I pressed. If she invited me here to tell me that I was going to be stuck with this thing forever… I didn't care that she was my estranged grandmother. I wasn't living like this for the rest of my life.

"It's been getting worse, hasn't it?" She asked without answering my question.

She had a terrible habit of doing that.

"It has."

"And it's only a matter of time before the inability to cast will be more than a minor inconvenience. You may not have noticed it amongst humans, but I'm sure you are now."

"I want this thing gone." I both confirmed and tried to make it clear I wasn't going to be okay with any other option.

"I know." She said it with a fond looking smile. "I'm worried that attempting to brute force it from the inside might have more consequences than I initially expected."

She turned back to the offerings bowl and snapped her fingers. Purple flames appeared and burned bright. And not a hint of purple anywhere else. Certainly not in those green eyes.

"Do you know what makes eyes glow?" She asked as she sat down on one of the benches and patted the space next to her.

"Mana flowing through veins in the eyes."

She nodded. "Despite the name, mana veins aren't quite like blood veins. Mana isn't supposed to flow to the eyes unless either specifically channeled there or unless the body is overflowing with it. And yet…" She drifted off and she turned to face me and her eyes locked with mine.

I looked away.

She sighed, "We can't examine your veins directly. Not without risking backlash from the curse."

"Didn't Sealie check my mana veins before?" I asked. I vaguely remembered her giving me a lecture about them being completely empty at some point.

"A shallow test. It's designed to check if there's any warning signs, that spell was never designed to study real problems. And certainly not built for dealing with a curse."

"You think the glowing eyes are a symptom of a larger issue, besides the curse itself."

"I'm saying we have no way of ruling out the possibility. Not safely anyway. I understand that you want the curse gone. And the gods know that there's no one more eager to scrub that man out of our history than me. But I won't put your safety at risk."

"Then what's the plan?"

She looked back to the statue of Athena. The aegis on her head painted red and gold, the spear had a matching gold blade and red on the grip. She wore gold armor with white robes underneath.

I supposed if any of the gods could help us with figuring out a plan here…

"We need to know more about the curse," Vivian said.

A terrible thought entered my head at that moment. One I had no idea how to voice. What about going to the source of this curse? Dearil Merripen put it there, he had to know how it worked.

There's no way she hadn't considered that, right?

And if he's deranged enough to put a generational curse on his own daughter when she was two, would he even help?

What if telling him he had a granddaughter with a human father caused him to do something?

Sure, he was supposedly in some prison, but who could guarantee he couldn't break out of it?

And he's attacked The Towers of Nine before. Successfully.

"Your eyes are turning pink. I doubt that's a good sign."

"It gets worse the more worked up I get." At least, that's what the evidence so far suggested.

She nodded. At least this was making sense to someone. "Anything that makes your body prepare to retreat or stand your ground is going to affect your mana production."

"And in turn the curse and my mana veins."

"Precisely."

I couldn't be sure if Mom had ever gone over the finer points of how mana flowed through the body with me or if I simply hadn't absorbed it then. Why would I have? I had thought it wouldn't matter until that first day when I got locked in Dragon Tower.

"It feels like we're going in circles." I stared at the flames while I spoke.

There was an unpleasant but nostalgic smell lingering in the air.

It reminded me of summer nights and barbeques where rib bones got thrown into the firepit.

"I know. But we have to look at this from all the angles. I'm sure we're missing something."

"Why curse me?" I pondered out loud. "I mean…he had no guarantee that Mom would ever have a kid. Why go to the trouble of using a curse that would skip her and only affect her offspring?"

She shook her head, "I wish I knew. And I can't ask. I won't risk him knowing you exist."

"Plus even if you did, would he even tell you anything useful?"

"I think if he cared about protecting Lucinda and her line half as much as he claimed he wouldn't have cursed her nor would he have tried to use behavior-controlling spells."

"You lived with him when he did this. Any chance he may have taken notes or left research or something somewhere?"

There was a hint of pride in her smile and that was definitely an expression I've seen Mom make.

It was almost uncanny how much they were alike at moments.

"The Merripen coven has worked with curses for a very long time. Most of their research is public. I've been sifting through it with your mother's help."

"You and Mom have been talking?" I asked.

"Some. Far more often than we have in nearly seventeen years. It's not perfect. But at the end of the day, you're her daughter and she's more than enough like me to be stubborn as a unicorn when there's something she wants."

I laughed. "Good, because she's going to be here in November and I don't want things to be too awkward."

The fact that she went from mostly relaxed to suddenly nervous did not fill me with confidence that I was going to get what I wanted.

Ah well.

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