The three witches pushed their luggage carts up the pathway away from the docks and passed the Big House. The name denoted the main white mansion that served as the main building for all events and classes.

It had once been the home of the Anouir clan, the family of powerful witches who had given the school its name. They were said to be master enchanters and artificers, capable of creating legendary magical artifacts that had appeared all throughout Verana's history. When the last remaining witch of the Anouir family had sworn off having children, he'd created the school out of what remained of his family home.

Next were the labyrinthine gardens, starting by the grandiose back porch and stretching out in several directions with the perfectly-trimmed tall green hedges blooming with red and white roses. Students often explored the features hidden within the gardens like fountains and statues donated by alumni. Or they would sit outside on a nice day in some quiet corner of the gardens and do homework or nothing at all.

Solene supposed today could have been such a day, if it weren't for the problem of carrying the luggage by.

Once the little coven made their way through the gardens, they found themselves on the path to the Coven Drive. A cul-de-sac of white stone marked the area, with the houses done up in slightly less elaborate or extravagant iterations of the Big House's style. What differentiated them was mainly in the colors and decorations, each marking the different heraldry of the covens.

The majority of these covens weren't unique to the Anouir Institute. These were massive organizations, spread all across the world of Verana.

Evenstar was among most distinctive, with their deep indigo blue trimmed with black and the celestial motifs that hung in the windows. As the preferred coven for those interested in the science of Divination, there were telescopes mounted to the railings with desks that could be folded down next to them if one needed to make an urgent star chart.

There was the Hawthorne Coven, one of the oldest organizations. Reserved for Healers, they were also less flashy, but neat. It was much quieter with the red roof and trim over a white house. One could even imagine this place at some point being a doctor's office.

Then there was Hollyoaks in their green and brown, a coven that Solene at one time had considered joining. Like Hawthorne, they predominantly produced Healers— but they also had alumni that turned to other forms of magic to do with the Circle of Earth.

As a witch with a strong affinity for the element, Solene certainly qualified.

Beyond that were other covens like the Arcane Spiral with their signature teal and green, but their little coven came to a stop.

For next door to Hollyoaks was Chevalier, the coven that both of Solene's parents had pledged themselves to. It was much plainer, in shades of gray reminiscent of the castles like the one in Gardenia Renoux, the kitsune neighborhood. They made up for it in the royal blue and gold heraldry banners that they draped across the railings, pinned beside the door and hung in every window. It was supposed to call back to an era of chivalry, when warriors like Durendal protected early Veranans from the magical threats of their days, to the earliest days of the Covenant.

This was the Coven that all three girls had pledged themselves to in their time at the Anouir Institute. It was where they had become more than acquaintances, shared names and faces in classrooms, and rather had become truly friends.

...

Cassius Quirk, the newly-elected Coven Presiding Officer, was waiting for all incoming students in the foyer with the list of room assignments and conjured the keys for each of them.

"Good to see all of you." He bobbed his head as Willa, Roxana, and Solene entered. "You also arrived early, excellent, punctuality is a virtue, you know."

He paused—the motion of bobbing his head nearly caused his thick dark blue glasses to fall off of his pointed nose. He then removed his wand from the pocket of his blazer. With a wave and a scattering of light like pale pearlescent bubbles, three keys with the number 409 wrought into the handles appeared in the palm of his open hand.

Quirk then offered them to the witches. "There you go, ladies. Please let me know if anything is not up to standard. And feel free to come downstairs to the parlor once you are done unpacking—well, in a few hours or so."

He glanced over his shoulder, at the open door leading into the parlor. Through it, Solene could see the other junior RAs scurrying about.

"We're not quite ready yet, we hadn't expected quite so many students to show up so early in the day," Quirk admitted with a tight smile. "But, we should have it all ready in an hour or two."

"We'll keep that in mind." Solene pocketed her key, and passed Willa's to her.

"Yes, thank you, Cassius," Roxana added sweetly.

That made Quirk puff up his chest a little bit. "Let me know if either of you have any issues."

"Of course." Roxana turned to Solene and Willa. "Let's get these all up to the fourth floor, then."

A levitation spell made such work easy, and they'd left their carts at the spot Quirk had designated for it, so they could be returned to the station by the boathouse. With one trip, they ascended the spiral staircase in the tower that housed the foyer to the fourth floor, where their room waited for them.

This of course was the main perk of being in a Coven like Chevalier—getting to live in the house, in a bigger room with a roommate or two that you actually liked. It was a quick business of getting unpacked, and Solene was faster than her roommates at that respect, if for that Roxana had brought many more clothes and creature comforts, and Willa so many books. Chief among them being ornately-illustrated tomes of fairytales.

Solene had decided to get out their hair while she decided where to put her favorite rugs and how to hang her cardigans, but she didn't want to go downstairs to whatever hellish social event Quirk had set up.

Instead, she slipped out one of the back doors to the Chevalier House with Princess Rosa of the Eventide Realm and wandered through the gardens, to one of the old sites of the original house.

...

She liked to sit atop the stone stairs that were unique to this particular ruin, and overlook the open ocean and the glimmering lights of Ventura Sound beyond the scarlet arches of the Dragonsgate Bridge.

There were a great many ruins like this upon the island on which the Anouir Institute was built. When the Anouir family still lived here, the island was prone to an uncanny number of hurricanes, which often resulted in the destruction of their houses. Some said that the hurricanes were evident of a curse or some other malediction that had been cast on the House of Anouir.

Still others determined it a mere coincidence, a freak of nature—never mind that the Anouir Institute never saw another hurricane after the Anouirs died off.

The ruins themselves had been left on the island as a sort of recreational area. A place to explore, to practice one's magic without damage to each other or the actual property in use—and perhaps as a stark reminder of what came before.

There was a sort of comfort to sitting in one of the old Anouir dwellings, a sense of resonance and familiarity. It only made sense—in another world, perhaps Solene herself would have lived there. She was, after all, an Anouir through her mother's Danaan lineage.

Solene had remembered when her mother had first told her of their connection to the school.

"But Danaan is an elvish name," she'd protested.

"It is, but one of the Anouir witches married an elvish prince," Luna had explained. "So because the name of the more magical family passes down and the elves are by their very nature more tied to the magic of this world than anyone else—"

"We took their name," Solene had finished. "But then why is my last name Frey? Dad's family—they're all mortals, aren't they? Ordinary humans?"

"They are," Luna had continued in her soft, even way. "But I wanted you to be a Frey, not a Danaan, even if that's not the way things are done."

"But why?"

Solene would never forget how her mother froze, how uncertainty crossed her face, how her voice dropped to a whisper.

"Because sometimes, I think the name is cursed. And you, my sun and moon, are going to break all the curses."

Solene never quite knew what her mother had meant by that—not until Soleil had told her the truth of the family curse. But it was only when she saw the ruins on the island of the Anouir Institute that she understood exactly what her mother had meant.

Except she was wrong about one thing, Solene had determined—the curse stretched back earlier than the Danaans.

The magic of Verana was inherently karmic. Every schoolchild, witch or not, knew of the Rule of Three. Magic cast would come back threefold—if not always in overt ways or in a manner that was expected. That was supposedly why there were more storms nowadays, why sometimes smog rolled through the streets like water.

It was the lashing out of the Mage Wars, before her parents' time, all accumulating and creating an apocalypse, an incoming disaster that was the consequences of their ancestors' actions.

Although Solene wasn't so sure that there was truly karma to that. But who was she to argue with leading scholarship and theory? She heard it often enough, when Horus Beltane or Miranda Barringer or any of her mother's other high-ranking friends came around.

But the point was, with the hurricanes, it was easy enough to see. The Anouir family, for all their legend as great magicians and artificers, could not have been creating artifacts with purely benevolent effects.

No, between that and the last one swearing to never have children and create the school in its stead, Solene could see that the Anouirs were cursed for their own acts of dark magic.

Maybe, like the apocalypse, that was the curse of the Danaans. Just a snowball rolling down the hill—and hitting those who had nothing to do with its creation.

But then again, the curse on the Anouir Island had clearly lost its power. There were no ghosts, no sense of unease hanging about the ruins. Rather, there was peace— the kind that made it easy to lose oneself in a book. And so that was exactly what Solene did.

Solene wasn't sure how much time had passed when she finally looked up from her book and saw the setting sun. She scrambled to her feet with a start—dinner was about to start!

Indeed, from here she could squint and see the trail of students feeding into the Big House.

She stowed her book into one of the pockets of her skirt, which she'd enchanted to seem outwardly smaller than it actually was by weight and appearance. It wasn't so dramatic as what master artificers might create, with entire worlds inside of knapsacks and purses, but it at least meant she could stow away a book in the pocket of her skirt without it being quite so obvious.

That was the problem with some witches like the ancient Anouirs, Solene decided as she descended the stone steps of their old house. They had to create such great things, such grandiose works of magical hubris—all while forgetting and forsaking the practical magics.

It really was such a shame, she decided.