Jane awoke to wrongness.

  It wasn’t a noise that pulled her from sleep. It was the magic. The air in her room felt thick and damp, like sweat on a muggy day or water left to turn sour in a pail.

  The magic in the air wasn’t flowing in the way it should. The natural bits and pieces of power normally generated by everything in the environment had been wiped away, suppressed by a monolithic, uniform replacement that dominated the mystical landscape.

  Jane gasped and leapt out of bed, responding with her body before her mind fully caught up. Her skin prickled. The magic kept pressing in around her, giving her a sense of being chased while simultaneously making her feel claustrophobic.

  It was so powerful that she almost didn’t notice the sounds.

  Almost.

  A deep, grinding vibration filled the air outside, barely filtering through the thick walls of the bakery. When she opened the window, the full experience of that sound hit her in the chest. It was a churning, rushing thing, as if the roar of a river had been somehow given thought, and then angered.

  Which very well might be what’s happening. This has to be the dragon.

  Jane rushed to slip on a work dress and Allen’s big coat before shoving her feet into boots and running downstairs. People were starting to yell outside, confused but not truly distressed or panicked yet. Nobody sounded hurt.

  That could change, though. It could change at a moment’s notice. And Jane was almost certainly the only person who could stop it.

  She took longer than she thought she would just to open the door. Her hand was shaking. She was the most powerful person in the city, but also the only person who could feel what she was feeling.

  When Jane finally managed to wrench the door open, Bella was already charging down the street towards her. She was dressed in what looked like yesterday's clothes with a thick shawl thrown hastily over top. From the first moment, Jane knew her friend was scared. Bella’s eyes were too wide to hide that, but she at least had enough control to keep her voice steady.

  “Good. You’re awake.” Bella gripped Jane’s arm, tight. “What’s happening? Do you know?”

  Jane knew pages’ worth of explanation for what was happening. She also knew enough about people to understand that her knowledge would be far from helpful at the moment, even if someone understood it.

  She decided to keep things simple. She would be open and honest, but not include any complexity that would just make the situation worse.

  “Magic stuff. Bad magic stuff. Nothing like this has ever happened before?”

  “Absolutely not.” Bella’s eyes sparked bright as various puzzle pieces seemed to slot into place. “The river. It’s something to do with that, right? You started checking out the water, and now it’s doing that.”

  It was undeniable that the sound and feeling were both coming from the lake. Jane could feel the power creeping towards the center of the body of water, but even without her senses, she would have known from the mere direction of the noise.

  “I knew something might be wrong. But I didn’t expect anything like this.” Jane held out a hand towards the water, trying to take a closer look. “Does the water look like it’s pulling back, Bella? Like a tide that’s gone out a little?”

  “Maybe?” Bella squinted towards the shore. “Yes. See? Frank’s boat is sitting so low. What does that mean?”

  Jane winced. “Nothing good.”

  She kept her hand outstretched, thinking hard. Perhaps she might still be wrong about what was coming, but there was no moral way to take that chance. Not with so many people nearby.

  “I’m going to do something,” she told Bella. “Don’t let anyone stop me. Don’t let anyone get near.”

  There were a lot of ways to use magic, and Jane was a powerhouse at almost all of them. She possessed a great deal of personal power. She was sensitive in a way that let her be efficient. She also had multiple other advantages that were harder to put into words, but which had made the academy deeply interested in her potential when she was first tested.

  All those advantages paled in comparison to her sheer ability to learn and memorize. Jane knew thousands of spells, most of which she had never had the chance to use.

  Some of them were easier than others. When she lit an oven, it was a small expenditure of magic that went in a cooperative direction with her personal alignment to the mystical. It was almost more fun than it was taxing. She used that kind of spell often, any time she could get away with it.

  Other spells in her mental stock were much harder, either because they took so much force to perform or because they simply clashed with what Jane was on a natural level. The spell she needed to cast now was both.

  It was going to hurt.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  She put her hands on the ground, getting situated and melding to the magic of the stone and dirt. At such close range, she could hear the normal forces those objects put out over the wrong magic in the air. It was just a few seconds before she understood what she was dealing with. From there, she let her awareness spiderweb out around the city.

  The process didn’t take long. She insinuated her control through major roads that hugged the water, trying to be as efficient with her power as she could. Anyone far enough from the lake wouldn’t need to hear what she was about to say, anyway.

  Suddenly, her voice boomed from thousands of stones vibrating in sympathy with each other.

  “I am Archmage Candidate Jane.”

  She had to get the wording just right, which was difficult when her entire body was burning with fiery pain. Jane was a quiet person. Nothing about this spell agreed with her. She knew she would be days recovering from it.

  “I am the ward of the Grand Archmage known as Lady Cecelia and a student in good standing from The Academy. In the name of The King, and as a user of the kingdom’s magic, I command everyone to get away from the waters of the lake and rivers.”

  It was a little more authority than Jane actually had, but it was also the sort of order nobody in their right mind would question. The people of Glenfall probably would have been moving away from the water on their own if they’d been able to think amidst their confusion.

  “What was that?” Bella screeched, then shook her head. “You know what? Never mind. Are you alright? You don’t look good.”

  Jane was alright for someone whose every nerve was complaining about what she had just put herself through. This wasn’t saying much. Still, she decided not to worry Bella more than she had to, especially since there wasn’t much her friend could do about it.

  “I’m fine,” she said, in as steady a voice as she could manage. “Help me up.”

  Bella’s hands gripped under her armpits, lifting Jane to her feet before snaking an arm down to support her waist.

  “We need to get moving, too.” Jane looked around. “Is there a high place nearby? The top of a building?”

  “Yes. Yours.” Bella dragged Jane towards the door, barely allowing for Jane’s own legs to participate. “I’ll get you there.”

  It was a surprisingly quick sequence of movements to get on top of her own house. Half a minute later, they were opening the window to her room, where Bella dumped her out the window like a sack of flour onto the roof of the lower level. It was slanted, but luckily not so much that Jane couldn’t sit up on it without slipping to the yard below.

  “Why did you distance everyone from the water?” Bella asked.

  “It’s an old warning I’ve read in books. When waters withdraw, they come back. It mostly applies to places near the ocean, but still, there’s no telling what might happen here.” Jane pointed at the lake. “See? The lake is bulging near the center. Upwards. What happens when all that water comes back down? What —”

  Her next words were silenced when a sudden reversal in the magic around her took her breath completely away.

  She felt Bella’s hands stop her from rolling off the roof as the water in the center of the lake suddenly flattened. All that power had to go somewhere. A wave as high as Jane’s shin radiated out in a perfect circle from that spot, rushing towards the shore faster than any boat could have managed.

  “Jane!”

  “I’m fine. We should be fine up here. Just don’t let me fall.”

  The air was absolutely chock-full of magic. Jane felt like a sick person being force-fed soup as all the energy in the air began to seep into her, replenishing her depleted stocks with water-aligned magical force. If she hadn’t encountered the dragon that day at the waterfall, she might actually have died from the sudden influx. As it was, it took all her energy to calm the raging torrents of foreign power inside her.

  “If I’m right, something is about to happen,” she panted. “Something big. Just don’t drop me.”

  “Never.” Bella’s grip on Jane’s arm tightened enough to hurt, but among all the other things Jane was feeling, it didn’t matter. “I’m here.”

  Just as the wave hit the shore and began to sweep over the town, the dragon finally appeared.

  Jane felt its arrival like a hammer blow. The water glowed briefly for an instant, and then a solid column of scales and fangs burst free of the lake. A long serpent of aqueous nature went straight up, defying every instinct water normally possessed before coiling in the sky and slithering through the air in a tight, undulating circle.

  Jane prayed it would just leave. If it did, she could rest.

  Instead, the dragon roared, pulsing magical force through the air so hard that Jane saw the stone river-bridges shudder. The town filled with frightened screams.

  She closed her eyes.

  It’s my job. Only because nobody else can do it, but it’s my job.

  She wished this was a problem she could blast out of the air. Destructive magic wasn’t her strong suit either, but it was so much better than messaging that she would have mucked stables for a month to make it a real option.

  Instead, she was about to do the magical equivalent of screaming at someone.

  Opening her eyes, Jane stopped fighting the dragon’s magic. Instead, she dug her own hooks into the magic pulsing through the air and began gathering big masses of energy into one huge, invisible ball in front of her.

  The dragon was too big to fight, and she was too small to survive trying it, so it had to be reasoned with. She considered what messages could actually do that, and there were few. Just one, to be honest, so simple and stupid that even an elemental spirit could understand it.

  Go away.

  Jane’s magical voice hit the serpent like a brick, momentarily halting its soaring movement.

  You aren’t a small spirit who has to stay in one place. You are a big spirit who patrols the waters. There are other waters. Go away.

  The dragon remained frozen in the air for one agonizing moment as Jane crumpled, unable to see what was happening through her rapidly darkening eyes. She had not been in any shape for a spell that powerful.

  Bella yelled something she couldn’t quite make out. Dimly, Jane sensed the dragon’s presence fading, flowing along one of the rivers and vanishing slowly into the distance. It was still dwindling as Jane felt herself being dragged through her own window and deposited on her bed.

  Can’t sleep.

  Jane couldn’t not sleep, if she was honest about it. But she was right that she couldn’t sleep yet, as much as every ounce of her hated that fact.

  One more thing to do.

  She poked out with her magical senses, wincing as they burned bright in her scorched vision. Her communication circle was just barely within arm’s reach. She dropped her hand to it, tried to turn it on, and discovered she was too drained to provide even the mote of power that action required. Instead, she wrenched a small fragment of the dragon’s quickly dissipating force from the air, shoved it into the circle, and more or less slapped it into submission.

  “Jane? What’s wrong?”

  Cecelia could apparently feel the unconventional activation of her circle. Jane was sorry to worry her aunt, but she was also losing consciousness. She couldn’t explain fully at the moment.

  “Need you,” she gasped.

  “Got it. I’m on my way.”

  Finally, blessedly, Jane let things go black in earnest.

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