Cassandra never believed in magic-until she woke up with wings.
One moment, she's living her ordinary life in London. The next, she's stranded in a mysterious, ancient realm brimming with danger and beauty beyond imagination. As she grapples with he...
Cassandra stared blankly at her notebook as Professor Radcliffe's voice droned on at the front of the lecture hall, every syllable seeming to hang in the air longer than necessary. Her pen moved absentmindedly, tracing the faint outlines of a jagged cliff, a crumbling archway, and the dark river that had dominated her dreams for weeks. The familiar shapes were almost automatic now, her hand working as if it had memorized the contours of this otherworldly place, despite the fact she'd never seen it in real life. The ruins had invaded her sleep, and now they had begun to creep into her waking life, their shadowy presence growing stronger each day.
Her sketches were interrupted by the hiss of Morwenna's voice from beside her.
"Cass," Morwenna whispered, leaning in close, her eyes flicking to Cassandra's notebook. "What are you doing?"
Cassandra jumped slightly, her pen leaving an erratic scratch across the page. She glanced sideways at Morwenna, who had drawn closer, her ever-present thermos of herbal tea resting on the desk beside her. Morwenna's curiosity was palpable, her soft blue eyes narrowing as they traced the lines of Cassandra's drawings.
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Morwenna was the kind of person whose soft-spoken nature belied a sharp wit and an unshakable empathy. Her golden-blonde hair, always perfectly in place, seemed to glow under the classroom lights, and her large blue eyes were filled with quiet understanding. It was rare to see her rattled; Morwenna had a way of observing the world with a thoughtful, amused detachment, as though she were constantly analyzing the bigger picture. Despite her formal, put-together appearance, she had a subtle humor that surfaced in the most unexpected moments, lightening even the tensest situations.
Morwenna was usually the quieter of the two, the listener. She and Cassandra had bonded during their first week in the halls of residence, united by their mutual sense of normalcy in a sea of Classics students who reveled in obscure trivia and academic posturing. While others debated in-depth on the Iliad and Roman engineering during mealtimes, Cassandra and Morwenna had snuck out for drinks, laughed over poorly planned hookups, and grumbled about the weight of their textbooks. Cassandra usually took center stage, eager to relay every detail of her life without so much as a prompt. In fact, she often recounted every ridiculous moment of her nights out with gleeful explicitness, once even going so far as to draw a diagram explaining the awkward angles of a particularly disastrous date.
But today, she wasn't so eager to share.
Morwenna's curls brushed against Cassandra's shoulder as she leaned in further, inspecting the half-finished ruins on the page. The scent of her herbal tea, chamomile, drifted between them, comforting yet oddly grounding.
"What's that?" Morwenna asked, her tone casual but with a note of concern beneath it.
Cassandra flushed, quickly snapping the notebook closed before Morwenna could get a better look. "Nothing," she muttered, though the heat in her cheeks betrayed her discomfort. "Just some ruins, you know. Classics stuff. The Parthenon, maybe."
