J12J12
Cael Kestrel has spent his whole life mastering one skill: disappearing. Quiet, careful, forgettable - that's how a boy with no memory of his parents learns to feel safe. It's worked for fourteen years.
Then a stranger knocks on his aunt's door, holding an envelope too heavy to be ordinary mail, and everything Cael thought he understood about staying hidden starts coming apart.
Dunbroch Academy is real. Magic is real. And somewhere in Cael, so is something else - something the school's oldest stories insist was never anything more than a bedtime tale. A staff that shouldn't answer to a first-year the way his does. A flicker of impossible blue light that arrives exactly when he needs it most, and vanishes before he can explain it to anyone, including himself.
He doesn't want to be interesting. He wants his two best friends, his growing rivalry with the one girl who refuses to be impressed by him, and one quiet, ordinary year to figure out who he is without an audience watching.
He isn't going to get it.
Someone has been waiting a long time for a boy like Cael to show up - and now that he has, waiting is over.