Page 52 of Roaring Spell

“My grandmother. Before she died.” Sakura pulls her knees to her chest, making herself smaller in my oversized chair. “She was the only one in my family who understood my magic. Used to say cooking and elemental work had the same foundation—combining ingredients to create transformation.”

“She sounds wise.”

“She was. She was also the only one who didn’t treat me like a problem.” A shadow crosses her face. “When she died, the rest of my family didn’t know what to do with me. I was thirteen and already creating localized thunderstorms when I got upset about homework.”

“Thirteen is young for that level of power.”

“It was terrifying for everyone involved. Including me.” She manages a small smile. “Grandmother used to say that big feelings needed big spaces to land. She taught me to direct storms at the ocean when I needed to release pressure. After she was gone, there was no one to teach me how to hold them.”

“So you held them alone.”

“For a long time.” The admission comes out quieter than she intends. “Until I got tired of it.”

“Mistvale isn’t going to ask you to leave.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know this town. I know these people.” I set down the empty bowl. “They rallied around Leire when she was struggling. They’ll rally around you too. They already are—Sunny sending stress pastries, Berry recommending comfort books, the vampires documenting your weather patterns with genuine interest rather than fear.”

“The vampires are documenting my weather patterns?”

“Thalia has a journal. Marcus provides commentary. They find your atmospheric moods ‘romantically compelling.’”

“That’s...” She blinks. “Actually kind of sweet? In a very strange way.”

“Mistvale is sweet in strange ways. It’s part of the charm.”

“More soup?”

“Please.”

The day passes in comfortable chaos.

She reorganizes my bookshelves with the intensity of someone who’s found a personal mission.

“Why do you have romance novels shelved with legal texts?” She holds up a Milly Taiden paperback and a volume on territorial property disputes.

“They both involve contracts.”

“That’s...” She stares at me. “That’s the most unromantic description of romance I’ve ever heard.”

“The romance novel features a binding agreement between parties with competing interests who must negotiate terms of mutual benefit.”

“It features a dragon shifter and a librarian falling in love.”

“Through negotiation.”

“Through romance.”

“Same outcome. Different methodology.” I shift against my pillows. “The protagonists reach a mutually satisfactory arrangement by the conclusion.”

She shoves both books onto a new shelf—labeled, reorganized, categorized by whatever system makes sense in her head. “I’m creating a romance section. It will be separate from the legal texts. This is non-negotiable.”

“I defer to your expertise.”

“Smart.”

She moves to the next shelf, making horrified noises at my choice to organize poetry by cover color (“That’s not a system, Torin, that’s aesthetics”) and my decision to intermingle fiction with non-fiction based on publication year (“You can’t sort Keats next to a treatise on salmon migration just because they came out in the same decade”). I let her work.