The Academy's sunlit halls had seen everything from runaway enchantments to spontaneous combustions in alchemy class—but this? This was messier than all the fireballs combined.
It started with a single girl: Marin Dovelle. Soft-spoken, charmingly aloof, and—for reasons no one questioned—always a little better connected than she should've been.
She'd claimed she was studying Restorative Arcanum, the magical equivalent of medicine, complete with divine-lit robes and that faint holier-than-thou glow all medics seemed to develop by week three. But what Marin lacked in genuine coursework, she made up for in forged field hours and illusion spells detailed enough to fool not one but three separate departments.
That's where it began: a simple case of magical fraud. Harmless enough, she thought.
Enter her two friends: Lyria and Fenna. Lyria, an alchemical specialist with a knack for potions and zero patience for bureaucratic nonsense. Fenna, an illusionist who could disguise a library as a waterfall and had, once, turned the Dean's robes invisible. Both were loyal to a fault, and both thought they were doing Marin a favor.
"Just help me sneak into the clinic logs," Marin had pleaded. "No one's getting hurt. I just need to stay enrolled until next term. Then I'll transfer. It'll be fine."
"Fine" lasted precisely one week.
A patient—real, bleeding, and very respected in the local magical community—collapsed in the clinic during Marin's faked rotation. Marin, desperate not to be caught, attempted a basic healing spell. Lyria had brewed the enhancer potion. Fenna had forged the enchantment seal. None of them realized the patient was allergic to arcane silver.
The result? Magical anaphylactic shock. Screaming. Chaos. An investigation.
And the beginning of their quiet, tragic descent.
—✦—
When the truth began to surface, it didn't come with fireworks. It came with silence. People stopped meeting their eyes in the hallway. Professors suddenly stopped calling on them. Their room assignments were "temporarily reprocessed" (read: revoked), and then came the actual charges: medical malpractice, magical fraud, and endangering a citizen of the realm.
The man they nearly killed was no political titan—but he ran the Healing Guild's apprentice program and had trained nearly a third of the campus medics. He was beloved. Known. Trusted. And worse—he survived.
"They're going to exile us," Lyria had whispered in the dark, clutching a cursed mug of tea.
"I didn't mean for this to happen," Marin had choked out, mascara streaking down her cheeks like warpaint. "I thought I could fix it before it got this far."
The Academy didn't call in the high courts. It didn't need to. Quiet disgrace did the job just fine.
—✦—
When the tribunal came, it wasn't robes and gongs. It was quiet—too quiet. The kind of quiet where magical truth spells hung in the air like nooses. The three girls sat side by side, stripped of their uniforms and dignity.
Marin admitted everything.
Fenna broke down halfway through the testimony, her illusions flickering like a dying candle.
Lyria never cried. But when they read the sentence, her hands shook hard enough to rattle her cuffs.
Expulsion? Obviously. But worse—they were blacklisted. Word spread to other academies, guilds, internships, even merchant covens. No one would take them.
They weren't in danger of prison. But they might as well have been ghosts.
—✦—
They wandered for a while after that. Stayed in bad inns. Did odd jobs under fake names. No dark guilds came for them—not directly. But the whispers were always there. "You've got power. You've got no place. We've got coin."
And for a time, it was tempting. Fenna considered it more than once.
But Marin—who had finally understood the full weight of her mistake—dragged them back every time. She kept them moving. She wrote apology letters no one answered. She begged for apprenticeships at clinics far enough away that no one had heard her name.
Eventually, one small-town healer took them in. Not as students. As assistants. Under tight supervision and low pay, but with real work. Real redemption.
The Academy never welcomed them back. Their names were never cleared. But they were not slaves. They were not criminals. Just three girls trying to rebuild something out of the ash heap of a bad decision.
—✦—
"Okay," Alex said, pointing at the name that had just floated up in the magical recruitment matrix. "What do we know about her?"
Jamie leaned in, squinting at the glowing panel. "Marin Dovelle. Expelled. Medical fraud. Something-something scandal. Oh, and—"
"And there's a whole subsection titled 'Oh Gods, No, Not Them Again'," Aera added, already scrolling with a raised brow. "That's... impressive."
"Or terrifying," Jamie muttered. "Depends on your kink."
"Enough," Alex snapped. Not mean, but focused. "Read deeper. Skip the bureaucratic moralizing. What did they actually do?"
"Faked a rotation, did some unsanctioned healing, got caught because the guy was allergic to the silver base in the enhancer," Aera summarized like it was last week's gossip. "But the spellwork was clean. Textbook. Honestly? Too clean for amateurs."
"And the illusionist?"
"Fenna. Apparently can hold a false image in place while multitasking. Sustained for hours. On record, she once covered for a missing professor during finals. No one noticed."
Jamie blinked. "Wait—that was her? I remember that! We thought the professor was just drunk!"
"They might've been both," Aera said cheerfully. "The professor and the illusion."
"And Lyria?"
"Potionwork, highly adaptive. Invented an emergency tonic that could double as a sleeping draught and a truth serum. Depending on the water purity."
"So basically," Alex concluded, tapping the panel, "a healer with nerves of steel, a potion-maker who thinks like a saboteur, and an illusionist with subtlety issues."
"We're building a team, not a heist crew," Jamie said, only half-joking.
"We're doing both if this mission is what I think it is," Alex replied.
"You seriously want to recruit these three?"
"They've been chewed up by the system," Alex said. "Which means they've stopped expecting it to save them. That's the kind of pragmatism we need."
"Also, they might hate us on sight."
"Great. That means they're still smart."
"Still a terrible idea," Jamie muttered.
Aera tilted her head. "Which is why it's probably going to work."
"Okay then," Alex said with a sigh, hitting the sigil to flag the trio. "Let's go ruin their week."