Elara Finch knew two things for certain that morning:
She was definitely going to be fired.
And it was, without question, the book's fault.
Not her fault.
The book's.
She stood ankle-deep in glittering ash, surrounded by the smouldering, chaotic aftermath of what had, until approximately ten minutes ago, been the Rare Arcane Texts Room at the Metropolitan Library of Esoteric Studies. That room had once been a sanctum of whispered reverence, a place where dusty tomes whispered secrets only to those who knew the right incantations, and where scrolls curled like sleeping serpents in their enchanted glass cases. Now, it looked like the aftermath of a magical bake-off held during a tornado.
Ash sparkled in the air like rebellious snowflakes, floating lazily despite the occasional gust from an unruly enchantment. The scent was peculiar: a mixture of scorched paper, burnt sugar and something faintly citrusy…lemon custard, to be precise. A scorched curtain hung in tatters from its rod, dripping sticky custard onto the warping oak floorboards. One of the ceiling tiles, as if caught in an invisible tempest, slowly rotated in place, held aloft by an errant enchantment gone rogue.
The grimoire in question…Codex Prankarum, according to the battered cover and the still-shrieking talking raven that had exploded from its pages mere moments ago…now resembled a pile of confetti set on fire, stomped on by a centaur, and then lightly seasoned with despair.
A large, custard-coloured scorch mark had bloomed across the floor in the exact shape of a shrugging man.
Elara glared at the ruined rare manuscripts section. Glitter, feathers, and an unsettling quantity of what might once have been lemon mousse coated nearly every surface. The brass plaque on the far wall, now half-melted and hanging askew, still read: NO FOOD OR DRINK. Ironic, really, considering the book had conjured both dessert and disaster in equal measure.
Somewhere behind her, a spectral goose honked faintly. It had been chasing a wealthy donor around the stacks for the better part of seven minutes and refused to be exorcised.
Elara sighed and brushed a glitter-dusted feather from her shoulder. Her platinum blonde hair…once tied neatly into a braid…had come loose, now haloing her face like a half-plucked dandelion. A smudge of ash decorated her left cheek, and her lipstick had mostly vanished, leaving only the faintest smear of rebellious berry red. Her coat, a deep purple thing with mismatched buttons and embroidered stars along the collar, was torn at the hem and smelled faintly of cinnamon and singed parchment.
She had always been a little... offbeat. Too much colour, too many pins, patterns that clashed delightfully, socks that never matched. As a child, her teachers had called it "eccentric." Her relatives had called it "embarrassing."
Her parents…back when they were alive…had simply called it Elara.
But that had been years ago. A rain-slick highway. A shattered windshield. A phone call at 3:42 a.m. that would carve a hole into her seventeen-year-old soul.
After the funeral, she'd been passed around like a poorly understood family heirloom: shuffled between an aunt in Edinburgh who thought emotions were "inefficient," a cousin in Boston who locked her in a magically warded guest room "for safety," and a second cousin twice removed in Oslo who swore Elara's mere presence gave their dog indigestion.
None of them had ever really seen her. Not like her parents had.
And certainly not like Isadora.
Isadora Finch. The infamous great-aunt. The one who wore velvet gloves in the bath and hosted moonlit séances with cardinals and minor demons. The one her parents only ever mentioned when wine was involved…nd even then, only in euphemism.
"You remember what happened to Isadora..."
"That woman conjured bees at a christening..."
"She owns a haunted snow globe, for god's sake..."
Elara had only met her once.
She'd been twelve, curious, and a little too bright for her age. Isadora Finch had not knocked. She had arrived. A blur of peacock feathers and wind-chime jewellery, a voice like music that had once been dangerous, gave her a snow globe that emitted lavender fog and played lullabies backward, and whispered, "The world will try to file you down, darling. Don't let it."
Her parents had thrown the globe away that very night.
Isadora disappeared not long after. Some said she died during a séance gone wrong in the seventies. Others said she married a selkie and ran off to sea. Others insisted she'd faked her death and lived in a lighthouse with a lover who turned into fog at dawn. One cousin swore she ran a bathhouse for banshees in Prague.
Elara never stopped wondering. The Finch family denied all versions.
The door to the Rare Arcane Texts Room creaked open behind her.
"Elara."
The voice was pinched, vibrating with the suppressed rage of a man who had spent three decades trying to maintain order in a house that sometimes seemed to delight in undoing him. Mr. Drell, the Head Archivist, stood framed in the doorway like a tempest bottled inside tweed. Short and stout, with spectacles forever fogged and perched precariously on his nose, he looked vaguely like a toad in a crumpled blazer.
Custard dripped from the monogrammed handkerchief he brandished like a weapon, a single feather adhered to his receding hairline giving him the look of a startled parrot.
"What. Did. You. Do."
Elara turns slowly, as if the question deserved a moment of dramatic tension, then shrugged. She adjusts her battered satchel, which groans ominously, leaking faint wisps of ink and a persistent aroma of burnt cinnamon.
"I opened a book," she says, her voice carefully neutral.
"You summoned poultry," Mr. Drell hisses, stepping over a toppled bookshelf as if it might snap at him like a live thing.
Elara rolls her eyes. "I opened it very carefully. With gloves. In a magic-safe box. While humming a neutral incantation. So technically, the goose summoned itself. I just opened the cover. The goose was not in the index."
"The goose chased a donor!" His voice cracks like an incantation gone wrong.
"He was eating egg salad over a ninth-century banshee ballad scroll. Honestly, the goose was doing preservation work."
Mr. Drell's eye twitches, his face turning a shade of purple that no living creature should aspire to. Behind him, a ghostly chicken wanders past, clucking existentially, pecking at a scrap of paper that seems to dissolve into glitter upon contact.
"And the desk?" he rasps, pointing to a now-living mass of parchment that keeps sneezing glitter like an allergic dragon.
"Okay, that wasn't entirely my fault," Elara mutters. "The catalogue sneezed. It was allergic to smugness."
Mr. Drell drops his handkerchief, which immediately bursts into song…a jaunty tune about the dangers of misplaced custard…and dissolves into lemon vapor that drifts toward the ceiling.
He gives up.
"You're suspended," he sputters, voice cracking under the weight of his defeat. "Indefinitely. Possibly eternally. And if I so much as see you near a footnote, I will have you banished from the entire Dewey sector. Am I clear?"
Elara bows dramatically. "With footnotes and endnotes, sir. Understood!"
Mr. Drell lets out a sound like a kettle nearing detonation and turns on his heel, muttering about insurance premiums and exorcists.
Elara sighs and looks around. Her notebook had melted into a cinnamon ward. Her enchanted travel mug was leaking something that might have been sentient ink. The ghostly chicken clucks something that vaguely sounds like, "You've made a right mess."
She bends to retrieve her bag, which grumbles and sneezes on her sleeve.
"Do I at least get a letter of recommendation?" She calls after Mr. Drell's retreating figure.
"Only if it's addressed to the Underworld!" He shouts from somewhere near the stairs.
Outside, the sky was the colour of unwashed wool. Rain drizzles softly, drumming a quiet rhythm on the cracked cobblestones. Elara's umbrella had turned inside out and now emitted soft hissing noises whenever she tried to adjust it, like a disgruntled serpent.
She stands there for a moment, the cold damp seeping through her soaked coat and into her socks, which squelches unhappily. She was temporarily suspended, unemployed, custard-stained, mildly electrocuted, and, she suspected, cursed.
It was only Tuesday.
Her gaze drifts back and upwards, toward the library's grand stone façade. It loomed behind her like a disapproving parent caught between disbelief and exasperation. Gargoyles perched on the ledges, their stone eyes blinking in the rain, and a faint shimmer suggesting that a few were still half-alive and muttering sarcastic commentaries about her performance.
Elara takes a deep breath, the air tasting faintly of wet stone and forgotten magic.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket.
She pulls it out with fingers numb from the cold and drizzled rain, bracing herself for bad news.
A new message glowed on the screen.
From: Executor's Office – Estate of Isadora Finch
Her heart stutters.
Isadora Finch.
The woman-shaped legend. The family scandal. The reason Elara once tried to dye her hair and got grounded for a month. A person who had looked at her that one time, like she wasn't broken.
She taps the message with trembling fingers.
To Elara Finch:
You are the sole heir to the property at 13 Westwood Lane, Westwood.
Effective immediately.
Instructions and key to follow.
No explanation. No reason. Just a key, an address, and the kind of formality that makes her stomach twist.
She stares at the screen, the rain tracing cold rivulets down her collar.
A thousand memories stirring in the attic of her mind…Isadora's mischievous smile, the haunted snow globe, the perfume that smelled like sage and secrets.
She looks up at the cloudy sky, feeling the strange, electric sense of the universe pointing a very large, very magical finger directly at her in glaring, ominous neon-bright colours.
The rain had gone from light drizzle to full melodrama. Elara's coat was soaked through, her socks squelched, and her umbrella had given up entirely, having twisted itself into an abstract sculpture of passive-aggressive defiance. She held it anyway, mostly out of spite.
She stares down at her phone again, rereading the message for the umpteenth time, as though repetition might cause a second message to appear, one that explained things. Effective immediately. Instructions and key to follow. That was all it said.
There was no Dear Miss Finch, no mention of what had happened to Isadora.
And still…that name. Isadora Finch. It landed on her chest with the weight of a forgotten heirloom.
"Right," Elara murmurs aloud. "Because nothing says 'you're doing great' like being suspended, covered in cursed custard, and inheriting property from a possibly dead or missing aunt who hasn't been seen since disco was in fashion."
The rain intensifies in answer. She sighs, sheltering under a bus stop awning that smells faintly of wet dog and regret.
13 Westwood Lane.
She didn't know where that was. The message hadn't included a country, let alone a map. But she had a feeling it wouldn't be found on Google Earth. Westwood wasn't the sort of place you found. It was the sort that found you.
More memories of Isadora unspooled in her mind like half-lit film reels…vivid, sharp around the edges.
She remembered her parents whispering about her in the kitchen, always just out of earshot, as if saying her name too loudly might summon her. "She showed up at the christening with a pocketful of salt and a raccoon in a hat." Or "You know what happened with the scrying mirror in '72." Isadora was never discussed in direct terms. Only incidents. Repercussions. Hauntings.
But Elara remembered something different.
Elara had been captivated.
She remembered how Isadora had knelt down one moment during that visit, looking her directly in the eye, and saying, "You're not like them, are you?" It hadn't been a question. More confirmation. A recognition.
Isadora had stayed just long enough to cause an uproar. Tea had spilled. The curtains caught fire, very briefly. Elara's father had tried to ban her from speaking to her great-aunt, citing safety and "reputation,".
And then Isadora was gone.
Elara had never gotten a straight answer. Just silence.
Until now.
She glanced down the road, but no one was around. The city looked half-dissolved in the downpour. Cars whizzing past, windows fogged. A man on a bicycle cursing loudly as he hits a pothole. The derelict bus shelter's roof dripped directly onto her shoes, barely giving her coverage.
Somewhere deep in her chest, under the layers of soot and sarcasm and suspended-from-the-library emotional trauma, something stirred.
Home, it whispered.
The thought shocked her.
She hadn't thought of any place as home in years. Not since the crash. Not since the days of house-hopping relatives who treated her like a temporary inconvenience rather than blood. Not since she began curling into the safety of books and magic, of spells tucked into margins, of incantations whispered like lullabies.
The library had been the closest thing. Until the custard. Until the cursed book. Until Drell screamed something about "insurance violations and poultry litigation."
So what now?
She could go back to her apartment…tiny, rented, with unpredictable heating and a landlord who believed in ghosts only when they forgot to pay rent. She could dry off, lie on her futon, pretend none of this had happened.
Or she could go.
To Westwood.
To Isadora's house.
To whatever came next.
Elara stood straighter. Her coat slumped against her like a drenched rat, but she didn't care. She pulled her satchel tighter against her shoulder, ignoring its irritating groan…one of the enchanted pockets didn't like rain…and looked up at the sky as if it might offer a sign.
Instead, lightning flickered across the clouds in the shape of a question mark.
She smiled. "Subtle."
She will leave tonight. Pack what she needed…warm clothes, a few good books, a pouch of enchanted tea leaves, and the one pair of boots that hadn't been assaulted by lemon mousse.
Whatever Westwood held, it had waited long enough.
And Elara Finch was done waiting.
"Well," she mutters, "guess I'm going to Westwood."