"How is he?"

At first, Cary thought that they were talking about her. As she gradually came back to consciousness, she could hear the voices from far off. But when they didn't get louder, she realized that they must not have been standing by her. And when the response came, she was thankful that they weren't talking about her.

"His eyes are gone. He'll never see again."

Cary opened her eyes, looking around at where she was. She was instantly thrilled that she could see, that the two voices weren't talking about her. When she spotted Headmaster Sparks and a woman two beds over, she thought that the woman might be the nurse. But her next words proved that wrong.

"How could I have missed this?" she asked. She shook her head as she looked down at the bed they were standing by. "Some guidance counselor I am."

"You can't see everything," Headmaster Sparks said. "You have two hundred students that you're monitoring. I should have seen this."

"Oh, yes. You're only watching a thousand of them. Claude, you can't see everything either. There's too much. I keep telling you that we need more help."

"How did he even know that it was there? You don't think..."

"Hey, no eavesdropping on adults young man," said a woman, as she came up behind Cary.

Cary turned towards her, only to see a small office at the back of the room, in the far corner. There were seven beds in the room, with four on her side and three on the other. Only the two of them seemed occupied at the moment, but as she still couldn't see who was in the other bed, she couldn't know for certain.

"Where am I?" Cary asked.

From the clean, white walls and the brightness of the place, she would have guessed that she was in a hospital. But with the headmaster there, she figured that she was still on campus somewhere. Probably in the admin building, as she knew no such place was in the school buildings or dorms.

"You're in the nurse's office," the woman said. "I'm Nurse Ianris. You gave us quite the shock."

"Why? What... What happened?"

Cary looked around at the room, trying to find clues as to how she got there. As she woke the rest of the way up, she remembered what had happened. How Nelgomi had gone crazy and broke her arms. When she remembered that, she sat up in bed, looking down at her arms in front of her.

Her arms were wrapped in a weird cloth, but they weren't in casts. More importantly, they didn't hurt. She raised her hands one at a time, testing out her arms as she did. But they seemed perfectly fine.

"I was able to heal the breaks easily enough," Nurse Ianris said. When Cary looked over at the nurse, she realized that she was an elf. Her long, pointed ears were tucked away beneath a doctor's cap, but they were still visible through the tight fabric. Her long, dark hair stuck out from the cap in places, and as she moved over to her side, Cary realized that her purple eyes weren't just a trick of the lights. "You'll have to stay here for some observations, but you should be fine. No harm done. Nothing that magic couldn't mend, anyway."

"Where... How's Nelgomi?" Cary asked. She looked back over to the other occupied bed. Sitting up, she could make out the occupant of that bed better, but he was little more than a lump huddled beneath the sheets. Of course, that was exactly like how the dwarf usually slept.

"Never you mind about that," Nurse Ianris said. "He won't be able to bother you anymore."

"What? No, I..." Cary wanted to deny her words. To deny that Nelgomi attacked her. But as all three of them turned towards her, it was clear that none of them were buying it.

"How are you feeling, Cary?" Headmaster Sparks asked, as he came over to her. Nelgomi's guidance counselor stayed by his side, but as she wasn't Ms. Scott, Cary wasn't one of her charges.

"I'm... I'm fine," Cary said, hesitantly, as she stared over at Nelgomi's huddled form. Their earlier words suddenly came back to her, and she realized what had happened to him. What she had done to him. "Is Nelgomi going to be alright? Can... Can magic heal him?"

"Maybe," Headmaster Sparks said, cutting off Nurse Ianris's comments. "Magic can do some wondrous things, but it does have limits. I don't want you getting into the habit of putting yourself in danger thinking that you can just be healed with the snap of a finger."

"Snap of a finger?" Nurse Ianris asked. "Who snaps their fingers to cast magic?" She shook her head before heading back to her office, with a few muttered words about snapping. Headmaster Sparks watched her head off before turning back to Cary.

"I do have a few questions for you," he said. "Like how you knew how to cast Fairy Fire."

"What?" Cary asked. She wasn't sure what was more surprising to her; that the spell had a name at all, that it was called Fairy Fire, or that she knew how to cast it. "I... I'm not sure." She thought back to the fight with Nelgomi, trying to think of how she knew the words. How she knew how to cast it. But all she remembered was struggling with her friend, and then the words suddenly popped into her head. "I... I just did. I didn't, then I did."

Headmaster Sparks nodded towards her for a moment, as if that explanation made perfect sense to him. If it did, he wasn't letting on. "Do you know how Nelgomi found out about the heart of the forest?" he asked, going straight at the heart of the matter.

"I... No... He was talking about it for months, but..." She tried to think back on all the times that the topic had come up. When the last time he talked about it was. But between her crisis of faith and her problems with David, she hadn't been paying much attention to Nelgomi. "Some friend I am," she muttered to herself.

"Nonsense," he said. "You kept him from leaving with the heart, at least... Well... Sort of."

"What? Why? What happened?"

"It's not important. You shouldn't have to worry about such things. That's for grownups to worry about."

"Headmaster, I... I feel like I'm responsible here. I want to know what I did." Cary wanted to ask what she did wrong, but she was afraid he'd tell her that.

Headmaster Sparks stood there for a moment, looking down at her, slowly shaking his head as he had an internal discussion. Whichever side of him won out, he gave a slow, deep sigh before hopping up onto the edge of Cary's bed. His hand landed lightly on her leg, on top of the covers that were there.

"The heart of the forest was destroyed," he said. "When Nelgomi was trying to get the fairy fire off of him, he was still holding the heart in his hand. He crushed it into his eyes in the process. That's part of why Nurse Ianris doesn't have high hopes for his recovery. There's no telling what kind of long term effects something like that can have on a person."

"So... So, they can't make any more fairy rings?" Cary asked. "No more portals to the magical realm?"

"Now, of all people, I would have thought you would know better than that," he said, smiling over at her. "The portal you came here through was different. Shaped like a fairy ring, but it was most certainly not a fairy ring. We have experts trying to work out the spell and how it works, but that's hard without taking it apart."

"Oh," Cary said. "So... You're... You're not taking it apart so that I can still go home?"

"No... Well, yes, there's that. But, no. Taking apart a portal is just dangerous as a whole. It would leave one side of it disconnected, which could have all sorts of dangerous consequences. If we could get in touch with the person who cast it, we might be able to learn how to make them ourselves."

When he spoke of the person who cast the spell, Cary couldn't help but think of the hooded figure from that night. Whoever it was must have been the sorcerer that cast it. Or sorceress. And as she realized that fact, she remembered seeing her hovering over her before, after the fight with Nelgomi. Moreover, her familiar looking face as she looked down on Cary, lying on the ground.

"It's not just the dwarven realm that is running out of usable portals," Headmaster Sparks said, seemingly oblivious of the thoughts flowing through Cary's mind at that moment. "Fortunately, that issue hasn't come to the magical realm. Or the elven realm, for that matter."

"If it's dangerous to take apart a portal, what happens when a fairy ring dies?" Cary asked.

Headmaster Sparks sat up straighter as he looked at her for a moment. "That is a very sensible question. Not something I'd expect from a ten year old. But, well, given your art scores this semester, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Anyway, something that you wouldn't know is that both sides of those portals are fairy rings. The mushrooms are linked directly. So, as one side withers and dies, so too does the other. But with the portal that you came through, those can seem to last eternally. Which is, of course, a problem in and of itself. But... As I said, that's a problem for adults to handle."

"So... What happens now?" Cary asked.

"Well, you get some rest. When Nurse Ianris says you can go, you resume your usual schedule. I can reach out to your friends for you, if you're worried about missing stuff in class. But it's the middle of the night right now."

"No, I meant with Nelgomi," Cary said. She glanced over at the lump that was her friend, worried that he would be scarred for life. That he would never be the kid that he once was. "Is he a witch now?"

"Oh, no," Headmaster Sparks said, shaking his head. "It doesn't work like that."

"But... He said that witches are made. That the witch that attacked earlier was a student." When Cary looked back at the headmaster, he had that look again. The look that all adults had when a kid shows that they're more aware of the world than they were expecting.

"There's a big difference between what Nelgomi did and what... that witch did," Headmaster Sparks said. During that brief pause, Cary almost thought that he would say the witch's name. That he knew it, as readily as he knew hers. She wondered for a moment if she did too. If it was one of the coven, or a student in one of her classes. "But we've had a lot more practice in handling witches. There's a police department dedicated to them. What Nelgomi did? There isn't really a law against it."

"No Theft of an Artifact of Magic?" Cary asked.

"No one has ever done it before," the headmaster said, shrugging. "The destruction of the fountain and tampering with a defense spell are, but the school isn't pressing charges for either of those. The fountain has already been repaired, and no harm was done by him triggering the lockdown on the admin building. We barely even noticed it until the silence spell fell outside." He laughed a little at the comment, or some internal joke that Cary wasn't in on. "Anyway, I'll leave you to get some rest. I'm sure it's way past visiting hours."

"Very," came a call from the office behind him. He barely glanced back there before getting back up to his feet.

"However, Cary, I do hope that, the next time you find yourself in such a situation, you at least try to find an adult to help you. You don't have to solve all these problems on your own."

"I know," Cary said, nodding. "Thanks, headmaster."