There is a certain type of silence that comes after you decide to kill someone.
It's not peace. It's not relief.
It's clarity.
That night, I sat by the window of my bedroom in silence, watching the sky over the Talbot estate drown in moonlight. The wind curled through the gardens like a whisper, brushing against the roses that lined the wrought-iron gates.
Thomas had entered my room again.
He hadn't touched me.
But he had hovered too long. His presence was heavy, like rotting velvet. His voice, when he murmured "sweet dreams," curled around me like a leash.
And that was it.
It didn't matter that the timeline said he wouldn't go further until I was fifteen. That was the original Bela.
This is me.
And I don't wait for monsters to strike.
In the weeks leading up to it, I prepared.
Each day, I played the quiet little heiress—doll-like, well-dressed, walking on polished floors in Mary Janes and hand-stitched lace. At night, I worked.
Not with power. With intention.
Magic, real magic, isn't all about force. It's about direction. Flow. Language. Will.
And I had been learning.
The First Lessons
The communication with the Stark couple started as a hum.
At first, I didn't even know I was reaching out. My soul, reshaped by the Void, was constantly brushing against unseen currents, and eventually, someone brushed back.
Two presences, ancient and coiled in wisdom, flickered like stars beyond the veil.
They didn't demand answers. They didn't recoil in fear. They watched. Then, slowly, offered strands of knowledge—not spoken, but woven into dreams.
"Every witch begins with breath."
That was Maggie's first teaching.
Breath is power. Breath is control.
She showed me how to still my body while letting my thoughts spin—how to exhale into magic, how to inhale direction.
"Before the ritual, before the potion, before the word—you breathe."
Don taught differently.
He didn't offer softness. He offered precision.
His first lesson came in the form of a rune—a glyph so ancient I could feel it buzzing when I traced it in the air.
"It is not the spell that makes the witch," he said. "It is the clarity of purpose."
Together, they began weaving my foundation. Not Void-magic. Witchcraft. The true kind. The kind with rules, discipline, risk, and reward.
I learned how to ground.
To channel energy from natural forces.
To balance the Void within me against the magic of the world.
Maggie made me draw sigils with my fingers in steam. On my skin with oils. In chalk beneath my bed.
Don showed me how to ward a room with a feather and a match.
"You already have a soul like iron," he said. "Learn to temper it."
I practiced herbalism by plucking flowers from the estate gardens, crushing petals, sniffing resin, tasting bitterness and sweetness alike.
Lavender for calm.
Rue for protection.
Mugwort for vision.
Bloodroot for banishment.
My tiny hands became vessels of focus. My eyes—mirrors of stars and stormlight.
I was becoming a witch.
Not by accident. Not by birthright.
By choice.
And so, the plan began.
The Spell of Severance
Death is easy.
But untraceable death? That takes finesse.
I didn't want fire or poison. I didn't want blood splattered on marble floors. I wanted silence. Finality. A clean cut across the thread of their existence.
The spell wasn't in any grimoire. It came from both traditions—the wildness of Void logic and the discipline of true witchcraft.
The core of the spell: entropy.
Decay of timing. Corruption of instincts. A single moment of broken intuition that would spiral into tragedy.
I built the sigil beneath my bed over several nights, carving it into the wooden base with a nail coated in wax and crushed poppy seeds.
The anchor was a photo—one of my parents together, framed in silver. I removed it from the hallway, replaced it with a duplicate, and wrapped the original in black thread.
Thread soaked in graveyard water. One drop on each corner.
The final trigger was a command—a phrase not spoken aloud, but pressed into my soul like a seal.
"End the rot."
It happened on a Wednesday.
Rain. Thin fog. Tires that slipped just enough. Brakes that caught a second too late.
The reports said the car swerved. That it flipped twice and landed upside down in the shallow creek just outside London.
No foul play.
No suspicion.
No survivors.
I stood in black lace at the funeral and held a white rose.
People wept. Paparazzi hovered outside the gates. Lawyers whispered in corners about estates and assets and guardianship.
I kept my eyes dry.
Inside, the power thrummed—steady, quiet.
They were gone.
And it was by my hand.
The New Beginning
Their deaths left a void.
But not for long.
A week later, Don and Maggie Stark walked into my life as though they had always belonged in it.
The magic they used to appear legitimate was seamless. Don became the godfather no one remembered naming. Maggie, a distant cousin with "ancestral rights" to guardianship.
The will had been updated—mysteriously, magically. The lawyers didn't question it. The system didn't blink.
The Talbot estate was liquidated. The paperwork filed. The new guardianship processed.
I was theirs.
The Stark home was nothing like the Talbot manor.
It was alive.
Walls of stone and ivy. Air that smelled like sage and stormwater. Floors that hummed with warding sigils carved beneath the wood. Windows that looked out onto a forest too deep and too old to belong to any mapped land.
There were no servants. No false smiles.
Just truth.
On my first night there, I asked Don a question:
"Did you know I was coming?"
He tilted his head, amused. "We felt something... shift," he said. "A long time ago. Like a ripple through an old pond."
Maggie touched my hair, then, brushing it behind my ear. "You called to us. Not like a witch. Not like a child. Like something becoming."
I didn't reply.
But I let her hand stay.
The True Study Begins
My training shifted immediately.
No more whispers in dreams. Now I had rooms. Books. Tools. Voices.
Don began my day with theory—the roots of magic, the flow of ley lines, the difference between Borrowers, Naturals, and Students.
"You," he said, "are none of these."
"Something new?" I asked.
He smiled. "Something old, perhaps, returning in a new form."
Afternoons were for craft—from basic spellcasting to potion brewing. Maggie walked me through hex bags, crystal focuses, and proper use of iron and salt.
"You don't just cast," she said. "You shape. And when you shape, you leave fingerprints."
By evening, I practiced elemental attunement.
My Void-born nature made it strange. My connection to time and space made fire dance too fast, water drip in reverse, air still in unnatural silence.
But they adapted the lessons.
They didn't fear me.
They guided me.
And still… I hid the Void.
They knew I was touched by something deep, something not of this world. But the full truth? I kept that locked away.
Because even in their warmth, I knew:
If they truly understood what I was, they might try to stop me.
And nothing will stop me.
One night, while scribing a time-lock sigil into a copper plate, Maggie watched me closely.
"You're too calm for a child," she said. "Even a witch's child."
I met her gaze.
"I was never really a child."
She didn't ask what I meant.
She just nodded.
That night, I stood in the center of my room, candles in a ring around me, the sigils of time and void both humming beneath my bare feet.
I had been forged in a place without mercy.
Refined by knowledge.
Adopted by power.
Made whole by will.
This wasn't revenge.
This was reclamation.
I was no longer pretending to be the girl who died.
I wasn't pretending to be Bela Talbot.
I was Bela Talbot.
And I would become so much more.