“You have until dawn,” she said without looking down. “The novice at the door will give you tea and a blanket. My answer will not change.”
“Then I let the droughts continue,” she said softly. “I let the hurricanes spiral. I let the fires dance another season. And you, Mr. Graves, will watch your cities burn while my sisters and I sip tea in this tower, warm and dry and patient .”
“He’ll breathe,” Seraphina said calmly. “But he won’t interrupt. That’s the first lesson. The old world was run by your kind—with your wars, your boardrooms, your desperate little hierarchies. You broke the planet. Now, you need us to fix it. But we are not repairwomen. We are dominant .” Dominant Witches
The men exchanged glances. One of them, younger, bristled. “Now, see here—”
But Seraphina had no intention of simply helping . “You have until dawn,” she said without looking down
She stood. The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of ozone and wet clay—the smell of creation being unmade and remade.
The age of dominance had only just begun. “I let the hurricanes spiral
She swept into the Grand Conclave, her velvet gown trailing like a pool of midnight. The delegation—three men in expensive, ill-fitting suits—stood huddled by the hearth, as if the fire’s warmth could protect them from her.
As the delegation stumbled out into the suddenly silent night, Seraphina stood before her altar. The bones of saints, the feathers of extinct birds, a mirror that showed not her face but the face of every woman who had been drowned, hanged, or silenced.