The flame on her finger suddenly erupted into a fireball. With a yelp, Grachi lost her concentration, dropped to the mattress with a soft thud, and the fireball shot across the room, narrowly missing her mirror before dissolving into a puff of smoke.
The dark shard didn't shatter. It didn't explode. It simply… dissolved. It was a shadow that couldn't exist in the warmth of that light.
"You set off the smoke alarm in the garage again?" he asked, climbing inside with the ease of long practice.
As each memory surfaced, a soft, golden light began to emanate from her chest. The others felt it too. Mia started smiling. Daniel chuckled at a forgotten inside joke. The wilted sunflower in her room—which Matías had brought—suddenly lifted its head, its petals turning a brilliant gold hundreds of feet away. grachi in english
The sunset over Miami painted the sky in shades of tangerine and violet, but Grachi Alonso barely noticed. She was hovering—literally—three feet above her bed, her textbooks floating in a slow orbit around her. A tiny, stubborn flame danced on her fingertip, refusing to be extinguished.
Matías listened, then placed the wilted sunflower on her nightstand. "It's not your power, Grachi. It's your heart. It's been cloudy lately."
Daniel pocketed his phone and nodded. "Laughter." The flame on her finger suddenly erupted into a fireball
"Ugh!" she groaned, burying her face in her pillow.
"Next time," Mia said, breaking the silence with a smirk, "can we just have a pizza party? Less dramatic."
"I know what I have to do," she said, her voice firming. "But I can't do it alone." It didn't explode
She snapped her fingers, and the single flame that appeared was small, steady, and warm. Exactly the way she wanted it. She had learned the most powerful spell of all: the one you don't need magic to cast.
A soft knock came from her window. She looked up to see Matías, his silhouette framed by the dying light. He was holding a small, wilting sunflower in one hand and a worried smile on his face.
But her mind was a storm. Lately, her powers had been… different. Unpredictable. Yesterday, she’d tried to levitate a pencil during a boring history lecture and accidentally turned Mr. Harrison’s toupee a brilliant shade of fuchsia. The class had roared with laughter. Mr. Harrison had not.
"The dark shard amplifies emotion," Grachi explained, drawing the symbol of release in the dirt. "We can't fight it with force. We have to un-speak it. We have to fill this space with its opposite."