It didn’t seem to matter what they intended—Thisbe was offended. She’d learned to control her magic, but no one here had seen it. She tried not to care too much that people in Artimé still feared her. In fact, she wished people in Grimere would take up the practice of being scared of her—that would make things easier! Instead she focused on one thing: taking down the Revinir. But how? The way to do it was completely eluding Thisbe.

One day during their private lesson, when Thisbe, Ibrahim, and Clementi were resting after a particularly strenuous workout with Florence, Thisbe brought up the topic.

“I think we need new, more powerful magic,” Thisbe said. “If none of our spells work against the Revinir, we have to come up with something that will.”

“That sounds good in theory,” said Florence. “But how will we know what will work if we can’t try it out until we’re face-to-face with her?”

“It just has to be . . . huge,” said Thisbe. “Super powerful. More powerful than anything anyone’s ever created before.”

“Spells like that are dangerous to have around,” Florence said quietly. “We had one before. It’s called obliterate.” She shared with them the story of the single component that Alex had created when trying to take out Gondoleery Rattrapp. It was a spell that had obliterated a whole vehicle in Quill and had almost reduced Matilda, one of Artimé’s dear gargoyle statues, to a pile of rubble. Not to mention that Sky had been close to where the spell landed—a few steps closer and it could have killed her. “That’s not something we want to have happen again,” said Florence. “We’ve lost enough friends and family.”

Thisbe nodded somberly. She’d read that story in one of the books Lani had written. It was a sobering thought that Alex, even as good a mage as he’d been, had been so close to making an irreversible mistake. Why, if he’d made a mistake like that, had he been so hard on Thisbe and Fifer?

“I think the dragon aspect is the biggest problem,” Clementi said. “Dragons have their own mysterious magic that we don’t really know much about, since they’re so secretive. Not to mention enormous.”

“And if all of the dragons in the surrounding worlds are under the Revinir’s spell,” added Ibrahim, “which is what it looked like to us, we’d need new spells that would work on them, too, in case they aren’t friendly to us like Pan and her kin are.”