Blazing Academy: Semester One (Academy For All Things Scorching #1) - Avery Song Page 0,62

I feigned innocence. "What could you possibly mean? It's my favorite dessert, currently."

"Uh-huh," he replied. "I'll order it."

"What's your favorite dessert?"

"You," he replied without even missing a beat. All I could do was gawk back at him, my cheeks beginning to turn red at the unexpected response. He pressed a button and then placed the tablet on the island to then admire my red face.

"Aww, you're all red."

"Y-You can't say things like that!" I complained. "I'm sixteen! Innocent, I say."

"Sixteen is just a number, and if you were so innocent, your face wouldn't be as red as a tomato. In fact, you probably will match the living room seats."

"Shut up!" I huffed and crossed my arms. "I hate you."

"Liar." He looked pleased with my frustrations as he carried on with, "Feeling more energetic?"

"Yes." I wasn't going to lie about it.

"Wanna talk?"

I slowly nodded, returning to my tea that was half finished.

"I'm struggling with the potential idea that my mom was the one to seal my powers away." That was the shimmering worry in my head after CloverSpell had dropped the bomb on us.

* * *

"My mom could have potentially put the seal on me?" I gasped. "W-Why would she do that?"

"Is there proof?" Gabriel questioned.

"We're not totally sure if that could have been a case. It's currently a strong possibility due to how unique Alice is," Clover explained. "That seal was extremely strong, having to take the three of you, myself, and Professor Daily to securely get rid of the shattered remains that would have been swallowed by the years of pent-up power."

"You've noticed that you haven't been triggering things to explode or even light up, haven't you, Alice?" Professor Daily acknowledged as he sought validation.

"You're right about that," I confessed.

"All of those incidents were due to your flaming abilities seeping past the cracks in the seal. From a quick observation from the scan we conducted after the ceremony, it's been predicted that the shattering of the seal began when you were around six or seven," Clover explained. "Do you remembering confronting your mother or someone of importance around then?"

"Not really," I answered. "Why would that have to do with my mom potentially being the culprit of this seal?"

"It's only a theory so far, Alice. It currently makes sense because your Mother is extremely powerful from what her past records revealed. But even those are outdated since they were reported after your birth. They may not be a true reflection of her power. It's almost impossible for someone of lower magical power and with a lack of skill in all flaming traits to have been able to place a spell of that caliber on you," Mr. Daily explained.

"Don't seals need to be touched upon?" Westley questioned. "They don't just sit there until they shatter. They have to be touched upon every couple of months, if not once a year. Wouldn't that mean her mother would have had to come to visit her to conduct the revitalizing of the seal?"

"You're correct." Clover nodded. "Which is why we think when Alice was younger, her mother could have taken advantage of her visits to boost up this seal. However, those visits had to have lessened at some point, and then Alice stopped seeing her mother altogether."

"What purpose would a mother have in placing a seal on her child that she knows if not maintained with proper attention and care could kill her?" Keru questioned as he crossed his arms. "It's like accepting the job to protect someone, having good progress, and ditching the role entirely when the individual needs it the most."

"Keru's right," Gabriel added. "Youth, particularly from childhood to teenage years, are the most vulnerable of any magic-user. If her mother's goal was to keep her safe from her own power, she wouldn't simply give up midway."

"Something or someone had to have stopped her, or whoever was assigned the task, from coming to give the protective seal a boost," Gabriel explained. "No matter the minor details, it just seems fishy for Alice's mother to merely vanish."

"We agree with you." Clover sighed and looked at Professor Daily.

"However," Professor Daily began, "this is something we're probably going to have to investigate. Chambers couldn't have been the one to do the seal. His magic is very different, and lacks two of the four flame traits."

"Until then, we wanted to be transparent with our current findings so you have a bit of insight. This isn't something you need to worry about during this semester. The seal