It was Marina at the door.

When I opened it, she completely ignored my existence. Literally she pushed by me as if I wasn’t even standing there.

“I can get us into Saint Niveus,” she said to Andie.

“No,” Andie said.

“Just hear me out,” Marina said.

“No,” Andie repeated.

“It’s key week!”

“I don’t care,” Andie said flatly.

Marina rolled her eyes. “You are such a goodie two shoes,” she said and Andie turned scarlet. “Even if we get caught what are they gonna do expel us? It’s key week, this is literally what we’re supposed to be doing!”

“I am not a goodie two shoes,” Andie said, slamming their book down hard on the bedside table. “I’m just not going to follow you around. If Saint Niveus wants my help they can ask me.”

And Marina said, impatiently, without skipping a beat, “Why on earth would they ask you, they have no idea what you can do.”

At which point I glanced at Andie to see how I should react because, and I cannot stress this enough, fuck Marina Maddox. But Andie only seemed slightly frantic, not like they were upset by what Marina said, but like they wished I wasn’t there to hear it.

They recovered pretty quickly though. “I’m not doing this with you,” Andie said. “If you want my help, tell one of your Saint Niveus friends.”

Marina just rolled her eyes, tossed her hair, said, “I’m getting that key. I suspect if you join me, you’ll have your choice of colleges, but suit yourself,” and flounced from the room.

When she was gone Andie closed their eyes and took a long soothing breath, but otherwise didn’t comment. They picked up their book and started reading again.

“…you okay?” I asked.

“Yep,” they said, without looking up from their book.

That was Wednesday night.

By Thursday morning I had a working outline to get the key from Bellhoof.

What’s even funnier is that by Thursday night I would not care about key week at all, what so ever.

We turned our lights off at a perfectly reasonable hour, but neither of us fell asleep. I could hear Andie tossing and turning for like at least an hour before finally they flopped back onto their back and sighed audibly.

“You want to get that key don’t you,” I said across the quiet room.

“So bad,” Andie said. “Damn it, Marina.”

Yeah literally, fuck Marina hahaha she was under my skin too.

The funny thing is that with the key in Bellhoof’s hands, I was the most qualified I could hope to be to help get that key. Plus, we literally knew where the minks were, having spent last week meeting them. So like… if ever we were going to take key week into our own hands, this was the moment to do it.

The only hitch was that Polecat is supposed to be pretty vicious, but I have it on pretty solid authority that in general, poison minks are naturally good tempered and Speckle the heart attack fawn is way more dangerous so I was willing to give Polecat a shot.

Thursday morning, everyone was buzzing because a Willowa sophomore named Dane Wickerfell tried to use magic to get the key from Polecat and Polecat evidently did not want to give up his treasure. Apparently Dane Wickerfell got bit, and it turned into a pretty serious infection. He’s been in the infirmary all day.

Our response to this news? Increased excitement, for some reason? Like, Andie and I were secretly harboring this fantasy where we were the miraculous minnows, heroes of key week.

Lunacy, in retrospect. Especially since as it stood it was looking like Bellhoof had a real shot of winning key week for the first time EVER, which is something I would have been pretty invested in not 12 hours earlier. Never underestimate the power of sheer spite I guess is the moral of this very short story.

It’s probably for the best that we didn’t have the time to put any of our ridiculous plans into action that day. In our heads, I think we were planning on doing it that night, which was good because what we needed to be doing was studying. Our homework situation has been getting increasingly dire.

Lily has us writing a deep, in depth analysis about the differences between the different kinds of magic, and like it’s easy to say oh yeah a warlock uses magic that comes from a creature that uses magic and a sorcerer uses magic that comes from ghosts but like… what does that mean really? How is energy left over from dead people transformed into magic? How does a warlock pull magic from a source? Where does magic even come from? Every question just leads to more questions, I literally don’t even know where to start.

Plus, I don’t think I’ve even talked about this yet, but twice a week in the afternoons we’re all required to take like… a normal math class, and a normal science class. Apparently biology is required for cryptozoology and calculus and chemistry are both required for alchemy.

I’m going to turn my brain inside out.

But it wasn’t math, or the different kinds of magic that forcibly rearranged my priorities yesterday. No no, that honor belongs to Protsman, who’s history lessons moved on from the Guardian spell to the Dog Saints spell, and let me tell you. My perception of reality has been grabbed by the throat and violently shaken. Idk if I’ll recover from this one.

“As many of you know at this point,” he began the class yesterday, cheerfully, while my head was still full of all the ways I would befriend Polecat and win school-wide accolades (bragging rights) “the Guardian is not the only active chosen one spell. Very recently another chosen one spell awoke, one of the oldest, and most infamous chosen one spells that exist on this earth. Can anyone tell me what that is?”

Lots of people raised their hands. I mean, mostly kids from the old families, obviously, but still, lots of people.

“Go ahead Mr Mun,” Protsman said with a little smile and Rook said, in a low, clear voice, “The Dog Saints.”

“That’s them,” Protsman said with a fleeting smile in our direction, and then asked of the class at large, “what can you tell me about Dog Saints?”

HA. What can I tell you about Dog Saints. TOO MUCH.

I didn’t raise my hand. I figured Protsman didn’t wanted to know that Julian has bad breath in the morning and Neal is a terrible driver.

Lots of other people volunteered though. LOTS of other people.

“There are five of them and they all have a different magical ability,” Ichabod said, enthusiastically.

“They’re supposed to be leaders,” added Terran Von Trostan.

“Their abilities interact to make them more effective as a whole than individually,” drawled Marina, barely looking up.

“What else?” Protsman called, gesturing for us to keep volunteering.

“The Dog Saints are only called when the world enters periapsis,” Bass called and Protsman snapped and pointed up into the crowd, searching for him.

“Yes! Who said that? Mr Scelerat! Tell us more!”

Bass hesitated. “Uhhh, periapsis is when our world gets the most magical,” he said. “And that’s when the Dog Saint spell triggers.”

“Very good, and when were last in periapsis?”

And then Bass said, casually, as if he weren’t dropping a bomb on my head that would change the way I understood everything I thought I knew about Dog Saints and also the future, “Approximately 11,500 years ago.” And I, who had been taking a drink from my water bottle, choked and water came out my nose.

“What?” I spluttered, causing an absolute scene.

“Yeah,” Bass said, as if startled by my response. “I mean, we don’t know exact dates, but it was right about when farming started. Didn’t you know that?”

NO I DID NOT KNOW THAT.

Protsman was smiling knowingly at me. “Yes so it is perhaps understandable why the reappearance of that particular chosen one spell is so significant,” he said.

YEAH NO KIDDING.

Fucking Neal and Julian I swear to god I thought the Dog Saints reappeared like… once every 500 or so years.

At the witch summit at Hedgewood last year Bass compared stories about the Dog Saints to stories about King Arthur and the round table, so I thought, sure okay, Dog Saints are of ye olden times, their greatness passed down via badly misspelled manuscript and like… stitched into tapestries or whatever. Like, oh yeah Shiloh, Dog Saints reappear every once and a while to make sure there’s no world ending events, and look! See how the world hasn’t ended? They do a great job!

ELEVEN AND A HALF THOUSAND YEARS AGO? NEAL AND JULIAN HAWTHORNE ARE THE FIRST DOG SAINTS IN ELEVEN AND A HALF THOUSAND YEARS?

And you should have heard these kids talking about them. All these rich, highly educated kids, from old, secret society families, who have grown up knowing about magic and cryptids and other worlds, and they talked about Dog Saints with this like… insane awestruck wonder.

I came out of class fucking furious. Just outraged to my bones. I told Bass, Rook and Andie that I needed to get some air and Rook gave me this super knowing, sympathetic look which made me want to die, and then I stormed down the hill towards the boat house and I called the Hawthornes.

“Hey,” Neal said brightly on the second ring. “Settle this for us: would you rather be a human sacrifice preserved in a bog or accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake?”

And I said, “Why didn’t you tell me that you were the first Dog Saints in 11,500 years?”

And Neal said, “I asked first.”

And I said, “Neal I swear to god —”

And Neal said, “I feel like if you’re a human sacrifice you could maybe convince yourself that your death was serving a higher purpose, but also the sheer rage at being accused of something can carry you through a lot.”

And I said, “listen once there’s a knife to your throat to be honest I don’t think it really matters.” Because remember, I actually have been on the brink of becoming a human sacrifice myself, so even in my righteous fury I was able to be distracted.

And Neal said, laughing, “Oh that’s right you really know what it’s like, huh. We should have called you earlier. Did you hear that Julian? Shiloh says it probably doesn’t matter—”

And then I remembered why I was calling and said, loudly, “ELEVEN THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.”

There was a long, somewhat awkward silence on the other end of the phone. Then, gently, Julian said, “does it really matter?”

“To everyone here, it matters a lot!” I cried.

“Well, yeah, but…” I could practically hear Julian running his fingers through his mane of hair. “Like, does it change anything? Really? It doesn’t change the effect these abilities have had on our lives. And it certainly doesn’t change the job much, does it?”

I hesitated.

“It doesn’t change what us being here means,” Julian went on. “It doesn’t change what the next few decades, or hell maybe even centuries, are likely to be like.”

I stood there in the middle of the uneven path, phone pressed to my ear, staring down at the boathouse, and the ferry, which bumped gently against the dock.

“What —” I began, and Neal said,

“C’mon kiddo, did you think the Dog Saints were harbingers of good tidings? Easy futures and good forecasts?”

“What?” I said again, shrill this time.

“Why do you think Lana’s so eager to boss us around?” Neal said. “And the witches allow us to attend their summits? And everyone wants us to go full Joan of Arc and like… lead us to holy victory or whatever?” which is a pretty loose translation of the whole Joan of Arc story, but I was too busy having a reality crisis to notice that at the time.

All of last year was coming into a new, strange kind of focus. I put my hand on my forehead, as if that could contain the frantic reevaluation of everything I’ve experienced in the last two years.

Neal laughed. “Anyways, you’re one to talk. You raise the dead kiddo. You’re the first one ever. What’s 11 thousand years compared to that?”

So I said, “I’m gonna throw up.” I sat down right on the path and a pair of Bellhoof students gave me a funny look as they diverted to avoid me.

“No you’re not,” Neal said. “What time is it there? Shouldn’t you be eating dinner or something?”

As if food could fix the enormity of what I’d just realized.

I asked, “What is periapsis?”

“It’s when our world is exposed to lots of magic,” Julian said. “It’s a very rare phenomenon.”

Yeah, super rare apparently. Comes up about once every 11,500 years.

“Yeah, but what does that actually mean?” I asked. “What happens?”

Both of them were very quiet for a while.

Then, “That’s a question for Protsman,” Neal said.

“We don’t know exactly,” Julian added. “There’s not a ton of definitive information.” Which was definitely a classic Julian dodge.

“But —”

“Last year a snake that had been asleep underground for millennia woke up, and caused earthquakes all over the west coast” Neal interrupted. “It was the largest scale cryptid event we’ve seen in generations. And what did we do?”

For a moment I just remembered the claustrophobia, that enormous, lonely, creature, Lily’s desperate sorcery to keep the caves from crushing us all.

Then Neal said, “We handled it. Right? We handled it.”

And he’s right. We did. We handled it. I took a deep breath.

“We had not one but two rifts stay open for extended periods of time last year,” Neal went on. “Out of one of them, we got a fog that probably could have ended all life on this planet, but it didn’t. We handled that too.”

“Just like we’ll handle the next thing,” Julian said. “And the thing after that. We’re stronger and more organized now than we’ve ever been before. Whatever happens, we’ll rise to meet it.”

I sat there with that for a long moment.

Dog Saints are older than agriculture, I spent all last year watching the world tip threateningly towards apocalyptic magical catastrophe, and Julian’s solution is we’ll cross the bridges as they come?

“What do I do?” I said.

“You go to school,” Julian answered, readily, like this was obvious. “You learn as much as you can so when the time comes, you have the knowledge or the skill set to make the difference.”

I wanted to cry.

“Do you need to talk to Lana?” Neal asked, finally concerned. “Do you need us to come back? We can spend a weekend off the island if you want. Have a break.”

Ooof, sounds good, doesn’t it? But they’re probably on a hunt, or about to be on a hunt. Apparently they’re the legendary heroes of pre-agrarian society so they probably have bigger fish to fry than my existential crisis.

“No,” I assured him. “I’m okay.”

But when I got back to dinner, I no longer gave even a fleeting fuck about key week. Andie turned in their chair, eyes glittering, to tell me that they’d just been down at the stables, and told me that Polecat had been put down to sleep for the night, and I answered, “honestly, I sorta want Bellhoof to win.”

“Oh,” Andie said, face falling. “Sure, okay.”

I feel like a total monster. It is currently Friday morning, and we all rushed breakfast to try and finish our essays for Lily. It’s really quiet and weird and I know it’s my fault but I don’t know how to fix it so instead I’m writing a blog post instead of doing my homework.