Albert Grey had spent years trying to understand Sera’s spell, or, rather, seething at its existence and trying to conjure something just as vast and unending for himself. He had never been able to because Albert Grey ruled with a boot on the neck of anything and anyone he was ruling, including his own formidable magic, and what he had never realised was that his magic, recognising that it was not and had never been loved by the man who wielded it, had simply decided not to play along. It did as it was told because it did, after all, have a boot on its neck, but it did not do one bit more.
