Bianca Segreti has been waiting for this day for years: her big graduation party. Her friends will be there to help her get through the evening, and hopefully there will be something to celebrate by dawn.She knows how her father got ahead in business. He had a gift, one of the ones no one talks about. But he misused that gift, and that's sending her father away for a long time.Bianca wants to do better, to be a better person. Starting tomorrow.Tonight she's going to...

Natasha Lopez finally has a school she actually likes, friends and classmates, and opportunities to use her powers to help others. But she still needs to figure out where her life is going, and who she intends to be. But when her father disappears behind a ward they'd never seen before, everything else is put on hold because it's up to her to bring him back.She needs help finding him, someone who can walk through wards like they aren't there. That means she needs Señor Fluffypants,...

Mike Tran comes from a long line of Stitch Witches, even though he didn't inherit that gift. He's got a crazy idea, though, that a Stitch Witch can fix the broken interior wards of the realm of Lost Ark. And rumor claims that one of the Cadets he's watching over has that gift.Luci Delgado knows that Stitch Witches aren't highly respected in magic schools like Umbrum Hall. Most of her classmates are powerful magic users, so she's anxious about underwhelming them with her crocheting ...

A summer in isolation in Umbrum Hall has all of Mary's class frustrated. The students and instructors are trying to make the best of it, but it's not easy restraining hundreds of magically trained Potentials and Cadets.Mary Quirk still hasn't gotten over seeing a world destroyed when Umbrum's fellow school of El Paso Cerrado collapsed, Now months later, some of the Paso students are returning to see if anything has survived. Mary would love to go herself, but it's not her school, a...

Mary Quirk has some unfinished business.Earlier that summer, Mary and her friends managed to rescue three cadets from their rival school, El Paso Cerrado. As part of that effort, Mary turned up a strange fact that her boyfriend Finn and his twin Dillon are both hiding: their human grandfather was a Maledictor.Maledictors make curses. It's an old and feared talent that isn't well understood. And Dillon clearly has more than a touch of it.Unfortunately, that's become ...

Isla Rivera has a problem. Her counterpart from El Paso Cerrado, having failed to secure his own place as Keeper there, now wants to steal her slot as Keeper of Umbrum Hall. The only question is how far Miguel will go to take that from her.The solution seems obvious, but it means taking a step she's not ready for. A step that might create permanent ties between her and Jason Brown. She's not sure if she's more afraid that would tie her to him, or that it would bind him to her. Hone...

Of all the students at Umbrum Hall, Mary's one of the rarer types of magic user—a Gatemaker. She's able to jump from one place to the next and sometimes to carry others with her. That's instinctive. Now she's learning to do the heavy lifting, making gates that other people can walk through by themselves. Gates between places, and gates between realms.That's a skill that will take years to master, but she may be running out of time.Because Umbrum Hall is more than just a sch...

Mary is a fire elemental, capable of creating flames from the very air around her. But to keep her place in the magic school of Umbrum Hall, she'll need more than that skill to impress the professors. After all, anyone with a match can start a blaze.Her first year, she worked hard and kept her head down. Something feels different this year, though, right from the start. Secrets are unfolding in front of her: about the nature of the school itself, about who her classmates truly are,...

The language of Poetry is an art that most of us attempt at some point in our lives. Although its commonplace exposure has been somewhat marginalised in today’s often fast-paced lives we all recognise good verse that can empathise with our thoughts or open us up to experience new things in new ways, to better understand and to enjoy the many strands of our lives.But finding a starting point can be overwhelming, even off-putting, so in this series we offer up our Top 10 classic poet...

In England the Victorian Age was about to become the past and a new age of worldwide wars of horror and slaughter would envelop and decimate generations, forever staining mankind.The Century would see the World discover strengths. The Democracies would stand firm against Fascism and later Communism yet still keep its own elite and privileged in power and the rest of us underfoot.The World was more connected than ever before. Culture accelerated its kaleidoscopic and interwo...

The language of Poetry is an art that most of us attempt at some point in our lives. Although its commonplace exposure has been somewhat marginalised in today’s often fast-paced lives we all recognise good verse that can empathise with our thoughts or open us up to experience new things in new ways, to better understand and to enjoy the many strands of our lives.But finding a starting point can be overwhelming, even off-putting, so in this series we offer up our Top 10 classic poet...