Uva had never been so gobsmacked in her entire life—not by a potion gone wrong, not by an incantation that backfired, and certainly not by the bizarre results currently taunting her from the pristine surface of the marble lab table.
She sat hunched forward, arms pressed hard against the wooden arms of the old chair she had dragged from the corner of the room, her posture tight with tension. She had been there since morning, her white cloak now crumpled around her, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, revealing her pale, veiny arms smeared with thin lines of red ink—notes she had written on herself in a moment of manic inspiration hours ago.
Frustration had built up inside her like a storm with no release, reaching a tipping point. At one point, all she could do was mumble under her breath, each word thick with venom.
"Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is madness," she muttered aloud, her voice cracked from disuse, her throat dry and raw.
