Violet Summers had three weeks to win a crown she did not understand. She stood in her workshop at the top of the lavender tower, and she pressed a fresh spray of pink and yellow buttercups between her fingers. The Grand Faery Revel chose one faery to lead every festival in Aryndale for the coming age. Violet wanted that crown more than anything. But she had never once watched the Revel judged, and she did not know what act could win it. Her little purple dragon dozed on the windowsill, tail curled tight. Violet held the flowers up to the light. "A dance? A song? Do I brew something?" she asked the dragon. It blinked its huge turquoise eyes and offered nothing. She had planned to charm the buttercups into bloom on stage. Now she froze. What if the judges hated flowers? What if last year's winner sang, or flew, or breathed fire? She could spend three weeks perfecting the wrong act and lose everything. She dropped the flowers and crossed to her study desk. Books stood in a tight row above the potion flasks and carving tools. She had bought them from a wandcrafter last spring and never opened them. Now she pulled the tallest one free. Dust lifted. The spine read simply: *Revels Past*. Violet lit a candle and turned the pages fast. She found lists. Names. Acts. One winner had spun a bridge of ice. Another had sung the northern lights down from the sky. Her heart sank lower with each page. Every winning act was grand. Enormous. Nothing like a bunch of buttercups. Then the dragon hopped onto the desk and pinned the last page with one small claw. Violet leaned close. The final entry described no ice, no song, no fire. It read: *The crown goes to the act the judges have never seen before.* Below it, a single line: three judges scored each Revel, and no two had ever agreed on the same kind of magic. Violet sat back. The truth landed hard and clear. There was no safe act to copy. Every winner had won by being new. Her flowers were not the problem. Her small idea was. She looked at the buttercups on the floor, then at her sleeping garden of tools and flasks. She did not need to guess what the judges wanted. She needed to build something none of them had witnessed. Her hands were already steady again. Violet closed the book. "Not flowers," she told the dragon. "Flowers that fly." The dragon tilted its head. Outside, the first festival lanterns flickered on across Aryndale. She had her answer now, and a harder problem with it. She had never made a living thing before. And she had three weeks to learn.