(Luna) Two weeks pass at Hollowcrest in a blur of training sessions, half-understood lectures, and evenings at the Moonpool that have started to feel less like escape and more like habit.
Two weeks of Kael correcting my stance in the library, his patience never wavering even when mine does.
Two weeks of Sage smuggling cookies into my room after curfew, pressing them into my hands like tiny acts of rebellion against a world that keeps watching me too closely.
Two weeks of the Twins adopting me a little further into their chaos every single day, until their laughter has become something I listen for without meaning to.
Two weeks, and I still haven’t shifted.
Everyone else has.
I saw it happen myself three days ago, a cub barely twelve years old standing at the edge of the training grounds, her whole body folding into itself and reshaping in one fluid, impossible motion until a small brown wolf stood blinking in the grass where a girl had been seconds before.
The other cubs cheered.
Sage squeezed my arm.
“It’ll happen for you too,” she promised, voice bright with the kind of certainty that only makes the ache worse.
“Everyone finds their wolf eventually.” I couldn’t stop staring at that little wolf shaking out her new fur like she’d been born knowing how.
The whispers followed soon after, the way they follow me everywhere now.
I catch fragments of it in the dining hall, in the corridors, in the way conversations stutter and drop when I pass.
I’m the Eclipse girl with the mark nobody’s seen in a thousand years, and I still can’t do the one thing every other wolf here manages before they’ve even unpacked their bags.
The weight of that failure sits heavier each day, a stone I carry from lesson to lesson, impossible to set down.
The Shifting Circle sits at the edge of the training grounds, a wide ring of ancient stone worn smooth by centuries of feet, heavily warded, the air inside it thick in a way that makes the hair on my arms stand up the moment I step across the boundary.
Even the light seems different here, thinner, as though the wards filter out anything that doesn’t belong to the old magic humming beneath the stones.
“The wards amplify the bond between you and your wolf,” Kael explains, his tone measured and instructive, standing across from me inside the circle before we begin.
“Most students could shift anywhere, given enough time, but the circle strips away distraction and makes that first connection easier to find.
It’s tradition, but it’s also practical.
No one’s forcing you to use it.
It’s simply the fastest way I know to help you.” “Close your eyes,” he adds, his voice steady and coaxing, though I’ve started to notice the small furrow that deepens between his brows when I struggle.
“Feel for the bond.
It’s already there, Luna.
You’re not creating something new.
You’re finding what’s already inside you.” I close my eyes.
I try.
I feel for it the way he tells me to, reaching inward past the buzzing hum that’s lived under my skin since the fever broke, searching for something that feels like a wolf, like teeth and fur and four legs eating up ground faster than my human body ever could.
For a second, I swear I brush against something.
A shape.
A presence, coiled tight and waiting somewhere just out of reach, close enough that my breath catches in anticipation.
I grab for it.
It slips away like smoke closing around my fingers, gone the instant I try to hold it, and I open my eyes with a frustrated growl that surprises even me.
My hands curl into fists at my sides, nails biting crescents into my palms.
We try again.
And again.
By the fourth attempt, sweat beads along my hairline despite the cool air, and my legs have started to tremble from the strain of standing so still while reaching so hard inward.
“Stop,” Kael orders, his voice sharper now, insistent but not unkind.
“You’re grabbing at it.
That’s the problem.
You don’t drag your wolf out into the light.
You stop fighting long enough to let it come to you.” “I don’t know how to do that.” My voice cracks with frustration, my whole body trembling from the effort of trying and failing over and over.
“I don’t know how to just let go of something I can’t even see.” “You have to trust it,” he says, quiet and unwavering.
“I don’t even know what it is!” I shout, the words echoing off the stone around the circle.
Kael goes quiet, watching me with an expression I can’t quite read, something between concern and calculation, as though he’s trying to solve a puzzle that keeps changing shape in front of him.
I close my eyes one more time, one last attempt, reaching for that flicker of presence again, and this time I don’t grab.
I try to just breathe, try to let it exist without demanding it show itself, try to imagine what it might feel like to simply wait.
Nothing happens.
The flicker doesn’t even appear this time.
Just empty, aching silence where a wolf is supposed to be, a silence so complete it feels almost cruel, as though whatever lives inside me has decided I’m not worth the trouble of appearing.
I open my eyes, humiliation burning hot in my chest, tears stinging at the corners of my eyes that I refuse to let fall in front of him.
My throat tightens around words I don’t trust myself to say without breaking.
“I can’t do this,” I say, voice flat with defeat, and I don’t wait for his response.
I walk straight out of the circle, past the small cluster of students who’ve gathered to watch, their whispers following me the same way they have since the night I arrived.
I keep my eyes forward, refusing to give any of them the satisfaction of seeing my face crumble.
I’m halfway back to Spiritwalker Den, arms crossed tight against my chest, jaw clenched so hard it aches, when a voice cuts through my misery from somewhere off to the side.
“Rough day, Eclipse Girl?” a voice calls, dry and amused, cutting through my misery.
I turn to find a boy leaning against a tree at the edge of the path, white-blond hair catching what little light filters through the branches overhead, ice-blue eyes bright with a grin that looks like a dare all on its own.
“Go to hell,” I snap, not slowing my pace.
He laughs, low and delighted, pushing off the tree to fall into step beside me without waiting for permission.
“I like you already,” he says, grinning like he’s already won something.
“I didn’t ask you to walk with me.” “You didn’t ask me not to, either,” he counters, easy and unbothered, hands shoved in his pockets, keeping pace effortlessly despite my furious speed-walking.
“I’m Zephyr, by the way.
Galerunner Den.
In case you were wondering.” “I wasn’t.” “You will be.
Everyone gets there eventually,” he says, glancing sideways at me, something warm and mischievous in his expression, a lightness that feels foreign after the heaviness of the last hour.
“So.
Shifting Circle didn’t go well, huh?” “None of your business.” “Fair enough,” he says, unfazed.
Instead of pushing, he launches into a completely unrelated story about the time he snuck an entire pie out of the Great Hall kitchens and ate it alone at the top of the Galerunner tower just to see if he could, gesturing with his hands as though reliving the whole ridiculous adventure.
Despite myself, despite the humiliation still burning hot in my chest, I feel the corner of my mouth twitch.
“That’s a terrible story,” I say.
“It’s an incredible story.
You’re just mad you weren’t there for it,” he shoots back, grinning wider at the almost-smile he’s clearly caught on my face.
“There she is.
Knew you had one in there somewhere.” He keeps talking, filling the walk with easy nonsense, complaints about his professors, a ridiculous theory about why the Stonefang wolves are all secretly terrible dancers, and somewhere in the middle of it, without meaning to, I laugh.
A real laugh, surprised out of me before I can stop it, startling even myself with how foreign the sound feels after weeks of clenched jaws and swallowed frustration.
It isn’t until we’re almost at the Spiritwalker Den steps that I realize something strange.
I haven’t thought about Jace once during this entire walk.
Haven’t thought about Kael’s hands on my shoulders in the library, or the resonance humming quiet in my chest every time Caspian’s near.
For five whole minutes, walking beside a boy I met ten minutes ago, my head has been completely, blessedly empty of all of it, free of the constant weight I’ve been carrying since the fever first broke.
My steps slow on the stairs, and my stomach tightens, a small knot of unease curling tight beneath my ribs.