(Luna) Life at Hollowcrest settles into something almost like a rhythm over the next few days.
Training with Rowan fills my mornings, classes I’m slowly starting to understand take up the afternoons, and evenings bring easy nonsense with Zephyr or quiet company with Sage.
The routine doesn’t erase the worry still sitting in the back of my mind about Jace, or the unease Zephyr planted at that little café table, but it gives me somewhere to put my energy that isn’t just spiraling.
I’ve started noticing small things: the dining hall smelling like cedar smoke in the evenings, the particular creak of the third stair on my way to breakfast, Sage always saving me a seat without ever mentioning it.
Small anchors.
I need them more than I want to admit.
Spiritwalker Den sessions are still new to me, since barely anyone is left in the Den to teach them.
Most of what I’ve learned so far has come from Thessaly, the ancient wolf who serves as Den mother, a woman so old her silver hair has gone nearly translucent.
Her pale eyes carry the particular stillness of someone who has spent far more time listening to the world than talking over it.
A gentleness lives in her that I didn’t expect, tucked somewhere beneath all that quiet authority, like she’s carrying centuries of patience and doling it out to me one careful spoonful at a time.
“Today we meditate,” Thessaly instructs, her voice calm, settling cross-legged across from me on the worn cushions in the small, dusty meeting room at the heart of the Den.
“Spirit Walking begins with quiet.
You cannot project your consciousness anywhere if your mind refuses to sit still first.” “I’m good at sitting still,” I say, my tone light, though it’s mostly a lie.
Sitting still has never been my strength.
My whole life has been built around motion, around counting seconds and chasing finish lines, and stillness has always felt like something closer to failure.
“We shall see,” Thessaly answers, amused, her mouth curving just barely.
I close my eyes the way she instructs, focus on my breath the same way Rowan taught me for the shift, in slow, out slower.
My mind keeps snagging on Jace’s face, Kael’s silence, the shape of a shadow I haven’t even seen yet but somehow already dread.
Thessaly’s voice guides me through it anyway, low and even, patient in a way that makes me want to try harder, if only not to disappoint her.
One moment I’m sitting on a cushion in a dusty room.
The next, without any sensation of movement at all, I’m somewhere else entirely.
Silver trees rise up around me, tall and impossibly slender, their bark gleaming like polished moonlight even though there’s no visible source of light anywhere overhead.
The sky stretches endless and luminous above me, not quite day and not quite night, glowing with a soft silver radiance that seems to come from everywhere at once.
The air tastes strange when I breathe it in, sweet and sharp at the same time, like something I don’t have words for.
Starlight, maybe, if starlight had a flavor.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
For one unguarded moment, I forget to be afraid of anything.
Jace and Kael and the weight of eyes I can’t see watching me from somewhere behind closed doors all fall away.
There’s only this, silver and light and a silence so complete it feels like being held.
I turn in a slow circle, drinking in the impossible glow of the Silver Grove, my chest aching with something close to wonder, when movement catches at the very edge of my vision.
A shadow.
It sits at the treeline, dark and wrong against the endless silver glow, a shape that doesn’t belong here any more than a stain belongs on clean fabric.
It isn’t moving toward me, exactly.
Just watching.
Still, patient, present in a way that makes my skin crawl even from this distance.
The wonder curdles into something colder almost instantly.
My heartbeat picks up despite the calm Thessaly worked so hard to build in me.
Thessaly told me the Otherworld is pure, untouched by the kind of darkness that lives beneath Hollowcrest.
Whatever that shadow is, it shouldn’t exist here at all.
I take a step toward it, some reckless curiosity pulling me forward despite the fear coiling tight in my stomach.
The world yanks itself away from me all at once, the silver trees and luminous sky collapsing into darkness so fast it feels like falling.
I gasp back into my body hard enough to nearly topple off the cushion.
Thessaly’s hands are already gripping my shoulders, steadying me.
Beside us, the candle she lit before we began has guttered to a thread of smoke, its flame snuffed out though the air in the room sits still and undisturbed.
Her nostrils flare, testing the air the way I’ve seen wolves do, and whatever she catches there drains the color from her weathered face.
“What did you see?” Thessaly demands, her voice sharp and urgent, nothing like the calm, measured tone she used to guide me into the meditation in the first place.
“Luna.
What did you see out there?” I open my mouth, the shadow still burned bright behind my eyes, that stillness, that wrongness, and something stops the words before they reach my tongue.
Thessaly’s fear, raw and unhidden on her ancient face, tells me more than she probably means it to.
Whatever I saw, it left a mark she could sense even from the outside, something that reached far enough to snuff a flame and pale a face that has surely witnessed centuries without flinching.
“Nothing,” I say, keeping my voice even.
“Trees.
Sky.
It was beautiful.” Thessaly studies me for a long moment, her gaze flicking once toward the dead candle.
I don’t know if she believes me, but she doesn’t push.
She just nods slowly and lets her hands fall away from my shoulders.
Something almost sad crosses her face afterward, like she recognizes the shape of a secret being born and knows better than to try prying it open before it’s ready.
I don’t know why I lied.
Maybe it’s Kael’s silence about the Undercroft weighing on me, or Zephyr’s warning about rooms I’m not invited into, or Greymane’s question I still don’t have an answer for.
Something in me has started keeping things close instead of handing them over, learning the shape of a secret before I even decide to tell it.
My hands are trembling slightly in my lap, and I press them flat against my knees to still them.
I hate that I’m learning it.
I hate it, and I do it anyway.