(Luna) The days after the imprint pass in a strange, disorienting blur.
I don’t understand it, not even after Sage explains it to me twice, patient and careful, like she’s talking someone down from a ledge.
She draws diagrams in the margins of her notebook, sketches of intertwined threads and pulsing knots of light, but the explanations slide off me as fast as she offers them.
I nod along anyway, pretending comprehension I don’t feel, because the alternative is admitting how lost I am.
It isn’t like the resonance I felt with Caspian before.
That was a quiet tuning fork note struck low in my chest, something I could set aside when I needed to.
Now it’s overwhelming, constant, a warmth that sits permanently behind my ribs like a second heartbeat that isn’t quite mine.
I feel him at the edges of my own consciousness whenever I let my guard down, faint but undeniable, a presence woven into me that wasn’t there a week ago.
Some mornings I wake already aware of him, that steady hum settled into my bones before I’ve even opened my eyes, and I have to lie still for a long moment just to remember where I end and he begins.
Sometimes it jolts me awake in the middle of the night, that sense of him breathing somewhere just beyond my own skin, and I lie there in the dark, my hand pressed flat against my sternum, trying to decide whether the ache belongs to me or to him.
Right now, threaded through that warmth, I feel fear.
His fear, not mine, sharp and persistent, though I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s causing it.
Every time I try to reach toward it, understand it, it slips away from me, like trying to hold water in cupped hands.
I want to corner him somewhere quiet and demand answers, but some instinct keeps holding me back, some small voice warning me I might not like what I find.
So I wait instead, and the waiting gnaws at me more than the fear itself does.
I don’t get much time to sit with the confusion, because the full moon arrives two nights later, and the entire Academy turns its attention toward the Moonpool.
This is my first full moon at Hollowcrest.
Sage warned me it would be different from anything I’ve felt before, that the pull gets stronger the longer a wolf goes without properly bonding to it, but she wouldn’t tell me what actually happens during the ceremony itself.
“You’ll understand once you’re standing at the water’s edge,” she said, her voice quiet, almost apologetic.
That not-knowing sits heavy in my chest as we walk down toward the Moonpool together, our shoulders brushing, neither of us speaking much, as if words might spoil whatever’s coming.
I’ve never seen Hollowcrest gathered like this.
Every student, every professor, every wolf from every Den crowds the grounds surrounding the Moonpool, moonlight pouring down in a way that feels heavier than usual, thicker, like the sky itself is leaning closer to watch.
The air smells of crushed grass and something older, mineral and cold.
My skin prickles before anything has even begun, and I find myself scanning the crowd without quite meaning to, searching for a familiar dark head among all the unfamiliar faces.
Seraphina stands at the water’s edge, and even after weeks of knowing the coldness underneath her warmth, my breath catches at the sight of her tonight.
Raven hair loose around her shoulders, she lifts her voice in ancient words I don’t understand but feel anyway, low and resonant, vibrating straight through my chest.
Around me, students lean forward as one, drawn toward her like iron filings toward a magnet, and for a moment I forget everything Zephyr warned me about the Elders.
I hate how easily she commands that kind of devotion, and I hate more how close I come to giving it to her too.
The moon’s pull hits me like an actual physical force the moment the ritual begins, tugging at something buried deep inside me, urgent and enormous.
My knees nearly buckle.
I grip Sage’s hand beside me, and she squeezes back, her fingers trembling slightly against mine, her eyes fixed on the glowing surface of the Moonpool with the same reverent attention as everyone else around us.
I wonder, briefly, if she feels as unmoored as I do, or if this is simply what belonging looks like, and I’m the only one still learning the shape of it.
Across the crowd, I catch sight of Caspian, and the moment our eyes meet, his fear spikes hard through the bond, sharp enough that I flinch and press a hand to my own ribs.
It isn’t faint anymore.
It’s right there, close to the surface, like whatever’s frightening him is happening right now instead of sitting somewhere in the past.
I take half a step toward him without meaning to, my body responding before my mind catches up.
Then Sage’s hand tightens around mine, the ritual beginning in earnest, and I force my feet still.
Whatever it is, this isn’t the place to ask.
The water ripples.
The ripples keep spreading, deliberate, forming shapes that shouldn’t be possible in still water.
And then, all at once, I see them.
My mother, wolf-formed, silver and thin, running through some dark and unfamiliar forest with her ears pinned flat against her skull.
My father beside her, human-looking but wrong somehow, his eyes flickering between ordinary brown and something like dying stars, distant and cold and ancient.
They’re running.
Not resting, not peaceful, not gone the way I’ve spent years believing.
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out, my whole body gone rigid with the effort of staying silent, staying still, staying anything but what I actually feel, which is the ground dropping out from beneath eight years of grief.
Running from something.
The vision shatters as fast as it appeared, the water smoothing back into its normal silver stillness.
I gasp, stumbling half a step before a hand closes firm around my shoulder.
“Are you alright, dear?” Seraphina asks, her tone warm and gentle, exactly the voice she used the very first night I arrived.
But her grip is too tight, fingers pressing hard enough to leave marks, and a cold thread of unease cuts straight through the wonder still humming in my chest.
I force myself to hold still, to breathe normally, even as every instinct screams at me to pull away, to demand she explain what I just saw, to shout my parents’ names into the crowd and see who flinches.
“I’m fine,” I say, my voice deliberately even.
“Just tired.
The moon, I think.” Her violet eyes hold mine a beat too long, searching, before her grip finally eases and the warm smile settles back into place like it never slipped at all.
“Of course,” she says, her tone smooth again, almost maternal.
“Full moons take more from the newly Awakened.
Rest well tonight.” She moves on to address the rest of the gathering.
I stand there shaking, my mother’s frightened eyes still burned bright behind my own, my father’s star-flecked gaze still haunting the edges of my thoughts.
They’re alive.
Running, hunted, but alive, and nobody here has ever once told me that.
Eight years of candles lit in their memory, eight years of believing myself an orphan, and all of it built on a lie someone let me carry.
I don’t tell Sage.
The thought crosses my mind, urgent, right there on my tongue, but something holds it back, some instinct telling me a secret this big needs to stay small a little longer, needs to stay mine until I understand what it means.
I press it deep into my chest instead, right alongside the warmth still humming there from the bond, and decide, for now, to carry it alone.
It feels like betrayal, keeping something from the one person who’s shown me nothing but kindness since I arrived, but I can’t shake the sense that speaking it aloud might make it more dangerous somehow, might put the words where the wrong ears could find them.
Across the circle, I catch Caspian watching me.
His expression carries something I don’t fully understand, longing tangled up tight with guilt, his dark eyes fixed on me like he wants to cross the distance between us and can’t make himself do it.
The imprint bond pulses low and warm the moment our eyes meet, and despite everything, despite the vision still shaking through me, despite Seraphina’s too-tight grip still aching faintly on my shoulder, warmth floods through my chest at the sight of him.
For one unguarded second, I let myself believe that whatever fear lives inside him, we might face it together, that the two secrets sitting heavy in my chest tonight might somehow be lighter once shared.
I don’t know, standing there in the moonlight with that warmth blooming golden in my chest, that three hours ago Caspian sat across from Seraphina in her tower and told her everything.
My first shift.
My accidental Spirit Walk.
The cracked door in the Undercroft.
I don’t know that the imprint is the one thing, the only thing, he didn’t report.
The one thing he’s keeping for himself.