(Luna) The summons comes the morning after the fire: a folded note slipped under my door in handwriting I don’t recognize, asking me to come to Professor Greymane’s study before midday.
I read it three times before I let myself move, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something else.
I’m not surprised, though.
After yesterday, after the whispers and the half step back and the word *prophecy* passed hand to hand across the training grounds like something contagious, I’ve been waiting for somebody official to finally say the word out loud to my face.
Part of me has almost wanted it, if only to stop the waiting.
His study sits tucked away in the oldest wing of the main hall, and the second I step through the door, I understand why nobody talks about this place much.
The air itself feels different here, heavier, thick with the scent of old paper and something faintly metallic underneath, like dust settled over iron.
The walls are covered floor to ceiling in texts so old their spines have gone soft and unreadable, interspersed with hand-drawn maps of places I don’t recognize, silver forests and shadowed valleys labeled in careful, cramped script.
Above the fireplace hangs a massive painting: a lone wolf at the center of three diverging paths, each vanishing into darkness.
I stare longer than I mean to, some instinct recognizing the shape before my mind can explain why.
“Sit,” Greymane orders, clipped and unbothered, not looking up from the desk where he’s arranging a small stack of papers.
I sit, my hands folding themselves into my lap without my permission, the way they do when I’m bracing for something.
“You’ve heard the word by now.” He lifts his silver-touched eyes to mine, his tone measured, patient but unflinching, the voice of someone who has delivered difficult truths before and learned not to soften them too much.
“Prophecy.
Whispered in corners, half understood, more rumor than fact for most of the students repeating it.
I’d rather you hear the truth of it from me than piece it together from gossip.” “Okay.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
He folds his hands atop the desk, settling into the kind of stillness that makes me think he’s told this particular story more than once before, though never quite like this.
For a moment, something almost like reluctance passes over his face, gone before I can be certain I saw it at all.
“What the Council knows, what most of this school knows, is a sanitized version.” His words come slow, deliberate, each one placed like a stone he’s testing for weight.
“An Eclipsed Wolf will rise.
One who carries both light and dark within her, born of a bloodline unseen in a thousand years.
And when she comes into her full power, she will do one of two things.
Seal the veil between our world and the ones beyond it, ending the connection forever.
Or tear it open, and let everything on the other side come pouring through.” The words settle heavy and cold in my chest, exactly as heavy as I expected them to be and somehow still worse.
I press my palms flat against my knees, trying to anchor myself to something solid.
“Which one am I supposed to do?” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.
Greymane watches me carefully for a long moment before he answers, something old and sad moving behind his eyes, as though he’s mourning a version of me he hasn’t met yet.
“That’s the question everyone will try to answer for you,” he says, quiet and grave.
“The Council will have their theory.
Seraphina will have hers.
Every professor, every Elder, every frightened student whispering in the halls will have an opinion about which road you’re destined to walk.” He leans forward slightly, and for the first time since I sat down, his voice softens into something almost gentle.
“Don’t let them.” “That’s not really an answer,” I counter, sharper than I intend.
“No,” he agrees, unhurried.
“It isn’t.
Because I don’t believe there is one yet.
Prophecies are strange things, Luna.
They tell you the shape of what’s coming, rarely the details of how it arrives.
I’ve watched entire lives get rearranged around lines of old poetry that turned out to mean something completely different than everyone assumed.
Don’t let anyone hand you a destiny before you’ve had the chance to choose one.” He rises from his desk and crosses to one of the shelves, retrieving something small and worn, and sets it down in front of me.
A journal, old leather cracked and softened with age, its pages filled edge to edge with handwriting in a language I don’t recognize, symbols that mean nothing to my eyes.
My fingers hover over the cover before I let myself touch it, half expecting it to feel warm, or wrong, or somehow alive.
“What is this?” “I don’t know exactly what it will mean to you.” He speaks low, almost reverent.
“I only know it was meant to reach you eventually.
When you’re ready, it will make sense.” He watches me turn it over carefully in my hands, his expression unreadable.
“I trust you’ll know when that is.” I open the cover before I mean to, curiosity getting the better of me, and go still.
Pressed into the inside leather, faded almost to nothing, is a symbol I know better than my own name.
Not the standard double crescent and moon.
A full eclipse, dark center ringed in fire, drawn by some hand long dead in ink gone the color of rust.
My own mark, staring back at me from a book old enough that the leather itself has gone soft with age.
“Who drew this?” My voice comes out thinner than I mean it to.
“Someone who knew you were coming, long before either of us was born.” Greymane offers nothing else, his tone final, watching my face carefully as I close the cover again, my hands not quite steady.
Something else has been sitting on the edge of my thoughts since I walked in here, something I’ve been too afraid to ask anyone else, and now, with the prophecy already laid bare between us, it feels like the only safe moment left to ask it.
While he talks about the veil, about sealing or tearing, the golden thread in my chest gives a small, insistent pull, like it wants my attention right along with his.
A cold thought slides in on the heels of it, one I haven’t let myself think all the way through until this exact second.
If I’m the one who might tear the veil open, if darkness is genuinely part of what I am, that same darkness could reach into something as deep as the bond.
It could be using me, wearing the shape of something real to get me to trust it.
“Can I ask about something that might not be unrelated at all?” My throat feels tight around the words.
“Imprinting.
What it actually means.” Something shifts behind his expression, careful and searching, studying me the way he might study one of the ancient texts lining his walls.
I brace myself, unsure whether I want an answer or a way out of the question.
“An imprint is the deepest bond a wolf can form.” He speaks slowly, each word weighted like a verdict.
“Deeper than pack, deeper than romance chosen with the mind instead of the body.
It cannot be manufactured.
It cannot be faked, not by magic, not by will, not by anyone’s intention, however powerful they might be.
If you’ve imprinted, Luna, the bond itself is genuine.
Your wolf recognized another wolf at the deepest level that exists.
That recognition doesn’t lie.” My breath rushes out of me all at once, and my shoulders drop from somewhere near my ears.
The bond with Caspian is real.
Whatever else is confusing, Kael, Rowan, Jace, at least this one thing is solid ground.
I let myself hold onto that certainty the way I might hold onto a hand in the dark.
Something flickers across Greymane’s face as I say Caspian’s name, quick and gone, the same wary stillness he wore the day my corona first appeared in front of the whole school.
He doesn’t say anything about it.
He just watches me a moment too long before he speaks again, and the silence sits strangely in my chest long after I’ve left his study, a small, unplaced unease I can’t quite name.
I don’t know, sitting there in Greymane’s study with that relief blooming warm in my chest, that he’s right about every word of it.
The bond is real.
What I don’t know, what I have no way of knowing yet, is that Caspian’s betrayal was never hiding inside the bond itself.
It’s hiding in everything around it.
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