(Luna) Sunlight cuts through the window and wakes me, and I discover a crick in my neck from falling asleep sitting up against the headboard.
Sage is gone.
The blanket she brought last night sits folded neatly at the foot of my bed, a sticky note stuck to the top.
*Meet you at breakfast.
Don’t panic about the schedule, I promise it makes sense eventually.
Mostly.* I trace my thumb over her handwriting, grateful for the small kindness of it, before I force myself to move.
Sleep didn’t happen so much as several hours simply vanished.
My whole body aches in places that have nothing to do with track, a deep bone-tired soreness I’ve never felt after any race.
I catch my reflection in the mirror over the desk and press two fingers against the mark on my forehead, half expecting pain.
It just feels like skin.
Like it belongs to me now, whether I want it to or not.
I get dressed, splash water on my face, and go find breakfast, because apparently the world doesn’t stop just because mine did.
My stomach growls loud enough to embarrass me in the empty room, and the ordinariness of hunger almost pulls a laugh out of me.
At least some things haven’t changed.
The Great Hall makes more sense once I stop trying to listen to everything at once and start just looking.
The overlapping conversations felt like static the night before, but this morning I let my eyes do the work instead.
Every uniform jacket has a small crest stitched over the heart.
Flame shapes in crimson thread.
Waves in soft blue.
Stone patterns in amber.
Silver-white wind swirls.
A handful of deep violet ones scatter thin through the crowd, the closest thing I have to my own people here, whatever Spiritwalker actually turns out to mean.
I search their faces, wondering if any of them feel as lost as I do, or if they were all born already knowing the shape of their own power.
I find an empty seat at the end of a long table.
A piece of conversation drifts over from two girls a few seats down, something about a bonding ceremony coming up for one of the crimson-crest boys, how his mark is finally supposed to fill in color once it happens.
I almost understand it.
Sage mentioned something last night about marks filling in with affinity color once a wolf bonds to their element, tangled up somewhere between the cookies and my crying, and it clicks into place now instead of floating past me as noise.
Small mercy, that.
Proof my brain still works, even here.
I’m still turning it over in my head when two identical faces drop into the seats across from me at the exact same moment, like they choreographed it.
“You’re the eclipse girl,” the one on the left announces, grinning wide at the whole table rather than just at me.
“Obviously she’s the eclipse girl, Ash, look at her forehead,” the one on the right says, rolling his eyes before he sticks a hand across the table.
“Alder.
That’s Ash.
We’re twins, in case that wasn’t already extremely obvious.” “Luna,” I say, shaking his hand, a little dazed by the sheer energy radiating off both of them.
It’s disarming, how easily they fill the space around them, like sunlight that doesn’t ask permission before it lands.
“We know,” Ash says, stealing a piece of toast off my plate without asking, entirely unbothered when I glare at him.
“Everybody knows.
You’re basically the only thing anyone’s talked about since you got here.” “Wonderful,” I mutter, flat.
“It’s a compliment,” Alder offers, amused.
“Sort of.
We’re adopting you, by the way.
This isn’t up for discussion.” “You don’t get a say,” Ash agrees around a mouthful of stolen toast.
“We decided last night.
Congratulations.” Despite myself, I laugh, the first real laugh since I left Little River, surprising even me with how easily it comes.
Something about the chaos of them, talking over each other, finishing each other’s sentences, makes the enormous hall feel a little less enormous, a little less like a place built to swallow me whole.
A whistle sounds from the far end of the hall, sharp and short, and both twins groan in unison, the sound so perfectly synchronized it almost pulls another laugh out of me.
“That’s us,” Alder says, already on his feet.
“Training assignments.
If we’re late again, Marrow’s going to make us run laps until our legs fall off.” “See you at lunch, eclipse girl,” Ash calls over his shoulder, already halfway to the door, and then it’s just me again, alone at the end of the table with half my toast missing and an odd warmth in my chest I don’t quite know what to do with.
“So you’re the freak mark everyone’s whispering about,” a voice says.
I look up to find a girl standing over me, red hair bright even in the dim hall light, green eyes sharp and assessing.
Before I can say anything, she reaches out and hooks two fingers under my chin, tilting my face up into the light like she’s inspecting a piece of jewelry she’s deciding whether to buy.
Her grip is cool and certain, the kind of touch that expects no resistance.
“Excuse me,” I snap, jerking back out of her grip, heat rising in my face.
“Ember,” she says, clipped, offering no hand and no apology.
“Emberwolf Den.
Top of my year until last night, when you walked in and made everyone forget I exist.” Her eyes flick down to my tray, and she plucks a piece of bacon right off it, eating it like she’s making a point.
“Must be nice,” she adds, mocking.
“Showing up and stealing everything without doing a single thing to earn it.” “I didn’t ask for any of this,” I say, my temper flaring hot and fast the way it always does, my hands curling into fists beneath the table where she can’t see them.
“Nobody ever does,” she says, already turning on her heel.
She walks off, and I sit there a second, jaw tight, wondering if that’s just how everyone here says good morning.
My appetite, what little I had left of it, evaporates entirely.
Physical Training doesn’t go any better.
The training grounds sit behind the main hall, an open field ringed by stands where students not currently sparring watch and heckle in equal measure.
An upperclassman runs the drills today, tall and unbothered, calling out pairings from a clipboard like she’s done this a hundred times before, her voice carrying easily over the noise of the crowd.
“Willow.
Ashworth.
You’re up,” she calls, brisk.
“Guess I get to find out if that mark means anything,” Ember says, grinning all teeth.
I don’t get much chance to prepare before she’s on me, and the difference between us becomes painfully obvious within the first three seconds.
She’s fast, trained, every movement economical and sure, and I’m a track runner who’s never thrown a real punch in her life.
She sweeps my legs out from under me before I even see the motion coming, and I hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of me.
For a moment I just lie there, staring up at the pale morning sky, wondering how I ended up here, a thousand miles from every track I’ve ever run, losing to a girl who hates me on principle.
“Again,” the upperclassman calls, unbothered.
I get up.
She knocks me down.
I get up again, angrier this time, and she knocks me down again, harder, and the small crowd of students watching from the stands starts murmuring, the sound needling under my skin worse than any bruise.
I can feel their eyes on me, weighing me, waiting to see if the eclipse girl is anything more than a rumor.
“Again,” the upperclassman repeats, flat, for what feels like the tenth time.
I push myself up off the dirt, my whole body aching, humiliation burning hotter than any of the bruises Ember’s landed on me.
Somewhere beneath my sternum, that same hum starts building, the one from the night the mark first burned itself into my skin, a pressure gathering low and insistent like something knocking to be let out.
I try to breathe through it the way I’ve been breathing through everything since Little River, and for a moment it almost works.
Then Ember settles into her stance again, and I catch the exact second her mouth curls, unhurried, already certain of how this ends.
“Come on, eclipse girl,” she calls, taunting, loud enough for the stands to hear.
“Show us the thing everyone’s so scared of.” A ripple of laughter moves through the crowd, and something in me goes very still.
I could hold it back.
I’ve held back everything for as long as I can remember, every scream, every question, every impulse that didn’t fit inside the neat lines of a lane on a track.
But the pressure under my skin surges again, hungry and insistent, and this time, instead of fighting it down, I stop resisting it.
I let go.
The next time she comes at me, I don’t think.
I don’t calculate, don’t plan, don’t do any of the careful things I’ve been told to do.
My body just moves, faster than I’ve ever moved in my life, faster than any human body should be able to move, and I duck under her swing and drive forward with a speed that surprises even me, sweeping her legs the exact way she swept mine and slamming her down onto the dirt with my forearm pinned hard against her collarbone before either of us fully registers what’s happened.
The whole field goes dead silent.
The upperclassman’s clipboard lowers slowly.
She doesn’t call anything this time, doesn’t say again, just watches me with a carefully blank expression, the kind of stillness that looks a lot like someone deciding not to react in front of an audience.
Ember stares up at me, chest heaving.
“Get off me,” she finally growls, her voice rougher than before.
But there’s something tangled underneath the contempt now, something that wasn’t there this morning.
Not quite fear.
Not quite respect.
Something caught in between the two, unwilling to pick a side yet.
I ease off her and step back, my hands shaking, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard it hurts.
I don’t know what my eyes look like right now, but judging by the silence stretching across the whole field, I know it isn’t nothing.
A few students in the stands lean toward each other, whispering behind their hands, and I catch the shape of my own name on more than one pair of lips.
I look down at my own hands like they belong to someone else.
That speed wasn’t mine.
Not the way my four hundred meter time was mine, not the way every second I ever shaved off a lap belonged to hours of work I put in myself, sweat and blisters and years of early mornings on a track back home.
This came from somewhere I don’t understand yet, somewhere underneath my skin that I didn’t ask for and can’t control.
I’m still standing there, trying to steady my own breath, when I notice a girl watching from the edge of the stands, apart from the murmuring clusters of students.
Long, wavy blonde hair, violet eyes fixed on me with an intensity that has nothing to do with curiosity.
She doesn’t whisper to anyone beside her.
She doesn’t look away when I meet her gaze.
She simply watches, still as carved stone, until the crowd starts to disperse, and then she walks toward me with unhurried steps, as if she has already decided how this conversation ends.
“Do you know what they used to do,” she says, no introduction, her tone eerily calm, “to shifters who showed a mark like yours?” “I don’t even know what my mark means,” I say, wary, my pulse climbing again despite the exhaustion dragging at every limb.
“They burned the Moonpool groves.
Sealed the old records.
Executed an entire bloodline, just to make sure it never happened again,” she says, her voice staying level, almost gentle, which somehow makes it worse than if she’d spat the words the way Ember had.
“Ivy,” she adds, offhand, like her name barely matters next to what she’s just told me.
“I’m not here to threaten you.
I’m here because I don’t think you understand what you’re carrying.
That mark isn’t a gift.
It’s a door.
And a thousand years ago, someone paid in blood to keep it shut.” “I didn’t ask for it,” I say, the same words I gave Ember, though they taste different now, heavier.
“No one ever does,” Ivy says, her gaze flicking briefly to my forehead, something like grief passing behind her violet eyes before it vanishes again.
“That’s what worries me.” She turns to leave, then pauses, glancing back at me over her shoulder.
“Find out what it means before it finds out for you,” she says, quiet.
“I’d rather not watch history repeat itself.” She walks away without waiting for a response, and I stand there in the settling dust of the training field, colder than I was a moment ago despite the climbing sun.
Whatever just moved through my body wasn’t me.
And I don’t know yet if I’m supposed to be afraid of it, or afraid of what happens if I stop being afraid of it at all.