White.
Raven turned a full circle, then another, and both circles showed her the same nothing.
No dormitory.
No beds, no window, no curtains drawn around Brielle’s bunk.
The surface under her bare feet was solid and cool, but when she looked down there was nothing to see — only white running out level in every direction until it stopped pretending to be a floor and became the sky too.
“Where the hell am I?” Her voice went out and died.
No echo came back, and the wrongness of that reached her before the reason did, because sound was supposed to land on something.
Here it just left her and drowned.
“Thalia?” She waited.
“Tessa?” Nothing answered.
The silence wasn’t the peaceful kind — it sat against her ears like held breath.
“Okay,” she muttered.
“This is stupid.
Wake up.” She didn’t wake up.
She walked instead, ten steps, twenty, then looked back.
The white behind her was untouched.
No footprints, no scuff, no proof she’d gone anywhere at all, though she could still feel every cold step in her soles.
Raven pinched the inside of her arm, hard, twisting.
It hurt.
Properly hurt.
Dreams weren’t supposed to do that.
Her mind went to Brielle — asleep two beds away with a sigil case in reach — but the thought fell apart on its own.
She hadn’t seen the girl activate anything, and besides, Brielle struck her as the type who’d want Raven fully awake for any humiliation she arranged.
An audience of one was still an audience.
Still.
If it turned out House Vance was behind this, Raven was going to wake up, walk two beds over, and introduce Brielle to a bar of kitchen soap in ways her expensive training had never covered.
The assessment, then.
Or the surge.
Maybe this was the price, collected while she slept— Behind her, the exhale and inhale of a breath hit her.
Slow, deep breaths, each one rolling through the empty space the way wind moves through a cavern.
The silence that had swallowed her voice let this sound through without any trouble at all.
Raven went still.
And in the stillness, she noticed something worse than the breathing.
Her chest was empty.
The faint presence behind her ribs — the one she’d carried her whole life, the sleeping weight she’d talked at, begged at, given up on a hundred times — wasn’t there.
She pressed her palm flat over her sternum and reached inward the way she had on a thousand bad nights.
Nothing reached back.
Not silence.
Absence.
She hadn’t known she could feel the difference until now.
The breathing came again.
Closer.
Raven turned around slowly.
A wolf stood in the distance.
Distance was the only reason her mind accepted the word, because nothing that size should be called a wolf.
Its shoulders rose higher than her head.
White fur covered it from muzzle to tail, and the fur held a light of its own, a soft glow that turned the emptiness around it gray.
Its eyes were silver, pale and lit from inside, and they were fixed on her.
Claws the length of her forearm rested against the white ground.
Every instinct she owned said run.
Raven took one step backward, then planted her feet, because the wolf hadn’t moved.
It only watched her, breathing those slow enormous breaths, patient as something that had waited a very long time.
Then she saw the chains.
Black metal circled its neck.
More links wrapped its forelegs and hind legs, thick dark loops running down into the white surface as though the ground had grown them, and where the metal crossed its body the glowing fur was stained dark, links sunk so deep the flesh had closed around them.
Raven’s hand pressed harder against her hollow chest, and the two facts walked toward each other and met.
The presence wasn’t gone.
It was standing in front of her.
Her lips parted.
“You were real.” The wolf’s ears turned toward her voice.
She didn’t go to it.
Eighteen years stood in the way — every examiner who’d called her wolfless, every night she’d lain in the dark begging the flicker inside her to answer, every beating she’d taken with her head down while the thing in her chest slept on.
It had let her be mocked.
Let her be rejected.
Let her be hunted through a black forest while she screamed inward for anything at all.
“All those years.” Her voice came out low.
She took one step.
“Here you are.” The wolf lowered its enormous head and said nothing.
“Why didn’t you answer me?” Nothing.
Her eyes burned, and she hated them for it.
“I called for you.
Every night in that house, I called, and you—” The word cracked in the middle.
She bit down on it.
“I needed you.” The wolf stepped toward her.
The chains snapped tight.
Metal cracked through the silence, and the wolf’s whole body jerked backward, wrenched mid-stride.
Raven flinched.
The growl that followed didn’t come at her — the wolf twisted its neck and snarled down at its own bindings, hauled against them once, twice, and the black links only bit deeper, holding it exactly where it was.
Holding it short of her.
Raven stared at the chains running down into the ground, and the anger in her chest had to move over and make room.
“Someone did this to you?” No answer came, but the wolf stood still as she crossed the space between them, silver eyes tracking every step without blinking.
She stopped in front of its lowered head.
Even bowed, its skull sat level with her own, close enough that its breath stirred her hair.
Her hand came up trembling.
Her breathing had gone as thin as it had under Brielle’s aura, and her fingers crossed the last stretch an inch at a time, reaching for its muzzle.
The wolf dipped its head lower to meet them— Then it stiffened.
Raven’s heart stopped.
Of course.
Eighteen years spent waiting for her wolf, and their first proper meeting was apparently going to end with it biting off her hand.