The door closed behind Lyra with a sound that was almost polite.
Short. Certain.
A sound that did not need to be loud to mean final.
She stayed there a moment, back against the wood, breathing in the afterimage of Sion's presence.
His footsteps faded down the stone corridor.
He hadn't locked it. Not yet.
Still, the promise of the lock hung in the room, heavier than the damp air.
Then she turned.
The first thought came unbidden.
It's bigger than the entire dormitory.
The second followed, quick and sharp.
It's a trap.
The room was lavish in a way that felt deliberate.
Circular, pale stone walls lifting into a vaulted ceiling where faded constellations clung like stories no one told anymore.
A broad hearth sat at the center, its ashes cold, arranged with care that bordered on reverence.
Rugs in deep navy and muted silver swallowed her footsteps.
Furniture filled the space almost too neatly.
A canopied bed draped in heavy velvet. A desk of dark wood. A divan near the fire.
Empty shelves, waiting to be claimed.
And across from the door, nearly wall to wall—
A window.
Not the slit of a fortress. Not the Academy's narrow concessions to light.
This was an arch of clear glass rising from near the floor to the ceiling, held in black iron.
Beyond it waited the ravine.
And beyond that—
The Forbidden Forest.
Fenrir's Night Academy perched at the edge of the drop, and this chamber sat right at its lip.
The forest stretched below like a dark ocean, ancient trees twisting upward, their silhouettes clawing at the starlit sky.
This was not a place meant for wandering.
Old beasts lived here, or so the stories said.
Paths that doubled back. Maps that lied without shame.
The view stole her breath.
And left her colder for it.
A gilded cage.
The words slid into her mind and stayed there.
Everything in the room spoke of comfort she had never owned.
Velvet soft enough to vanish under her fingers.
Rugs thick enough to swallow sound.
Clean, cold air slipping through the seams of the window.
All of it designed to soothe.
All of it designed to remind her what that soothing cost.
She was no longer part of the herd.
She had been set aside. Curated. Watched.
Sion stood near the door, silent, letting her take it in.
He seemed larger here, as though the room had been shaped around him rather than the other way around.
His scent—pine and frost—pressed into the corners, displacing beeswax and old dust.
"Rest," he said.
In this room his voice lost its edge. It sank instead. Like a stone dropped into deep water.
"What you need will be brought. Food. Water. The jug is safe."
Lyra didn't answer.
Her eyes stayed on the forest. The dark felt more honest than the velvet behind her.
"Tomorrow," he continued, "your new life begins. There will be rules. Expectations. Training."
She turned.
"Training for what?"
Her voice scraped on the words.
He didn't answer at once.
His gaze drifted instead to her collarbone, to the place beneath the linen where the ache had settled into a low, steady pulse.
Under his attention, it flared, warm and insistent.
He stepped closer.
Lyra backed up without thinking until the edge of the desk pressed into her spine.
He stopped just short of her.
"It's already manifesting," he murmured.
The words weren't meant for her.
They carried the focus of someone observing something rare. Precise.
There was calculation there.
And something darker, quieter.
Satisfaction, perhaps.
He lifted a hand, as if to touch her through the fabric.
Lyra froze.
His fingers stopped a breath away.
He didn't touch her. He felt.
A tremor passed through his arm.
"The first is always the most violent," he said, lowering his hand.
"The memory gets caught in the flesh. It wants out."
Then it passed.
Whatever had taken him loosened its grip.
His eyes met hers again, the mask sliding back into place.
"Rest," he said once more, already turning away.
"Wait."
The word slipped out before she could stop it.
He paused, hand on the iron handle.
"What is it?" she asked.
Her hand flew to her collarbone.
"What's growing in me?"
He looked back over his shoulder, profile sharp against the dark wood.
"It's a scar. Yours. The one thing you carry from one life to the next."
He hesitated. Chose.
"A wound. And a power. A lesson your body refused to forget."
His eyes darkened.
"You'll understand soon. The memory always comes."
Then he was gone.
The door shut. Heavy. Solid.
A moment later: metal turning.
Once. Twice.
The final click.
Locked.
Lyra stood still as the sound settled into her bones.
Alone. In a magnificent cell overlooking a ravine and a forest that ate the careless.
Silence pressed in.
Wind whispered somewhere outside.
The bed creaked softly, old wood shifting.
Her collarbone throbbed.
She crossed the room without thinking, drawn to the marble washstand.
Above it hung a small oval mirror, its silver frame dulled with age.
Enough.
Her fingers shook as she pulled the linen aside.
And she saw.
Her breath left her in a rough exhale.
It wasn't a scar. Not a line. Not healed flesh.
Silver shimmered beneath her skin, metallic and alive, as if moonlight had been stitched into her body.
Intricate. Precise.
Shapes that hinted at wings—broken, bound by fine interlocking lines.
The suggestion of a wolf mid-leap, caught at the instant of impact.
The edges were uneven. Almost fractal.
At the center, something denser pulsed faintly. A buried ember.
Beautiful.
And wrong.
It was warm beneath her fingers.
Raised. Smooth. A circuit. A rune. A language burned into her from somewhere that did not belong to this world.
Touch it, something inside her urged.
You have to.
Her hand lifted. Hesitated.
Then she pressed a finger to the mark.
The world broke.
Not a memory. An invasion.
Smell: sweat and blood.
The sharp rot of dead horses. Mud at dusk.
Sound: metal screaming.
Shouts torn apart by distance. Iron entering flesh.
Her own breath, ragged.
Sight: not a hall, but a mire.
Heavy armor dragging at her body. A sword in her hand, dark with blood that isn't hers.
Pain everywhere—rib cracked, thigh torn.
Chaos pressing in.
One figure holds her focus.
A man in gray armor, back to her, fighting two others.
She knows him by the line of his shoulders.
Sion.
This Sion is battered. Cloak torn. Losing ground.
One attacker falls. The other lunges, spear angling for the gap beneath Sion's arm.
She moves without thought.
Mud sucks at her boots as she throws herself between them.
No time to raise her blade. She turns, trying to take the blow on her shoulder.
She misjudges.
The spear drives in just above her left collarbone.
Cold. Exact.
It tears through flesh and something vital.
White pain, soundless. The force lifts her, armor screaming.
She sees the face of the man holding the spear.
Young. Brown eyes she knows. A companion. An ally.
There is no triumph in him. Only horror.
Tears cut clean lines through grime as his lips shape a single word.
Why.
She betrayed them.
Stepped in front of the spear. Chose Sion.
Failed everyone else.
The world dims.
The last thing she sees is Sion turning.
Fury tears across his face, and beneath it something worse.
His gold eyes are on her, not the enemy.
In them lives a despair too raw for war.
Then it's gone.
Lyra collapsed.
Her knees struck the rug.
She wasn't at the mirror anymore.
She was in the center of the room, gasping as though she'd run for miles.
Tears came hot and fast—not for herself, but for the woman in the mud, iron in her bones, betrayal in her heart.
Her collarbone burned, the phantom wound echoing the real one.
And beneath it, rising from the roots of the silver mark, came something else.
Power.
Raw. Untamed.
It flooded her limbs, electric and unforgiving.
The resolve of that warrior.
The will to stand in front of the blade.
Power born of sacrifice and failure.
The strength of a lone wolf holding the line, even if it meant breaking.
A scream climbed her throat.
She swallowed it.
What escaped pressed into the carpet instead, rough and broken.
Her fingers dug into the wool, anchoring her to now.
She knelt in the center of the gilded cell, shaking.
Phantom blood on her tongue.
The weight of armor long gone still on her shoulders.
The scar burned, a silver star of pain and memory.
Tomorrow, her new life would begin.
Tonight, she was locked in with the ghosts of the old one.
And they were patient. Coiled. Waiting.
She didn't know how to tame what stirred in her blood.
Or whether she wanted to.