2 Avaline
I stood at the rough cedar fence line of the Sanctuary Farm, my fingers digging into the weathered wood until splinters bit deep into my palms.
Behind me, the summer grass was green and perfect, smelling of honeysuckle and warm dirt. The sun always hung at a perfect, golden four o’clock angle here.
This was the only safe place left in my mind.
A spirit-haven I had built to survive the long dark.
I’d decided to come here once more, to see if this time something was different. Because somewhere out there, someone I belong to just moved the whole world.
According to the old prayers I had memorized as a pup, the Dreamscape was the Goddess’ silver loom. The sacred, unseen architecture where the sleeping minds of her children were woven together, thread by glowing thread.
When a pack slept, their consciousness was meant to drift across the Threshold, brushing against the minds of their den-mates, allowing them to run together across vast, starlit plains even in the dead of winter.
It was supposed to be a place of endless connection, a shared warmth that reminded every shifter they were never truly alone in the dark.
But my sanctuary wasn’t filled with the gentle, starlit mists of the collective spirits of my wolf brothers and sisters.
For a dormant like me, my wolf didn’t live inside my ribs. She was still a separate spirit, waiting in the silver pastures of the Moon’s Threshold.
Here, in the Dreamscape, the poison that separated us appeared as a iridescent pearl-colored river.
Stagnant. Reeking. I could see her sometimes, far across the canyon, a pale shadow pacing with the other wolf spirits behind the mist on the other side of the river that cut through this valley in my mind.
Neither of us could cross the river to the other, no matter how many times we’d tried.
I leaned over the top rail of the fence, the wood digging into my chest.
Reed.
I didn’t speak his name aloud. Words held no power here at the edge of the Threshold. The Dreamscape didn’t deal in language. It traded in sensation, emotion, and instinct.
I closed my eyes and shaped the thought out of pure sensory memory instead. I reached deep into the archive of my mind, packing the memory tight: the heat of his skin, the rumble of his chest.
Mate.
It was a dangerous, bittersweet habit. A ritual of failure I had practiced in secret for two decades.
I held the memory of him out over the edge of the fence, suspending it above the poisoned river. I let it drop.
I held my breath and gripped the cedar fence so hard my knuckles turned a bloodless white, the tendons in my wrists aching.
I waited for the ripple to cross the flooded expanse.
I waited for the echo to bounce back from the other side of the Threshold.
I waited, with a desperate hunger, for the water to suddenly boil with the violent, answering heat of his presence.
But the pearl-colored river remained perfectly the same. A sluggish mirror reflecting nothing but the starless sky above the canyon on that side. The corruption was simply too thick, the poison too deeply ingrained in my system.
Across the chasm, my white wolf didn’t even lift her head.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Failure still tasted like cold ash on the back of my tongue—ever since the catastrophic failure of our Solstice rite.
I had not been able to fully crossed the boundary of the Threshold into the Dreamscape since that night. I had never once stepped past this cedar fence.
Reed had been so sure. So fiercely protective. So determined to bring my wolf to me out from the Moon Goddess’ Loom.
It had almost worked.
It would have worked.
He had used his Founding Alpha fire to shock my dormant wolf awake and merge with my human soul.
Instead, the intensity of our Solstice rite had flared a magical beacon across the Dreamscape and into the real world. Immediately drawing the gaze of the Conclave and the Verdant Order.
Our attempt to unite me with my dormant wolf had cost both of us everything.
I opened my eyes and let out a slow, trembling breath that plumed white in the cold air rising from the canyon. I pushed myself back from the fence, letting go of the cedar rails.
It was time to return to the surface.
It was time to put the obedient mask back on and face Phaelen and her silver needles.
Whatever had happened in the real world had recently made the Verdant Order anxious.
I’d overheard the Wardens whispering plans—gathering many of the dormant wolves together here for a purpose I suspected would end in our deaths this day.
Severance.
I turned my back on the canyon.
That’s when the ground beneath my bare feet heaved with a sudden tremor.
Cinnamon. Char.
I whirled around, my breath catching in my throat.
Down in the canyon, the stagnant, pearl-colored water began to ripple as if someone were attempting to wade through it’s poison.
My wolf let out a phantom whine that echoed through the fog.
Heat slammed into the warded boundaries of my mind. The sheer force of the astral shockwave threw my consciousness back into my body.
My eyes snapped open.
The wet tile under my knees was perfectly still. Obscenely quiet.
The Second Saint was leaving the room—bending toward the desert and the mountains and the thousand miles of dark, its cinnamon-char heat pulling back like a tide. And Phaelen, the black-handed Seeress, stood in the middle of the wet tile with her composure cracked wide open and her hands trembling.
She scrabbled at her belt. Her stained fingers closed around the heavy silver syringe she kept there for the ones who fought, the one loaded with enough of the pearl-colored poison to drop a shifter twice my size, and she turned to me with her eyes gone wild.
“Row Three still won’t settle,” she said, and her whisper had lost the sweetness, lost the false-mother croon. It came out ragged. “They watch you. They always watch you. So you’ll take this again, and they’ll see, and they’ll settle.”
Cadmyra Vosch. The name rose in my mind the way all the names rose, clean and cold and perfectly preserved, filed away through a thousand hours of feigned catatonia while she’d spoken freely over my body, believing me furniture.
Because I came from a family of wolf shifter Scribes, I remembered everything ever done to me—and everything they had ever said in my presence.
I knew where the poison came from better than the Tenders did.
Every drop of the pearl-white poison forced into Row Three to prepare us for Severance was brewed and fed from three hidden fonts the Order maintained across the valley.
For twenty years I had listened to Phaelen and the Wardens speak of their dark alchemy over my catatonic body.
I gave her a slow blink. Dead-eyed. Devoted. The blink I had perfected in this drowned tile box until it was smoother than glass. I let my mouth go soft. I let my shoulders round into the shape of the thing she needed me to be.
And down the line, dozens of sets of shoulders eased—because they saw the blink, and the blink meant stay small, live through this hour.
Phaelen exhaled. Relief made her sloppy. She stepped in close, close enough that the reek of corrupted aurum latens rolled off her stained hands and stung my eyes. Close enough that I could have counted the burst vessels in her cheeks. And she laid one ruined palm on my shoulder like a benediction.
Phaelen leaned down, her breath hot on my ear. “Good girl. You’ve always been my good girl.”
I stopped blinking.
I let my face go smooth.
The serene flat nothing that came over me when I was most afraid and most certain.
“Cadmyra Vosch.” My voice dropped an octave, out of the meek register I’d worn for twenty years and down into the one I kept underneath it, the one built for razors. “Of Halloway Reach.”
Her hand went rigid on my shoulder.
“January fourteenth. You told High Arbiter Gault your sister’s powers had ‘expressed favorably.’ You handed her to the Tenders yourself to gain power and position.
” I held her eyes and I did not look away, would not look away, gave her the unblinking predator’s stare I’d never once let her see.
“She was sixteen. She screamed your name down the whole corridor. You didn’t turn around.
I know because I was three cells down and I heard every step you didn’t take. ”
The syringe hung in the air between us, forgotten. Her face had gone the color of the tile.
Phaelen’s whisper broke entirely. “You—you can’t. You’re empty. You’ve been empty for—”
I stepped closer. “No. I was listening.”
Then I moved.
My hand shot up and drove into the soft hollow of her throat and her whisper died in a wet click. My other hand caught her wrist, the one with the needle, and I twisted it up and over and in, and I planted the syringe in the side of her own neck and drove the plunger down with my thumb.
Her eyes went enormous. The black hands came up, clawed at nothing, and I stepped back out of their reach and let her fall.
She folded onto the wet tile, cracking her jaw against the rolled steel lip of the trough, and I felt nothing about that at all.
I stood over her. And because I was a Scribe, because my mind was still water and everything that fell into it stayed, the memory came up unbidden through the bleach and the blood—
—wild honeysuckle and summer storm rain, so sweet it ached in the teeth, and the rough timber of the fence post pressing against my spine as he laughed—
—and under the honeysuckle, always under it, the other thing.
The sound I would carry until I died. A three-year-old girl carried past my paralyzed body into the dark and the Wardens laughing because Founding blood was the only vessel strong enough to hold what the High Arbiter meant to put inside her.
I had lain there, seizing, awake, and I had not been able to lift a single finger to stop it.
I looked up at the line of frightened women watching me, chemical-slow and terrified and mine.
I couldn’t save that little girl.
But I could save these.