Virelle found me before dawn, perched on the roof of the new dormitory—Michael's wave-shaped creation that hummed in the wind.
"They're coming," she said simply. "The Forgotten. I can smell their particular brand of emptiness on the morning air."
I'd learned not to question her senses. After three thousand years, she perceived things the rest of us couldn't imagine. "How many?"
"Scouts first. Three, maybe four." She tilted her head, considering. "They move like memory—you only notice the gaps they leave behind."
"Should we evacuate the children?"
A sound escaped her that might have been a laugh in someone who remembered how. "No. Let them see what we're building. The Forgotten fear change more than death. Show them eighty-one wolves becoming something new, and they'll hesitate. Confusion is our best weapon."
She was stalling, though. I'd learned her patterns over the weeks—how she'd circle around truths too heavy to speak directly. "What aren't you telling me?"
Virelle went still in that inhuman way of hers. "I knew their founder. Before the Severing. Before they became what they are." She paused. "I loved her."
The morning air seemed to grow colder. "Virelle—"
"Selene was everything the Forgotten now despise. Vibrant. Changing. She painted emotions into the sky just to watch others feel them." Virelle's ancient eyes fixed on something beyond the horizon. "When the Severing came, it broke her differently than most. She didn't just lose her connection—she lost her ability to bear feeling at all. So she gathered others who'd been hollowed out, and together they decided that if they couldn't feel, no one should."
Below us, the sanctuary stirred to life. Lira practicing with her lighthouse stones. Marcus guiding two new arrivals through morning meditation. Clara organizing hunting parties with mechanical precision softened by newfound empathy. All of them unaware that the Forgotten were coming—and that our ancient protector had history with their leadership.
"She founded them to stop feeling," I said slowly. "But you still feel her."
"Every day." The admission cost her. "Three thousand years, and I can still see how she laughed before the Severing. How she'd paint auroras that made entire cities weep with joy. The Forgotten don't just reject emotion—they're led by someone who once embodied it completely."
A howl echoed from the forest. Not wolf. Not human. Something between—the Forgotten's scouts announcing themselves. Around the sanctuary, defenders moved to positions, but Virelle raised a hand.
"Let them come. Let them see." She finally looked at me, and for the first time I saw the full weight of her years. "They'll recognize me. Selene will know I'm here through their eyes. That's either our advantage or our doom."
"Which do you think?"
She almost smiled. "Depends on whether any part of the woman I loved survived inside what she became. We're about to find out."
Three figures emerged from the treeline, moving with that strange absence Virelle had described—like gaps in the world walking. They stopped just outside our borders, heads tilted in unison, evaluating.
Then the one in the center spoke, voice empty as winter: "The Apex sends greetings, Virelle. She says to tell you the paint has long since faded from the sky."
Virelle's claws extended involuntarily. "Tell Selene the colors were always inside those who saw them. Paint was just permission to remember."
The scouts exchanged no looks, made no gestures. But something shifted in their emptiness.
"The Apex remembers you as well," the scout continued, empty voice somehow conveying weight. "She wonders if you've finally learned the mercy of forgetting."
"Forgetting isn't mercy," Luna said, appearing beside us with her sketchbook. She studied the scouts with curious eyes. "It's just another kind of hungry. The hungry friend knows—it tried to fill empty constructs and learned that some emptinesses choose themselves."
The scouts tilted their heads in that eerie unison. "A child who speaks of the Unnamed. Interesting. The Apex will want to know of this."
Virelle dropped from the roof, landing between Luna and the scouts in one fluid motion. "The child is under my protection. As is this entire sanctuary. Tell Selene if she wants to know more, she can come herself. Stop sending echoes of what she used to be."
Around us, the morning routine continued with forced normalcy. But everyone watched. Clara had positioned the former constructs strategically—their transformation from empty to full a direct challenge to everything the Forgotten represented. Lira sat with her lighthouse stones, reality bending subtly around her in defiance of stagnation. Marcus guided his broken wolves through exercises that transformed pain into strength.
"We're not hiding," I announced, loud enough for the scouts to hear. "Anyone who wants to observe what we're building is welcome. But if you've come to make us empty like you, you'll find we're very good at staying full."
The lead scout studied our impossible community for long moments. "The Order seeks efficiency through emptiness. We seek peace through absence. You seek... what?"
"Life," Evelyn called out, her voice strong with newfound purpose. "Messy, inefficient, painful, beautiful life."
The scouts had no answer to that. How could they? They'd forgotten what life meant.
The scouts stood in perfect stillness for heartbeats that felt like hours. Finally, the lead one spoke: "The Apex predicted this. She said, 'Virelle always loved broken things that insisted on mending.'"
Something shifted in Virelle's posture—a micromovement that spoke of centuries of pain. "And Selene always feared feeling too much. Even before the Severing."
"The Apex feels nothing now," the scout replied. "She has achieved perfect stillness. No pain. No loss. No—"
"No life," Michael interrupted, his newly emotional voice carrying across the courtyard. "I was empty like you for seven years. It wasn't peace. It was death wearing skin."
The scouts processed this without reaction. But I noticed something—the smallest hesitation before their synchronized turn to leave. One of them, just for a moment, had looked at Michael with something almost like recognition.
"Tell Selene something for me," Virelle called after them. "Tell her I still have the stone she painted for me. The one that shifts from joy-blue to sorrow-gold depending on the light. Tell her it still works."
The scouts paused at the forest edge. "Impossible. The Apex's gift died with the Severing."
"No," Virelle said softly. "Just the woman who wielded it. The gift lives on in every sunset that makes someone stop and wonder."
They left without another word, but their exit felt less like retreat and more like seeds planted. Around me, the sanctuary exhaled collectively. We'd passed some kind of test, though what kind remained unclear.
Luna tugged my sleeve. "The hungry friend is excited. It says the empty ones aren't as empty as they think. Just very, very good at pretending."
The afternoon brought unexpected revelations.
I found Virelle in the old garden, holding a stone that shifted between impossible colors. Even looking at it made my eyes water—joy-blue bleeding into sorrow-gold, emotions carved into mineral by someone who'd understood feelings as art.
"She painted this the night before the Severing," Virelle said without looking up. "Said she wanted me to remember that sadness and happiness were just different shades of being alive. Ironic, considering what she became."
Clara approached with her afternoon reports but stopped, transfixed by the stone. "It's... feeling. Crystallized feeling. The Order would have destroyed this immediately."
"They tried," Virelle smiled grimly. "Sent construct units three times in the first century. I killed them all. Eventually they decided one stone wasn't worth the losses."
Around us, the sanctuary adapted to the morning's encounter. Patrols doubled, but with Marcus's empathy-trained wolves mixed among them—defenders who could sense intent beyond physical presence. The children continued their lessons, though Luna kept pausing to draw scouts that looked like holes in the paper.
"What really happened during the Severing?" I asked. "You were there. You remember."
Virelle set the stone carefully aside. "Imagine every emotional connection you've ever had—love, friendship, even hate—suddenly severed. Not forgotten, but unreachable. Like looking at colors you can no longer name. Some of us went mad. Some adapted. But Selene..." She paused. "Selene decided that if she couldn't feel connections, she'd sever everyone else's too. Make the world match her emptiness."
"And you've been fighting her for three thousand years?"
"No," Virelle corrected softly. "I've been waiting for her to remember that the colors were always inside us. The Severing took our ability to share them, not feel them. But she's afraid that remembering would hurt more than forgetting."
That evening, the sanctuary felt different. The scouts' visit had left ripples—not of fear, but of recognition. We weren't alone in our brokenness. Even those who chose emptiness had started as something else.
Evelyn found me during dinner preparations. "The scout on the left. When Michael spoke about empty being death wearing skin..." She hesitated. "It flinched. Microscopic, but real. I know because I've been watching for it in myself—the moment emptiness cracks."
Small rebellions. That's how change started.
Luna's drawings from the day covered an entire wall now. Not the scouts as holes, but the spaces around the holes—all the life pressing in, waiting. In one corner, she'd drawn Virelle's color-shifting stone surrounded by invisible watchers, their eyes slowly remembering how to see.
"The Forgotten will be back," Thorne said during our evening planning. "This was reconnaissance. Selene's testing whether we're a threat to their philosophy."
"Are we?" Mira asked.
"Yes," Clara answered simply. "Every former construct who chooses feeling, every wolf who transforms pain into purpose, every gift that defies stagnation—we're proof that emptiness isn't the only answer to hurt."
Virelle hadn't joined us for dinner. I found her later on the wave-dormitory roof, still holding Selene's stone. The moon was rising, and in its light the stone shifted—joy-blue-sorrow-gold-something else. Hope, maybe. Or the color of waiting three thousand years for someone you love to remember how to feel.
"She'll come herself next time," Virelle said. "Selene never could resist a puzzle, even after she forgot why puzzles mattered."
The sanctuary settled into night around us. Eighty-one lives intertwining, building something the Forgotten couldn't understand but couldn't ignore. Tomorrow would bring new challenges. Tonight, we had each other.