The bell tolled.
It wasn't a call. It was a drag.
A metallic, heavy thing, cutting the Omega wing's sleep like a blade that had lost its edge.
Lyra's eyes opened before the rest of her did.
Her body was already moving, a reflex worn smooth by the routine of Fenrir Nocturnal Academy.
The winter morning light didn't so much enter as it seeped in.
A grey, damp seepage that spread across the dormitory, staining everything—the coarse wool blankets, the dark oak chests, the faces of the other girls, soft and puffy with interrupted dreams.
She sat up.
The cold of the stone floor bit into her soles.
The silence was thick, a fabric woven from sighs and the rustle of sheets and the far-off clatter from the kitchens.
No one spoke.
Speaking invited attention, and attention here had two sharp edges.
Lyra kept clear of both.
She dressed with the economy of long practice.
Wool stockings, the standard linen dress, the bodice laced tight with hands that knew every loop.
Each button fastened was a tiny stand against the rushing morning.
At the misty mirror, her gaze slid away from her own reflection—those hazel eyes perpetually shadowed, the brown hair yanked into its stern bun—and stuck to the window.
Outside, the academy's gothic towers jabbed at an ash-colored sky.
A crow sat on a gargoyle.
It didn't seem to care about much.
The walk to the refectory was her daily ritual of disappearing.
Shoulders a little rounded, gaze down but not defeated—a posture meant to whisper nothing to see.
The corridor breathed cold.
The air held the smell of old beeswax and the deeper, never-drying damp of stone.
Her own footsteps vanished into the echo of all the others.
The hall was a storm behind glass.
The noise came from the high table, where the Alphas ate breakfast like it was a prize they'd torn loose.
Laughter too loud, voices talking over each other, the busy, aggressive music of cutlery on porcelain.
Lyra took her tray in silence.
Oatmeal, an apple, tea the color of dust.
She carried it to the far end, where the Omegas and the quieter Betas gathered like sediment.
She found a spot alone on a bench near a stained-glass window.
Some ancient hunt was frozen there, its colors bleached weak by the light.
Each spoonful of oatmeal required patience.
The weight of the day sat on her shoulders like a lead cope.
The hours had their own relentless liturgy: Lineage History, then Containment Studies, then the long, empty wait for night.
For the Recognition Ceremony.
Her stomach tightened.
It wasn't fear, not precisely.
It was a fatigue so deep it felt like the ground beneath her.
Sometimes, in the quiet, she had the peculiar sense she'd done all this before.
Known these faces under different names, in different air.
A ridiculous thought. The mind playing tricks in its cage.
That's when her fingers, brushing the honey pot, found the uneven fold of paper tucked under the bread plate.
Her heart did a quiet, solid thing in her chest.
A single heavy knock.
No one sent her notes.
No one.
Moving even slower, using the lift of her cup as a screen, she palmed the paper and unfolded it under the table.
The hand was clean. All angles, no flourish.
Meet me in the winter garden at midday. I have your book.
— K.
Kael.
The Beta from the library.
The only person in this place who didn't pick her apart or look straight through her.
Who just… saw.
A week ago, she'd risked asking for the book on arcane botany, the one forbidden to Omegas.
He hadn't even blinked.
Just said, "I'll see what I can do."
And now this.
The day, which a moment ago had been a flat, endless stretch, suddenly had a mark on it.
A point to move toward.
A warmth, strange and thin, climbed her neck.
It wasn't shame.
It was the simple, startling relief of being remembered.
She folded the note with excessive care and slipped it inside her bodice, right over the steady thump beneath her ribs.
It was then, her fingers still pressed against the hidden paper, that the pain came.
Not a pain of now.
Not a cramp.
It was a memory wearing pain's clothes.
Acute, deep, a bright and sickening strike that flowered from her left collarbone as if an invisible blade had found its home there all over again.
Lyra's breath caught.
The world smeared.
The noise of the refectory drained away into a dull, woolly hum.
In her mind—no picture, no story—came the pure sensation of it: metallic cold, the shocking thud of impact, the body's utter disbelief at being so profoundly breached.
Then, nothing.
It passed as fast as it came.
Left behind a ghost of an ache and a film of cold sweat on her skin.
She blinked, hard, pulling the solid world back.
Her hands in her lap had developed a faint, independent tremor.
What in the world was that?
Some new trick of a tired mind?
The dread of the ceremony pressing out in a new shape?
She glanced around, afraid her lapse had painted a target on her.
But the refectory churned on.
Alphas laughed.
Omegas whispered their conspiratorial nothings.
The ordinary, heavy life of the place flowed around her, utterly blind to the small, silent wreck that had just happened inside her skull.
Lyra lifted her teacup with both hands to steady them.
The warmth of the china didn't reach the cold now sitting in her bones.
Kael's note felt different.
It was no longer just a comfort.
It was a rendezvous.
An appointment in a winter garden that now seemed separated from her by a vast and airless distance, all because of a wound she had no memory of earning.
The bell rang again for the end of breakfast, its tone dragged out and final.
Time for Lineage History.
Time to stand, to join the current of bodies, to carry with her the ordinary weight of the day and the silent, echoing shape of a scar that wasn't there.