The History of Clans classroom held a cold that went deeper than stone.
It was in the engravings, those old battles, and in the oil-paint faces of ancestors who never seemed to approve of anything.
It was in Professor Hargrave's voice too, a dry recitation of dates and treaties he offered up like a menu to a room of the disinterested.
Lyra sat in the third row by the window. Pale, dusty light lay on the wood of her desk.
She was trying to focus on her notes, on the seven founding clans listed in her careful hand, but she kept seeing that silhouette in the Headmaster's window.
The botany book under the desk pressed into her thigh. A fragile secret for a hard room.
The lecture was well into its second hour when the door opened.
No bang. Just the quiet of someone owning the space.
Three Alphas walked in. No apologies. Their boots sounded loud in the new silence.
Sion led.
He didn't bother looking around. The room just felt different with him in it, the way air feels before weather breaks.
He wore the Black Moon heir's uniform, black and silver, but it sat on him like plate.
His hair, black as polished slate, fell sharp.
He took a seat front and center, showed the class his profile. Looked like a monument to boredom.
The other two, Rokan and a thicker, quieter one called Torin, sat behind.
Rokan had these light eyes and a smile that didn't mean a thing.
He let his gaze wander the room.
It landed on Lyra. Just for a blink.
Long enough.
Up front, Hargrave cleared his throat, fiddled with his spectacles, and went back to droning about Iron Age alliances.
His voice sounded thinner now.
Lyra looked down at her pen. Held it too tight. Her wrist ached.
The air had gotten thick, sluggish to breathe.
She felt stares on her neck, or imagined she did.
The ceremony tonight wasn't an idea anymore. It had a face.
That face sat six meters away, giving off a chill that was worse than a shout.
It happened maybe twenty minutes later. Hargrave had them pull out the Fenris clan genealogies.
Lyra bent to get her scroll from the satchel.
A shadow fell across the desk.
Rokan stood there. He held his own scroll like it was a riding crop. Torin loomed behind him, just a wall.
"Pardon, Omega."
Rokan's voice was a polite murmur that didn't touch his eyes.
"You knocked this over."
His hand moved before the words even settled. Not a jerk. A smooth, almost idle sweep.
His scroll caught the edge of her open satchel.
The thing hit the flagstones with a solid thump.
Pens, chalk, the inkpot. Scattered.
The glass bottle rolled, lucky not to break, trailing a dark, messy line.
Heads turned. Hargrave stopped talking. His mouth made a soft, irritated 'o'.
Lyra froze.
Her body knew this dance. Shrink. Wait.
Her face went hot. She bent quickly, fingers trembling, grabbing for her things.
Rokan crouched down with her.
He smelled of expensive soap and something underneath, a sharp, metallic note.
He seemed to be helping, but his body caged her against the desk leg.
"Let me help you," he murmured.
His voice was sweet poison, for her alone.
His fingers, long and capable, closed over the quill she was reaching for. He held it fast, just out of her grasp.
She had to look up at him. His smile was all cutting edge.
"It's always fascinating," he whispered, his breath a tickle against her ear.
"Something this… fragile. A good gust and it's gone. One real thought and it comes apart."
He tilted his head.
His pale eyes moved over her face like he was inspecting a flawed specimen.
"I do wonder. Why does a waste of space like you still breathe? What's the point? You here to show the rest of us what not to be?"
The words were old friends. They found the same soft places they always did, let the air out of her.
She opened her mouth. Nothing came. Just a short, tight breath.
Then something broke.
Not outside. In.
Rokan's face, that smile, those cold eyes—they didn't leave.
But behind them, something else tore through. Sudden and whole as a strike of summer lightning.
She wasn't in a classroom.
She was on a churned-up field.
The smell hit her first: blood, sour sweat, acid rain.
The air shook with the grind of metal on metal.
She was standing. Planted.
Her body was a great, terrible weight, not wool but battered steel, blood-smeared and dented.
In her right hand, a sword, long and vicious, its dark edge dripping something that wasn't water.
Rain sluiced down, washing grime from a face that was hers and wasn't. Older. Harder. A scar ran from temple to jaw.
At her feet, a man in ornate armor lay opened from shoulder to hip.
He was still alive, breathing in wet gasps, pink bubbles at his lips.
And on his face, as he stared up at her with hate and a kind of shocked awe, was a smile.
The same empty, cruel smile Rokan wore.
The vision had sound. The roar of a battle not far off.
The taste in her mouth was copper and ash.
And in her veins, a power so absolute it was devastating, a pure and crystallized fury.
With it, one word. Not a thought. A bone-deep truth:
INSIGNIFICANT.
Gone.
Lyra came back with a jolt that shoved her backwards into the table leg.
The classroom noise returned, muffled like she was underwater.
Nausea, hot and acidic, climbed her throat.
Rokan's face was right there, his smile slipped a notch, touched with confusion.
She must have made a noise.
He blinked, drew back an inch.
"Boys!"
Hargrave's voice cut in, sharp with real worry.
"To your seats. Now. Leave her be."
It was a frail command, but it was one.
Rokan stood up slow, his eyes never leaving Lyra.
She was shaking, a hand clamped over her mouth.
He didn't look amused anymore. He looked… thoughtful.
Like he'd seen a new strain of mold in his experiment.
"Of course, Professor," Rokan said, his voice back to its normal pitch. "An accident."
He tossed the quill he still held.
It landed on the stone by her knee. The tiny tap of it echoed in her head.
He and Torin walked back. They passed Sion's row.
Sion didn't turn. Didn't seem to notice a thing.
But the light tap-tap-tap of his fingers on his book cover stopped.
For one exact second.
Then it started again.
Lyra knelt, gathering her things with clumsy hands. They shook so bad she could hardly fist the pen.
But it wasn't just the fear, or the shame, or the sick feeling.
It was something deeper.
A vibration. A hum in the marrow.
When she finally grabbed the pen, her fingers closed around it with a force that made the wood complain.
A clean, white fury boiled up in her.
Old fury.
It wasn't the scared heat of a humiliated Omega.
This was colder.
The fury of a commander looking down at a thing that needed to be removed.
It was simple. Lethal.
She hated him then with a clarity that scared her.
Hated his smile, his smell, the very air he stood in.
And with the hate came a knowing.
A gutter-instinct knowing of how to make him fall. Where to push. What angle to take.
It was knowledge in the muscle, not the mind.
She choked back a gasp, forced her lungs to work slow.
This wasn't her. Couldn't be.
She was Lyra. She made herself small.
She didn't have… battlefield visions.
Hargrave coughed, tried to find his thread.
"As I was… the Treaty, yes, it established the succession…"
Lyra finally sat, shoving the last of it into her battered satchel.
Her hands in her lap wouldn't be still. She watched them like they belonged to a stranger.
White knuckles. Tight tendons.
The anger hadn't gone.
It had just pulled back, a snake under her skin, its poison mixing with the fear now, making something new.
Her eyes dragged themselves to the window.
Out in the courtyard, the clock on the main tower showed four.
Three hours to the ceremony.
Three hours. Time stretched and shrunk all at once.
The room's cold bit deeper, but inside her, where there'd been a hollow of ice, now a spark glowed.
Small. Confused. Terribly warm.
Something had woken.
Something that had looked at an Alpha's cruel smile and answered it, from some deep place, not with submission.
With a silent promise of murder.
She made fists, hid them in her dress.
The throb in her collarbone kept time with her hammering heart.
An old war drum, sounding under her skin.
And Lyra, for the first time, wasn't sure she wanted the beating to stop.