THE ALTAR IN MY SLEEP

I do not sleep that night. I sit on the edge of my cot with the carved rib bone in my lap, turning it over and over in my hands until the symbols feel burned into my eyes even when I close them.

Remember the Altar, or lose everything again.

When the sky finally turns gray through the narrow window, I have made a decision I know is foolish before I have even finished making it.

I have to tell someone. Not Riven — he already carries enough of my secret, and this feels like more than his shoulders should have to hold alone. Not Nyra — she would want to come with me, and I cannot risk her getting caught in whatever this is. There is only one person left who might understand, who has known me longer than any of them, if the stories are true.

Zevran Vale.

I find him in the library the next morning, the way I always seem to find him — alone, surrounded by more books than any one wolf should need, a cup of something that smells too strong for this early gone cold at his elbow.

"Rue," he says, without looking up from the page in front of him. "Come to steal my chair again?"

"I need to talk to you."

Something in my voice makes him look up properly this time. Sharp blue eyes move over my face, reading something there he does not like.

"Sit," he says, and it is not a request.

I sit. I place the bone on the table between us.

Zevran goes very still.

"Where did you get this," he asks. His voice has lost all its lazy humor.

"Someone left it in my room last night. Past the guards. Past the whole wing."

He picks it up carefully, turning it exactly the way I did all night, reading the script with a frown that carves deep lines into his forehead.

"You can read this," he says. It is not quite a question.

I hesitate. "Yes."

"Nobody reads Old Nightvale script anymore, Rue. It has not been taught outside the Elder Council in generations."

His eyes come up to meet mine, and there is something in them now I have not seen before — not suspicion exactly, something closer to recognition, like a man finally seeing the shape of something he has been staring at sideways for weeks.

"Elara could read it. I remember her complaining about the lessons. Said the tutors droned worse than a dying bee."

My heart stops.

"You knew her," I say. "Really knew her. Not just as the Alpha's mate."

"I knew her better than almost anyone." Something moves across his face, quick and painful, gone before I can name it fully. "She used to sit in this exact chair and steal my books before I finished with them."

The silence stretches between us, heavy with everything neither of us is saying out loud.

"Zevran." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "The night before she died. Did she come to you?"

His jaw tightens. His hand closes around the bone hard enough that his knuckles go white.

"Why are you asking me that."

"Because I need to know if you are hiding something." I lean forward. "Please. Whatever it is. I think it matters more now than it ever has."

He is quiet a long time. Long enough that I think he will not answer at all. When he finally speaks, his voice has gone rough, stripped of its usual careless calm.

"She came to me the night before the Council took her," he says. "Terrified. Shaking. She said someone was going to hurt her, and she made me promise something."

"Promise what?"

"She whispered a name. Told me if anything happened to her, I was to make sure it never got out. That saying it out loud would only get more people killed." He sets the bone down like it has grown too heavy to hold. "I have kept that promise for five years, Rue. Even from Kael. Especially from Kael."

My pulse hammers so loud I can barely hear my own voice. "What name?"

Zevran looks at me for a long, unbearable moment.

"Vaelor Dusk," he says finally, quiet, like the name itself is dangerous just spoken aloud in daylight. "She said Vaelor Dusk knew what was coming for her, and that he was the only one who could tell the whole truth if I ever needed it told."

The floor seems to tilt under me.

I do not remember walking back to my room. I do not remember much of the rest of that day at all — bringing Kael his meals with hands that would not quite stop shaking, answering his questions about my sleep with lies so automatic I barely register saying them, the whole castle moving around me like something seen through water.

That night, when I finally sleep, the dream comes for me the way it always does. Except this time, it does not stop at the water.

I am standing at an altar.

Black stone, cracked down the middle, carved with symbols that glow faint silver in fog that presses close on every side. Trees stand around me, twisted, dripping something dark and slow from their branches. No birds. No wind. Just my own breathing, too loud in a silence that feels alive.

I am wearing white. My hands are red.

"Say the words," a voice says. Familiar. Cold. I cannot see who speaks, only feel the voice moving through the fog like something with a shape of its own.

"I do not know the words," I hear myself say, in a voice that is mine and not mine, older, certain, nothing like the careful whisper I have learned to use as Rue.

"You know them. You have always known them. Say the words, and everything you have lost comes back to you."

My mouth moves without my permission. Words in a language I should not know pour out of me, ancient and heavy, and with every word the altar beneath my palms grows warmer, brighter, until silver light floods up my arms like water rushing the wrong direction.

Blood drips from my hands onto the stone. Not a wound. Something else. Something given, not taken.

"Good," the voice says, pleased now, almost gentle. "Good girl. Almost there."

I see, all at once, in the way dreams show you things too fast to properly understand — a bloodline stretching back generations, wolves who bargained with the Moon herself for power, a debt that has come due, and me standing at the center of it, a key turning in a lock built long before I was ever born the first time.

"No," I gasp, trying to pull my hands back. They will not move. The stone holds them like it has decided I belong to it now. "I do not want this."

"It does not matter what you want," the voice says, almost kind, almost sorry. "It only matters what you are."

I wake up screaming.

Nyra is at my door within a minute, hair wild from sleep, eyes wide with fear. She must have heard me through the wall.

"Rue!" She grabs my shoulders, shakes me gently until my eyes focus on her face instead of the altar still burning behind them. "Rue, you are safe. You are here. Breathe."

I cannot stop shaking. My hands, when I look down at them, are clean — no blood, no altar, just Rue's thin fingers with their bitten nails — but I can still feel the phantom warmth of that stone under my palms, still hear that voice calling me good girl like I am something being trained instead of someone being asked.

"I saw it," I whisper. "The altar. I said words I should not know. There was blood, and it was not a wound, it was—" I stop, pressing a shaking hand over my mouth. "I think I did something terrible, Nyra. I think I did something terrible and I do not remember what, and someone wants me to remember it again."

Nyra's face goes pale in the candlelight. "What kind of terrible."

"I do not know. That is what frightens me most." I meet her eyes, and I let her see all of it — the fear, the confusion, the horrible creeping suspicion that I am not only a victim in this story but something else too, something with blood already on her hands from a night I cannot fully remember. "What if I am not only the one who was wronged, Nyra? What if I did something wrong too?"

She takes my face in both hands, the way she has never done before, and holds my gaze steady.

"Then we find out the truth together," she says, fierce and certain. "Whatever it is. I am not leaving you to carry this alone."

I want to believe that will be enough. I want to believe friendship and courage can hold back whatever is waiting for me in that forest.

But even as she says it, I hear, faint and far away, carried on no wind I can feel, a voice drifting through the crack under my door like fog finding its way in.

Come to the trees, little ghost. Remember what you gave away.

Nyra does not hear it. Her face shows nothing but worry for me, calm and unknowing.

Which means it is not really a voice at all.

It is a summons. And it is calling only for me.