166. The Mirror of Bone

There was no light.

Only the hush of emptiness, vast and consuming.

Emma floated in the darkness, weightless, untethered. She couldn’t feel her limbs. She couldn’t even remember her body—just the faint sensation of movement, like she was drifting down an invisible river that moved without water or banks.

Then a whisper echoed through the black.

“You should not have come.”

Emma’s breath hitched—or it would have, if she were still breathing. The voice was not human. It wasn’t angry, but it carried an ancient weight, as though it had been speaking since before the first Pack howled at the moon.

“Who are you?” she asked, though her voice was nothing but thought.

The darkness did not answer.

Instead, a vision opened before her—a shimmer in the void, like a mirror rising from a bottomless sea. It stood tall and twisted, its frame carved from bone so white it glowed. Emma had seen it before, in fragments of memory and magic, in Alexander’s cryptic warnings, and in the writings she had barely