Chapter 81 — Dreamwalkers

Chapter 81: Chapter 81 — Dreamwalkers

~ Raven ~

Raven didn’t answer.

She’d meant to laugh it off, say something dismissive and go back to fighting with the strap. Instead, she sat there with the buckle half-fed through, staring at Brielle until the other girl finally lowered the boot in her hands.

"What?" Brielle asked.

Raven hesitated.

"Raven."

"It was a stupid question."

"It was a very specific question." Brielle turned on the bed to face her properly. "Why the hell would you ask me that?"

"I read it somewhere."

"You didn’t."

"There’s a Chapter in—"

"Raven."

Raven let go of the strap.

Fine.

"Fuck it," she said. "Twice. It’s happened twice."

Brielle didn’t say anything, so she kept going.

"The first time was my second night here. I fell asleep and I was somewhere else. Not dreaming about somewhere else. I was there. And there was a man."

She stopped.

"I couldn’t see his face. It wasn’t blurred or hidden. There just wasn’t one to see."

"Did he speak?"

"He asked what I was."

Brielle kept her eyes on her.

"And he went through my head," Raven said. "That’s the part I can’t explain properly. He wasn’t asking about my life. He was looking at it. Things from Blackthorn. Things I’ve never told anyone here. He went through them like pages."

"You’re sure they were your memories?"

"He knew the kitchen stairs."

Brielle let out a slow breath.

"The second time was nine days ago. Same place. Same man. Except he was angry this time." Raven adjusted her grip on the loose strap. "At one point he said he hadn’t needed to come far. That he was already here."

Brielle’s expression tightened. "Here?"

"Inside Valerius."

"Did he actually say that, or did you assume it?"

"He said it."

"How did you get out?"

There it was.

Raven had known the question was coming since about the second sentence, and she still didn’t have an answer she could give without opening several other doors.

"I fought him."

"With what?"

"I don’t know." Raven looked down at the buckle in her hands. "I pushed back. Then he was gone and I woke up."

Brielle watched her for a moment too long.

"There was blood," Raven added before the silence could turn into another question. "My nose. And afterward I had a headache for nearly two days. Even the sigil lamps hurt to look at."

That changed something in Brielle’s face. Not fear exactly, and certainly not softness.

Just attention.

"You didn’t tell anyone."

"I was going to tell the Headmaster that a faceless man was reading my memories. In my second week here, with a Nascent classification and half the academy already convinced I was trouble." Raven gave a small shrug. "Sure."

"You could have told me."

"I’m telling you now."

Brielle picked the boot back up, mostly to have something to do with her hands.

"All right," she said. "Then I’m going to say the thing you won’t like, and you’re going to let me finish."

"Say it."

"It was probably a nightmare."

"Brielle—"

"Let me finish." Brielle held up two fingers. "You’d been at Valerius nine days. You were rejected by two heirs, hunted out of your own House, put through classification in front of the entire academy and then jumped by upper-years in wolf masks. A recurring nightmare about a faceless man going through everything you’re afraid people will find out is not a supernatural event. It’s a very reasonable response to a very unreasonable month."

Raven said nothing.

"And the other thing," Brielle said. "Dreamwalkers don’t exist."

"You said that’s what they do."

"They did. Past tense. Raven, they’re gone. They’ve been gone for generations. They’re in children’s stories now — behave or the Dreamwalker comes for your sleep, that sort of thing. My grandmother used it on me. Nobody has produced a documented one in living memory."

"Extinct."

"That’s what’s taught."

Raven turned the buckle over in her fingers.

"Then explain the nose bleeds."

Brielle didn’t have anything for that, and to her credit she didn’t invent something.

"I can’t," she said.

Raven let it sit for a second, then went at it from the side.

"Say they were real. Say one of them walked into somebody’s head tonight." She looked up. "How? What actually lets you do that? Would it be a sigil?"

"It would have to be."

"Which kind?"

Brielle set the boot down again.

"Berry already took you through the four types, so I’m not repeating the lesson. But you’re thinking about sigils like they’re always something drawn onto a person."

"Inscribed."

"Right, and that’s the wrong shape for it. Give me your hand."

Raven gave her a hand, warily. Brielle turned it palm up and tapped the centre of it.

"When you shift for the first time, who paints the Shift Sigil onto you?"

"...Nobody."

"Nobody. There’s no ceremony, no ink, no Sigil Master, nobody kneeling on your back with a needle. Every wolf that’s ever lived has managed it and not one of them was drawn on first."

Brielle let go. "It’s already in the body. It comes up when the wolf is ready for it and it works whether you understand it or not. That’s a natural sigil. It’s not written on you. It’s part of what you are."

Raven thought of every wolf she had ever watched transform. It had always looked so natural that she had never once wondered what made the change possible.

"So Dreamwalking would be that."

"That’s what I’d assume. Nobody would inscribe an ability like that onto a person, and if they could, someone would have. Which leaves the blood." Brielle paused. "Or need."

"Need-born."

"What do you know of it?"

"The kind your body believes it might not survive."

"Then you know it isn’t something you decide to have." Brielle went back to the boot. "A wolf who’s about to die can pull a pattern out of nowhere. It might save them, it might rip them apart, and it usually doesn’t happen twice. So — maybe the first Dreamwalkers were somebody in enough trouble that their body invented a way out of their own skull, and it held, and it went down through the bloodline afterward. Or maybe it was in certain families from the start and it simply died out with them."

"Which one?"

"I have no idea."

Raven looked at her.

"I’m not being modest," Brielle said. "This isn’t a thing anyone teaches. I’ve had tutors since I was six and not one of them ever spent an hour on Dreamwalkers, because you don’t build a curriculum around an ability nobody has. Everything I’ve just said is me reasoning from sigil theory and old stories. Don’t carry it around as fact."

Raven nodded slowly.

Then, because the whole thing had cracked something open and she’d never had anyone to ask before:

"Where did sigils come from?"

Brielle’s hands stopped.

"What?"

"Sigils. Any of them. The Shift one, the lamps in the corridor, all of it. They’re patterns. Someone had to know what the patterns meant before they could be patterns." Raven shrugged. "Where did the first one come from?"

Brielle sat back.

"That’s — actually a better question than the last one."

"Try."

"There’s a name for it. The First Script." Brielle said it with the casual certainty of something she’d been taught too young to question. "Supposedly, there was once a language that wasn’t meant for speaking. It was meant for telling things what to do."

She shifted the boot in her lap.

"Every sigil we use now is supposed to be a fragment of that language. A word, maybe part of one. Nobody has the whole Script anymore. We just have pieces that still work when they’re written correctly."

"That’s what Berry’s teaching us? Fragments?"

"That’s what everyone’s teaching everyone. Nobody says it like that because it makes the entire subject sound like grave-robbing."

Raven waited.

"And the wolf legends say we didn’t work it out ourselves," Brielle said. "They say the first Alpha Queen taught wolves how to read the Script. How to hold pieces of it in the body without dying of it."

"An Alpha Queen."

"That’s the story."

"Is it true?"

"I genuinely don’t know, Raven. My House recites it at midwinter. Half the Great Houses treat it as history and the other half treat it as scripture, and I’ve never met anybody who could tell me which it’s supposed to be." Brielle pulled the boot on and stood. "That’s the end of what I’ve got. Ask a scholar."

Raven filed it where she’d been filing everything else since she arrived — the enormous pile of things she was apparently part of and had never once been told.

Eighteen years in a House full of wolves. Nobody thought to mention the language.

She reached for her strap again.

"Brielle. That thing you said about Marchmont. That she awakened at sixteen."

"Raven."

"I’m only asking whether it’s the same—"

"Later," Brielle said.

The horn went before Raven could push it.

It came up through the floor more than the window, a long low note from the direction of the observation grounds, and the whole corridor outside erupted.

Brielle was already moving. "That’s the assembly call."

Raven got the last strap through, hauled it tight, and followed her out.

The grounds had stopped being the grounds.

Every bank of the observation field had filled solid, students standing three deep along the rails where there were rails and simply standing where there weren’t. The four Wing banners hung enormous from the tower faces, and beneath them the display slates had come alive in long bright rows, each one showing the same view of empty trees.

Beyond all of it, the forest.

The Founders’ Ward was waking along its edge. Raven could see it going up in sections, a pale seam of light running the treeline like a tide coming in, and she could feel it from a hundred paces away — a low pressure against the skin that made the hair on her arms lift.

She found her Wing’s colours and cut toward them.

Garrick counted the five of them without appearing to. Mara handed her a spare line without being asked. Dorian had gone quiet, which Raven decided she didn’t like at all.

"Nervous?" she said.

"Absolutely not."

"You’ve gone grey."

"That’s my natural colouring."

Across the assembly, Rowan’s five stood in a tight block, Seren at the front with her harness finally left alone and Celeste at her shoulder looking like someone who had been told this would be fun. Blade’s Wing stood apart from everyone, unbothered, Isolde Marchmont at the centre of them with her hands behind her back.

Raven did not look at Prymont’s line for longer than it took to confirm where it was.

All four heirs were there behind their teams. For once, nobody was watching them.

Then the noise began to go.

It went in the wrong direction, which was what made Raven turn — not spreading out from the crowd but rolling in from the forest edge, row by row, until fifteen hundred students had gone quiet without anyone asking them to.

The Headmaster came through the instructors’ line and did not stop when she reached it.

She walked past the wardens, past the Hunt officials with their registers, past the four Cardinal heirs, and none of them said a word to her. Rowan straightened. Nikolai took his hands out of his pockets.

She stopped in front of the twenty of them.

Behind her, the last section of the Founders’ Ward lit, and the treeline went white from end to end.

The Headmaster looked over all twenty representatives without hurry.

"Representatives. To the line."

Raven glanced at Brielle.

Brielle glanced back.

They stepped forward together.

The Headmaster waited until all twenty were in position.

"Welcome to the Founders’ Hunt."