CHAPTER FOUR: The Specialist
874 Words
Thessaly's office was in the old wing — stone walls, low ceilings, the smell of dried herbs and something faintly electric. She looked at Mira the way you'd look at a painting you'd heard described for years but never seen.
"Come in," she said, before Mira could knock. "Sit wherever you're comfortable."
The office was organized in a way that looked like chaos and probably wasn't. Shelves of specimens and texts and instruments Mira mostly didn't recognize. Two chairs near a window letting in long bars of afternoon light. Mira took the one closer to the window.
"You know why I'm here," Mira said.
"Damien told me to expect you." Thessaly settled into the other chair. "He said to be thorough. He said it three times." A pause. "He's not generally a repetitive man."
"No," Mira said. "I imagine he isn't."
The questions that followed were unlike any testing she had experienced in Ashveil. Not can you run faster, can you lift more, do you have elemental response — but stranger, softer questions. Did she experience physical sensations when other wolves used gifts in close proximity? Where in her body? Since when? Did dominant wolves behave differently near her — quieter, more careful, as though responding to something they couldn't identify?
Mira answered carefully and honestly.
Yes to the physical sensation — a pressure in her sternum, present since childhood, which she had always assumed was ambient response to higher-ranked wolves. She had never questioned it.
Possibly yes to the behavioral changes. She thought of Ryden's slight physical distance, always maintained, which she had attributed to disdain. She thought of training sessions where senior wolves would pause without apparent reason and resume looking vaguely disoriented.
She had spent eighteen years attributing all of it to the way powerful people reacted to powerless ones.
"I didn't have context for it," she said. "It seemed like the way things were."
Thessaly set down her pen. "It would have," she said. "Given what I suspect you're carrying, the absence of context is almost inevitable. Standard pack testing would have found nothing." She held Mira's gaze. "Which means you would have had eighteen years of anomalous experiences with no framework to interpret them."
"What do you suspect I'm carrying?" Mira asked.
Thessaly folded her hands.
"There is a category of wolf gift called absorption gifts," she said. "Extremely rare — I have personally documented fewer than twenty cases. Unlike standard gifts, absorption gifts do not generate power outward. They interact with the gifts of others — sensing them, absorbing their energy, redirecting them. The most powerful and rarest absorption gift is called Voidblood." She paused. "A wolf carrying Voidblood can absorb the energy of an active gift, draw it in, store it temporarily. In more advanced manifestation, they can deflect a gift entirely — redirect it without absorbing. And in the most advanced documented cases, they can strip a gift from another wolf. Remove it temporarily. Leave that wolf suddenly, completely without power."
The afternoon light moved slowly across the floor between them.
"Standard pack testing screens for outward signatures," Mira said slowly. "Voidblood has none."
"It reads as absence," Thessaly confirmed. "Which looks exactly like no gift at all."
Eighteen years. Eighteen years of training twice as hard because she thought she had nothing. Eighteen years of her father's carefully neutral expression and Ryden's distance and a pack treating her like a liability to be managed.
Eighteen years of powerless when the truth was simply that no one had thought to look for what she actually carried.
"Show me," Mira said. "Test me."
Thessaly's assistant was seventeen, nervous, with a minor heat ability. He stood three feet from Mira and activated his gift at half strength.
The warmth came first. And underneath it, the pressure in her sternum intensified — the feeling she'd had ten thousand times in her life and never understood, connecting now for the first time to what was causing it.
"Breathe into it," Thessaly said quietly. "Don't direct it. Simply allow."
Mira breathed.
The warmth intensified. And then it moved — toward her, like water finding a drain. The boy made a startled sound. Thessaly began writing rapidly. And Mira felt herself fill with something warm and electric and thoroughly not-her-own, lighting up her nervous system like a current.
"Stop," Thessaly said.
The boy stepped back, staring at his hands. "My gift went cold," he said.
They tested three more times. Three gift types. Each time the same — the flow, the other wolf's gift going briefly dark, Mira sitting in the center of it feeling like she was made of light.
By the time they finished, Thessaly had filled four pages and Mira was sitting with her hands in her lap and her understanding of herself completely rearranged.
"Voidblood," Thessaly said. "Confirmed." She set down her pen. "The strength of the response on day one, with no training — I need to tell Damien today. Not tomorrow. Today."
Mira looked at her hands.
Powerless, Ryden had said. By every measure.
She turned her hands over slowly.
Not powerless. Something else entirely. Something that had been living in her chest her whole life — waiting for someone to finally ask the right question.
- Writer
