Chapter Seven — Learning to See
736 Words
The first thing Maren taught me was how to feel what I'd been doing accidentally my whole life.
"Close your eyes," she said. We were in the herb garden still, the morning warming around us, the compound beginning its daily noise in the distance. "Tell me what you feel."
"Nothing," I said. "That's rather been the problem."
"You feel nothing because you're looking inward," she said patiently. "Your gift does not live inward. It lives at your edges. Your skin. The air around you. Try again. Not inside. Out."
I tried again.
And this time — faint, uncertain, like trying to see something at the edge of your vision that disappears when you look directly at it — I felt something. A warmth to my left. A specific, textured warmth that had shape to it, that hummed at a frequency I didn't have words for.
"That's you," I said, opening my eyes.
Maren smiled. Fully, for the first time. It rearranged her whole face. "That's me. And what does it feel like?"
"Warm," I said. "Steady. Like — embers that have been burning a long time."
"Accurate." She tilted her head. "My gift is warmth-based healing. Old and slow but very reliable." She gestured past the garden wall. "Now. The training yard. What do you feel from there?"
I closed my eyes again and I reached outward, toward the sound of drills and commands and the controlled impacts of bodies in practice.
It was overwhelming. Like going from one voice to a room full of them — all different timbres, temperatures, textures. Bright sharp spikes of power. Deep thrumming wells of it. Something that flickered like firelight, unstable and brilliant. Something else that moved like deep water, slow and cold and very strong.
"I feel — a lot," I managed.
"Good. That's your baseline." Her voice was quiet, careful. "Now. Don't amplify. Don't reach. Just notice."
I noticed.
Over the next hour, she taught me the difference between passive resonance — the ambient hum of my gift responding automatically to wolves nearby — and active influence, which required something from me: intention, direction, a kind of deliberate opening or closing of whatever channel ran through me.
"You've been passively amplifying everyone near you your entire life," she said. "Without control, without knowing. Your father's pack was stronger when you were in it. You assumed it was them. It was always partly you."
"And when I left—"
"They lost the amplification. They wouldn't have noticed it as your absence specifically — they would have experienced it as a general decline. Slower healing. Slightly less strength. A small margin on every engagement." She paused. "Enough to lose things they should have won."
I thought about the three border skirmishes my father's pack had in the month before he cast me out. They'd won all three, barely. I thought about whether the margins had changed since.
"Can I reverse it?" I asked. "The passive amplification — can I stop doing it?"
"With training, yes." She looked at me steadily. "But Seraphina — understand something. You stopping is not the same as you having never started. The wolves who grew up near you built themselves around a floor you provided without knowing it. Removing it now would feel, to them, like sudden weakness. Like losing something." She folded her hands. "You are not responsible for that. But you should understand what your presence means to the people around you before you start making decisions about when to give it and when to take it back."
I looked at the middle distance and thought about every wolf in Blackthorn Pack who had performed better in training this week.
I thought about Finn's form correction. About whether that had been my eye or my frequency.
About Caden, sitting on the cold ground by the creek, and whether what drew him to me was something real or something I was emitting without consent.
"Maren," I said. "The Alpha. Does my gift affect—"
"His feelings?" She said it simply, without embarrassment. "The gift amplifies what exists. It does not create what isn't there." She held my gaze. "Whatever you're wondering about — that is real. The gift only turns up the volume. It does not write the music."
I didn't say anything.
But I filed it away somewhere I could find it later, in the dark, when I needed it.
- Writer
