The air grew frigid, turning my exhaled breath into a mist of frost that hung suspended between me and the Headmaster. The entity behind him, a towering mass of shifting, obsidian smoke, emitted a sound like grinding tectonic plates. It did not have a mouth, yet the vibration resonated directly within my chest, a discordant chorus of ancient grievances.
"What is that?" Nyra snarled, her back arched, her fingers digging deep gouges into the stone floor. The wolf within her was no longer merely restless. It was cowering.
"It is the reason your ancestors were slaughtered, Nyra," the Headmaster replied, his gaze locked onto me with a terrifyingly calm intensity. "It is the consciousness of the original Dreadmoor, stripped of his mortality and bound to this academy by a cage of our own desig
