The warning remained with Zinnia long after dawn had bled across the waystation windows.
Run.
It had not sounded like a command from the darkness beneath the shrine, nor like the ancient voice that had entered her dreams and called her silver daughter. This voice had risen from somewhere deeper, from the sealed chamber inside her soul where her wolf had once lived, carrying fear, urgency, and a fury so intimate that Zinnia could not mistake it for anything but her own.
Yet when she searched for the presence again, she found only silence.
She sat beside the window with her mother’s pendant open across her palm, the hidden strip of moon-script resting over her fingers while weak winter light moved across the silver. The message no longer shifted as it had beneath ordinary flame.
When th
