Fated in Sapphire

Chapter Six - The Last Day of Summer

Talia's POV

I wake up to Ember before I wake up to anything else.

This is always how it goes. My alarm hasn't sounded, the sun is barely past the curtains, and my wolf spirit is already fully awake and apparently in possession of opinions about the day ahead.

*First day of school tomorrow,* she announces, with the energy of someone who has been sitting with this thought for a while and has finally decided I should be sitting with it too. *We should plan our entrance.*

*We don't need an entrance,* I think back, pulling the blanket higher.

*We ALWAYS need an entrance. It sets the tone for the entire year.*

*Ember.*

*Yes?*

*It is six in the morning.*

A pause. *Your point?*

I give up on sleep. This is also always how it goes.

My room is a comfortable disaster — books stacked on the nightstand in the specific order I'll read them, the desk buried under organized chaos of notebooks and color-coded pens that make sense to me and confuse everyone else, a half-finished friendship bracelet on the windowsill I've been meaning to finish since July. The walls are covered in academy pennants, photos from the past three years, and a map of Silverpeak annotated in four different ink colors because I apparently cannot look at a map without wanting to improve it. My best friend Priya says my room looks like a very enthusiastic librarian lives in it. She means it as a compliment. I take it as one.

I love my room. I love that it looks exactly like me.

Downstairs, the sounds of my family waking up: my father's voice, low and warm, followed by my mother's laugh. The domestic music of a house where people are genuinely happy to be in the same space. My little brother Cato's door banging open — he's twelve and has never closed a door quietly in his life — followed by the thunder of his footsteps on the stairs, taking them two at a time.

On the family link, the morning comes alive. My father sending something cheerful that's mostly warmth with a joke buried in it. My mother's response is fond exasperation. Cato's presence on the link is a burst of *I'm awake and hungry* that crashes through everyone else's morning like a pup who hasn't learned to modulate yet, even though he absolutely has and is choosing not to.

I laugh into my pillow. Then I get up.

---

Breakfast in the Delgado household is never quiet and never boring, which is exactly how I like it. My mother makes toast and eggs and listens to Cato's detailed account of a dream he had about fighting a giant river otter — he tells it with the seriousness of someone reporting a military engagement. My father adds sound effects at appropriate moments. I eat my eggs and feel the particular warmth of a family that finds each other genuinely funny.

The pack link opens up as I eat. My friend group channel stirring to life as people wake up, the casual morning communication of wolves who've been connected long enough that talking through the link feels as natural as talking out loud. More natural, sometimes. There's a fluency to it you can't get any other way — you can't fake your link presence the way you can fake a tone of voice. Everything comes through whether you mean it to or not, which is sometimes inconvenient and always honest. We've been friends since first year, the five of us. By now the friend group channel feels less like a communication tool and more like a second room we all live in.

*Last day of summer,* someone sends — Priya, from the particular texture of her link presence, warm and slightly melancholy. *I'm genuinely devastated.*

*Same,* from Marcus. *What time does everyone want to meet at the river?*

*Can't. Family thing.* — Jonah.

*What kind of family thing?*

*The kind I can't get out of.* Long-suffering resignation ripples through the channel.

*You've been saying that all summer,* Priya points out. *I'm starting to think the family thing is just you and a book.*

*That is between me and the book.*

*JONAH.*

*The book hasn't told anyone! It has excellent discretion.*

I'm laughing into my eggs, which Cato notices and asks about, and when I try to explain that the joke is happening in my head he gives me the look of a twelve-year-old who finds older siblings fundamentally baffling and returns to the river otter.

Then it happens — the slow bleed of someone's emotional residue seeping past their filters and into the friend group channel. Warm, aching, directed longing, saturating the link in a way that is genuinely a lot to encounter before eight in the morning.

A collective groan ripples through the channel — Priya's, Marcus's, mine, even Jonah's, which is impressive given he's theoretically absorbed in a family thing.

*Can we PLEASE,* from Priya, *learn to block our links when we're pining? Some of us are trying to eat breakfast.*

*I'm not PINING,* comes back immediately, indignant. Definitely Darian. *I'm YEARNING. There is a meaningful philosophical difference.*

*There is genuinely not.*

*Pining is passive. Yearning implies intention and emotional depth—*

*Darian,* from Marcus, patient and devastating, *you have been yearning at us since June. At some point you need to just talk to her.*

*It's not that simple.*

*It's exactly that simple.*

*BLOCK YOUR LINK, DARIAN.*

I send a wave of amused sympathy into the channel and let the argument carry on without me. Darian and Priya have been having variations of this argument since fourth month of last year, which everyone on the channel knows except possibly Darian, who has committed to yearning as a lifestyle. I know the sound of each of these wolves on the link as well as I know their voices out loud. Better, maybe. This is the texture of my life and I love it unreservedly — connected, warm, occasionally invaded by other people's emotional overflow at six in the morning, never dull and never lonely.

Ember, settling into my morning thoughts: *You're in a good mood.*

*It's the last day of summer. I'm allowed.*

*You're always in a good mood.*

*That's not true.* I think about it. *I was in a terrible mood the day you convinced me to try the climbing wall and I got stuck seventeen feet up for forty minutes.*

*I didn't convince you. I suggested. You decided.*

*You HEAVILY suggested.* But I'm smiling at the memory. Cato had to talk me down. He was ten and deeply smug about it. He has never let it go. *Today feels different though. Like something is about to happen.*

*School starts tomorrow,* Ember says. *Something IS about to happen. Multiple somethings.*

*No, I mean something specific. Something I can't see yet.*

She considers this. Ember is practical in the way a good foundation is practical — not exciting, but everything stands on her. *You've said that before.*

*And I've been right before.*

*Name a time.*

*Third year, when I told Marcus the council session would run long and we should meet an hour later, and it ran two hours long—*

*That was an educated guess based on which council members were attending.*

*Intuition is just educated guessing that happens faster,* I say. *I'm telling you. This year is going to be different.*

Ember makes the internal equivalent of a shrug. Fair. I make this declaration every year, and she reminds me of this every year, and every year I turn out to be at least partially right about something — so we've reached a kind of détente on the subject. She doesn't tell me I'm wrong. I don't claim to be more certain than I am. We work with what we have.

This time, though. This time it sits with a different weight. I can't explain it better than that.

---

After breakfast I get organized, because organizing is one of my great pleasures in life and the academy student roster being published this week is practically a gift. I pull it up on my tablet at the kitchen table while Cato argues with our mother about whether twelve is old enough to take the extended mountain trail without an adult, which it is not, which he knows, which doesn't stop him arguing. The argument is a ritual at this point — both of them know how it ends, but Cato seems to find it valuable to make his case at full volume regardless.

The roster this year has fourteen new students. I go through them the way I always do — not to be nosy, but because I can't help it. New people mean new dynamics, new friendships, new everything. And because first days are genuinely hard for a lot of wolves and I would like to be in the right place at the right time if someone needs a friendly face. It's a thing I can do, so I do it. I've never understood the alternative.

Ember: *This is why people think you're the welcome committee.*

*I AM the welcome committee. Self-appointed, yes, but consistently effective.*

*You appointed yourself.*

*Someone had to,* I say. *And nobody else was going to.* I scroll through the names. Most are from nearby districts, transfers feeding into Moonlight Academy for the advanced years. I recognize a few surnames — children of council members, daughters of merchant families, the ordinary churn of Silverpeak's academy-age population. I build a small mental file on each. New students tend to cluster by familiar connection in the first weeks. It helps to know who might cluster with whom, and who might fall through the gaps.

And then: Lyra Stone. Daughter of Garrett Stone, newly appointed royal advisor to King William.

*Advisor's daughter,* I think. *She'll probably be fine. Built-in access to palace connections, her father working directly with the royal family—*

*Or,* Ember says, practical as ever, *she'll be overwhelmed and hide in a corner.*

I think about this. Advisors' children sometimes have the hardest first days of anyone, because the assumption is that they're already connected when actually they've been dropped into a new kingdom with none of their old relationships and all of the social weight of their parent's position sitting on their shoulders. People expect them to be fine, so nobody checks.

*If she's in a corner,* I tell Ember, *we'll find the corner.*

*Obviously,* Ember agrees. This is not even a question for either of us.

I put the tablet down and go get my running shoes.

---

The woods behind our house are my favorite place in Silverpeak — not the mountain trails the princes use for training, not the formal pack run routes, just the ordinary neighborhood woods where ordinary wolves go in the afternoons. Old pine trees and a creek that runs cold even in August, the air carrying the particular quality of mountain summer: warm at ground level and cold if you climb. Enough trail variation to keep a run interesting. Nothing that requires anything of you except your own body doing what it was made for.

I shift at the edge of the trees. Ember's wolf form is russet-furred and medium-sized, built for speed over short distances and confidence over long ones — she moves like she owns whatever ground she's on, which is simply how she is. We've been this together for three years and the shift is seamless now, the pleasure of it uncomplicated. The world in wolf form is richer — the scent of the forest deep and layered in ways the human nose only catches edges of, the sound of the creek ahead, every bird in the canopy mapped in seconds, the distant hum of the pack link woven through all of it like a second heartbeat.

Other wolves on the trails. Not a formal run — just neighbors out in the afternoon, wolves being wolves because the weather is warm and the last day of summer deserves to be spent outside. An older mated pair running side by side in the easy synchrony of wolves who've been doing this together for decades, their link so perfectly intertwined they move like one creature. A group of younger wolves I half recognize from the academy, their link presences bright and social, sharing some running joke that spills into laughter through their channel. A single wolf sitting on a rock beside the creek with his chin on his paws, doing nothing at all, just existing in the afternoon sun.

I understand that wolf completely.

The pack link hums through all of it. The background music of belonging — the warmth of being one thread in a vast web, the constant low knowledge that you are connected, that your presence matters to the shape of something larger than yourself. I run through it and feel it around me the way you feel sunlight, without having to think about it, without having to name it. The pack link is not something any of us chose. It's simply something we were born into, like language, like family. And like those things, it becomes visible only when you imagine its absence.

I wonder, sometimes, what it would feel like to not have this. To walk through a space full of wolves and feel none of it — to be in the middle of a crowd and completely alone inside it. I've tried to imagine it, closing my eyes and reaching for the link and then trying to picture finding nothing there. The exercise always made me feel slightly ill. Even the attempt was uncomfortable.

Not uncomfortable like a bad smell. Uncomfortable like grief. Like something important has gone missing and your whole nervous system knows it before your mind does.

I wonder if Lyra Stone has ever known anything else.

Ember, running easy beside my awareness: *This is good.*

*It really is.*

*You should appreciate it more.*

*I appreciate it constantly.*

*Not constantly,* she says, which is probably true. *You appreciate it right now, in this moment. That's what matters. Just remember it.*

I don't know why she says this with quite the weight she does. I file it away the way I file most of her practical wisdoms — not because I understand them immediately, but because she usually turns out to be right eventually.

The run takes me to the high point of the neighborhood trail, where the trees thin and you can see across the valley. Moonlight Academy sits on its plateau to the east, the stone buildings pale in the afternoon light, the grounds empty at this hour. Tomorrow it will be full of wolves. Tomorrow I'll be there, and so will fourteen new students, and somewhere in that crowd will be Lyra Stone, who may or may not need someone to find her corner.

*You keep coming back to her,* Ember observes.

*I know.*

*You don't know anything about her except her name.*

*I know she's the advisor's daughter and she's new and that's usually enough to pay attention.*

*It's usually enough for you to pay attention to everyone,* Ember says. *This feels different.*

It does. I can't say why. I sit in wolf form on the ridge for a few minutes and look at the empty academy and think about what it might mean to show up somewhere entirely new with no connections, no anchors, no one who knows your name yet. I've watched it happen to students before — the way the first week can either make or break someone's relationship with a new place. The friends you make in those first days tend to become the ones you keep.

I don't want her to miss that window because nobody was paying attention.

Then I shake it off and run home through the trees, because I'm not going to solve anything by sitting on a ridge turning a stranger's hypothetical loneliness into a project. I'll know more tomorrow.

---

I shift back at the treeline, pull on my clothes, and walk home through the neighborhood streets. Wolf form to human form, the world narrowing back from its richer register to the ordinary afternoon. I pass neighbors in both forms — a woman in wolf form sprawled in her front garden in the last patch of late sun, an older man walking his pup-aged child in human form while the pup keeps trying to shift and has to be gently redirected back. First shifts are exhausting for everyone involved.

The pack link hums around me the whole way home. That comfortable background frequency of a connected community. I pass through it the way I always do — not thinking about it, just inside it, the same way you don't think about air.

It's only later, lying in bed thinking about Lyra Stone's blank spot on the roster, that something occurs to me. If the link is a room full of sound, she lives in a silence inside it. Not a chosen silence — there's no registration for a block, no record of her requesting to withdraw her presence from the network. Just absence. A wolf who has somehow managed to exist outside the connection that everything else in our lives runs through.

I've seen blocked links before. Wolves who go private, who pull their presence down as close as possible. There's a texture to that — a closed door, a deliberate quiet, the shape of something that is present but not sharing. That's always recognizable. It has a feeling.

This is not that. Lyra Stone's roster entry is not a closed door. It's no door at all. Like she doesn't exist on the network. Like she has never existed on it.

I can't imagine it. I've tried a few times before, when I was younger and learning about the history of isolated wolves or exile bonds or ancient practices of separation. I'd close my eyes and try to picture what it would be like to reach for the link and find nothing. The exercise always made me feel slightly sick.

*Don't borrow her loneliness,* Ember says, picking up the thread of where my thoughts have gone. *Just be ready to do something about it when you meet her.*

*Right,* I agree. *That's more useful.*

*It usually is.*

---

Dinner is loud and warm and my father makes a joke so terrible on the family link that all three of us groan simultaneously, which makes him so pleased with himself that he tells it again out loud for good measure. My mother threatens to revoke his link privileges. Cato argues that this is not legally possible. I eat my food and listen to my family be exactly themselves, and feel completely, unremarkably, extraordinarily lucky.

This is the thing I try never to take for granted: the noise of it. The way everyone talks at once and nobody minds. The way my father reaches across the table to pour my mother's water before she notices her glass is getting low, because he's been doing it for years and knows when she needs it before she does. The way Cato tells the river otter dream for the third time today, with new details added, and my mother listens with exactly the same attention she gave the first telling. She doesn't rush him. She doesn't check her phone. She listens, because Cato is twelve and his dreams matter to her.

I grew up thinking this was just what families were like. It took until second year at the academy, watching the way other students talked about going home, to understand that it wasn't. That what I had here was specific and particular and worth protecting. Some wolves my age have parents who work too much or fight too often or have grown into strangers sharing an address. Some have homes that look fine from the outside and are quietly awful on the inside, held together by performance rather than love.

I hold what I have carefully. I try to hold it every single day, and I try to remember that not everyone around me has the same floor beneath them. Some people are building from the ground up. Some are building while the ground shifts. That's worth knowing about the people you meet.

After dinner I pack my bag. This is one of my rituals — the evening before the first day, everything laid out and organized, every book in its right place, every notebook labeled and ready. My bag is meticulously assembled while Cato plays something loud in his room and my parents settle into the living room and the family link softens to the comfortable low hum of a household winding down.

*I have a feeling about this year,* I tell Ember, folding my summer notes into the front pocket.

*You say that every year.*

*And I'm always right.*

*You are categorically NOT always right.* She has a specific example loaded and ready. *Second year. The hair.*

I stop folding. *That was a bold choice and I stand by it.*

*It was blue. Your hair was blue for two months.*

*Blue is a perfectly valid hair color.*

*It clashed with your uniform in a way that was genuinely difficult to look at directly.*

*That is an exaggeration.*

*Marcus called it an optical incident.*

*Marcus,* I say firmly, *is not a fashion authority.* But I'm laughing, because it's true — the blue hair was a catastrophic decision that I committed to fully and refused to regret, which is at least a consistent approach to catastrophic decisions. *This year is different. I mean it.*

*What makes this year different?*

I think about it honestly. The feeling I woke up with. Lyra Stone's name pulling at my attention all afternoon for no reason I could name. The ridge, the empty academy in the afternoon light, the certainty that settled in my chest while I was sitting there looking at it.

*There's someone,* I say. *I don't know who yet. But someone who's going to need us, and I'd rather be ready than not.*

Ember is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means she's taking it seriously. *All right,* she says finally. *Then we'll be ready.*

I zip my bag and set it by the door. The room is organized and still, moonlight through the curtains cutting pale squares across the floor. I stand in it for a moment and let the feeling settle — not urgency, not anxiety, just a calm readiness. Like knowing a door is about to open and positioning yourself to walk through it.

*Get some sleep,* Ember says.

*I know.*

*You're still thinking.*

*I'm always thinking. It's a design flaw.*

*Think quieter.*

I close my eyes and let the family link settle around me like something soft — my parents in the next room, Cato's presence a drowsy scrawl at the edge of my awareness, the friend group channel silent at last. The night is quiet in the way summer nights are quiet — warm and full and almost done.

Somewhere on the far side of the capital, in a house that is larger than the one she grew up in and still doesn't feel like home, a girl whose name has been following me around all day is probably lying awake. I don't know this for certain. I can't feel her on the link even if I try, which I won't think too hard about yet.

I just know.

Tomorrow I'll be in the corridors early. I always am. And if there's a girl standing alone somewhere, not sure where to go, wearing her aloneness like something she's had to make a habit — I'll find her.

That's what I do. It's always been what I do. And this year, for the first time in a long time, I think it's going to matter in a way that changes things for good.

Tonight, I sleep well. The last day of summer is over.