She had not expected the dreams.
Recovery, she had learned, did not happen only in the waking hours of deliberate effort and healer sessions and carefully tended choices. It happened in the sleep hours too, in ways she could not supervise or direct, in the territory of the body's own accounting, which ran its own processes without asking permission.
She dreamed of the mirror.
Not with the quality of nightmare. With the quality of completion, the mirror showing her things that were not the past but the present, the woman she actually was, and she looked at the reflection without flinching because the woman looking back was genuinely recognizable. She dreamed of the Keeper's ground and woke with Lyra already awake inside her, warm and steady, as though the wolf had been there for the whol
