Vows To The Void Moon

Chapter 5: What the Sage Knows

Saoirse P.O.V

The Sage found me outside.

I had needed air, not in a dramatic way, just in the way that small enclosed spaces become untenable when you've been sitting still with too many unresolved things for too many hours. I was standing at the Sanctum's eastern wall, watching the fog pull apart over the Riftlands, when I heard his steps behind me. Deliberate. He wanted me to hear them.

He stood beside me without speaking for a moment. This was something I noticed about him, he treated silence the way some people treated furniture, as a functional object rather than an absence. He settled into it and waited for you to do the same.

I was too tired for patience. 'You knew I was coming,' I said. 'You knew my name. You knew about Thessaly before I did. So either you have Hollow Courts access or you have something else, and I'd like to know which.'

'Neither,' he said. 'What I have is your mother.'

The fog moved. The trees were very still.

'My mother disappeared twelve years ago,' I said. My voice came out flat. I had constructed that flatness over a long time and I was grateful for it now.

'She disappeared from your awareness twelve years ago,' the Sage said, and there was nothing cruel in how he said it, which almost made it worse.

'She came to the Veil Sanctum eleven years ago. She lived among us for three years. She left eight years ago to follow something she had found, information she believed was critical enough to pursue regardless of personal cost.'

He paused. 'She was right about the information. She significantly underestimated the cost.'

I turned to look at him. I was aware that my face was doing something I wasn't controlling, which was unusual and uncomfortable. 'Is she alive?'

The Sage's expression had the particular quality of someone about to give an honest answer they wish they could soften. 'As of eight months ago, yes. I cannot tell you with certainty what is true now.'

Eight months. I did the arithmetic of that without wanting to.

'What did she find?' I asked.

'Evidence.' He turned back to the fog. 'Your mother was Veilborn, Saoirse. Not pack-aligned. Not pack-registered. She renounced before you were born, which is why you carry no formal pack designation and why you have spent six years as a Riftlands scout rather than a pack wolf — you were never registered to be claimed.' He glanced at me.

'You did not know this.'

'I knew she wasn't packing,' I said. 'I didn't know she was Veilborn.'

'There is a distinction between those two things that matters enormously in the context of what you are.' He said this carefully, as though the sentence had edges.

'Your mother's bloodline carries an ability that the Veilborn have documented across three generations. It is not a wolf ability. It predates the pack system. It is for lack of a more precise term an empathic sovereignty. The capacity to read and, under sufficient activation, to influence the emotional atmosphere of a space and the people within it.'

Something very quiet moved through me.

'I don't’ I started.

'You have been calling it instinct for twenty-six years,' he said. 'You have been managing it as a scout skill. You have kept it unnamed because naming things makes them real and real things can be taken.' He looked at me steadily. 'I am telling you now because in eleven days the Void Moon rises, and when it does, what you have been managing as instinct will activate fully and you will not have the option of keeping it unnamed any longer.'

Eleven days. The Void Moon. I had been treating it as background noise, like a lunar event that made pack politics edgier than usual and required extra vigilance on the border. Not as something with a claim on me personally.

'And Cadryn Voss,' I said. 'What does he have to do with this?'

'Your mother went to him,' the Sage said. 'Eighteen months ago. With everything she had found.'

Inside the Sanctum, through the stone wall, I could hear nothing. But I was aware that in that chest-deep, nameless way that the man on the table was awake again.

'He knew her,' I said. It wasn't a question.

'He protected what she gave him,' the Sage said. 'At considerable personal cost, as you have seen.'

I looked at the door of the Sanctum for a long moment. Cadryn Voss had looked at me and said: you were already in this before you found me.

I was beginning to understand what he meant.

I was not yet ready to walk back through that door. But I was getting there.