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“Lucky me,” I mutter, though I can’t shake the feeling that the encounter was significant in ways I don’t yet understand.

“Shall I show you to your quarters?” Finnian asks as servers clear impossibly clean plates. “It’s been rather an overwhelming first day.”

I nod, suddenly eager to escape the weight of so many inhuman gazes—particularly the ice-blue stare I can still feel between my shoulder blades despite the prince’s departure.

As we leave the great hall, I can feel all eyes on me even though the chatter never dies down. It takes everything in me to hold my head high and follow Finnian out to the hall.

The corridor to my quarters shifts and rearranges itself as we walk, expanding and contracting in ways that defy normal spatial physics. My inner ear struggles to reconcile the shifting dimensions, balance momentarily failing.

I stumble, the world tilting around me.

Finnian’s hand catches my elbow, steadying me. Where his fingers touch bare skin, sparks of golden warmth spread upward, racing along my nerves like wildfire.

“The Academy disorients most newcomers,” he says, voice gentle with understanding. “The architecture exists in multiple dimensional planes simultaneously.”

“Multiple planes,” I repeat flatly, forcing my voice steady while my vision struggles to process a hallway that curves when it should be straight. I’m grasping for the familiar, for anything that makes rational sense.

We stop before a heavy wooden door carved with intricate knotwork patterns that writhe slightly when viewed directly. It swings open at Finnian’s gesture.

I step through the doorway and freeze.

The room is appointed with disturbing accuracy. My desk at the exact angle I prefer. Books I’ve mentioned only in classified reports. Most disconcerting—the patchwork blanket I carried as a child, destroyed years ago in a fire.

Someone’s been watching me for a long time. Someone has been inside my head, my memories, my childhood dreams—and I have no idea how long they’ve been watching.

“Is something wrong?” Finnian asks, noting my pause, his expression revealing genuine concern.

I recover instantly, military training overriding shock. “Not at all. Just admiring the accommodations.” My voice sounds hollow to my own ears, too brittle to be believable.

“The Academy attempts to provide comfortable quarters for all faculty,” he explains, though his eyes hold an unspoken question. “These rooms often... adapt to their occupants over time.”

This level of detail couldn’t possibly be an adaptation. Someone has been inside my head, my memories, my childhood dreams—and I have no idea how long they’ve been watching.

“I’ll leave you to settle in,” Finnian says. “Your teaching schedule begins tomorrow afternoon—basic assessment of our advanced combat students. I’ll escort you to the training grounds after the morning meal.”

“I appreciate your assistance, Professor Willowheart,” I say, keeping my expression neutral despite the unease crawling up my spine like insects beneath my skin.

“Finnian, please,” he corrects with a warm smile that reaches his eyes, creating tiny crinkles at the corners. “We needn’t stand on formality here.”

After he leaves, I search the quarters thoroughly—checking for surveillance, inventorying escape routes, testing windows and doors.

In the wardrobe, I find the worn patchwork blanket identical to the one I carried everywhere as a child—the one destroyed in the same fire as the cabinet.

My fingers trace the familiar pattern, memories flooding back with overwhelming force.

This isn’t just something I mentioned in passing or a preference that could be observed. This is a piece of my history, a comfort object I mourned losing and have never spoken of since.

I move to the window overlooking the Academy grounds.

In the gardens below, I can make out figures moving with inhuman grace—some glowing faintly, others wreathed in shadow.

Beyond them, the forest that surrounds the Academy pulses with life I can sense even at this distance, trees swaying in patterns that have nothing to do with wind.

Their movement calls to something in my blood, something ancient and buried.

Turning back to the room—my room, apparently prepared with disturbing accuracy—I remove the pendant from around my neck for the first time since Graves gave it to me.

The pendant hits the floor and power explodes through me. Thorns blaze up my arm, stones moving by themselves. Pleasant warmth spreads through my body like wildfire. My knees buckle with the intensity.

The patterns pulse with bluish-gold light that illuminates the stones on the nearby table, and with it comes the scent of pine and starlight—the exact fragrance from my recurring childhood dreams. The stones shift in response, physically rearranging themselves into a pattern I shouldn’t recognize but do—a constellation that doesn’t exist in Earth’s sky but feels more familiar than any I’ve ever studied.

My hand rises to touch the birthmark behind my ear, finding it hot and pulsing in time with the light from my arm.

As I watch, transfixed, Litvak’s cut seals itself, but it’s not healing—it’s changing.

My flesh transforms into something else, and the pendant can’t stop it anymore.

The edges knit together not with scar tissue but with delicate patterns that resemble the very stones on the table, as if my flesh becomes something both more and less than human.

I replace the pendant hurriedly. The moment it touches my skin, the thorn patterns recede, and the stones return to their previous arrangement. The healing sensation diminishes but doesn’t entirely stop, continuing as a subtle warmth beneath my skin.

My heart pounds with a mixture of adrenaline and something deeper, more primal—recognition of transformation I can’t control but that feels, despite everything, right. My body betrays me with every breath, accepting what my mind still fights.

I sit heavily on the bed, finally allowing my carefully maintained composure to crack when no one can see. My hands shake so violently I have to press them between my knees, my chest heaving with shallow breaths that can’t seem to find oxygen.

Everything I thought I knew about reality, about myself, about my mission—all of it suddenly feels insufficient, incomplete.

I’m in fucking Faerie. With magic and floating professors and living architecture. And somehow, impossibly, my body recognizes this place even when my mind doesn’t. My blood remembers what my memories can’t access.

I glance at the small collection of stones—my stones, somehow—and whisper to the empty room, “What the hell am I doing here?”