Miss Talbot's office light stayed on long after curfew.
Most students assumed she was just grading papers — or maybe just lonely.
They were wrong.
The moment the hallway outside went quiet, she locked the door, pulled the blinds, and took the fake bottom out of her filing cabinet. Underneath the folders and dusty syllabi was a flat wooden box carved with runes so old they'd been outlawed by three councils.
She didn't care.
She opened it.
Inside were six silver rings and a strip of velvet cloth — black as oil, soft as shadows. She wrapped it around her hand and felt the tension snap back into her shoulders like a wire.
Magic. Old and familiar. Tired, like her.
Talbot wasn't her real name. But it was the name Blackstone had on file, and that was what mattered.
She pulled the map of campus down from her bookshelf, unrolling it on her desk. It looked normal — buildings, walkways, tree lines.
But when she touched the cloth to the parchment, ink bled into view beneath the surface: Wards. Anchors. Ley fractures.
And one mark, still glowing faintly in the woods near the science building.
Fresh.
Sloppy.
Not student work.
"Shit," she whispered.
She stood and moved to her bookshelf. Not for a book — for the tiny mirror hidden behind the row of outdated academic journals.
She breathed on the glass.
It fogged.
Then cleared.
A face blinked into view — older, male, eyebrows like lightning bolts and a stare like a scalpel.
"You're late," he said.
Talbot didn't bother apologizing. "Someone breached the outer ward."
The man's expression darkened. "Who?"
"I don't know. But the signature was old. Not one of ours."
"Veil magic?"
"Looks like it."
His jaw flexed. "You should've shut the site down when the last gate flickered."
"I did. This isn't a gate. This is… something else. Someone testing."
He narrowed his eyes. "And the boy?"
Talbot froze.
"You've been watching him, haven't you?" the man said.
"Not officially."
"Is he showing signs?"
"Dream residue. Shadow trailing. Auditory bleed. But nothing direct."
"Yet."
They both fell quiet.
Then:
"If the Veil is thinning," Talbot said carefully, "we might not have time to wait."
The man frowned. "You want to wake it."
"I want to know what we're dealing with. If the wolf is bonding—"
"—then he's still unstable. We wake that spirit fully, and we risk burning out the host."
Talbot pressed a hand to her temple. "He's stronger than the records say. He survived a break."
The man leaned closer to the glass. "If this boy destabilizes the wards again—"
"I'll contain it."
"You'd better."
The mirror fogged over and went black.
Talbot exhaled.
Then turned back to the map, fingers tracing the glowing sigil in the trees.
"Who let you in?" she whispered. "And what are you looking for?"
Outside, on the roof of the west dorm, a crow watched her window.
Its eyes flickered.