Reboot. This takes place 1 year after the last chapter. Very short tentative opening to a new era.
Seline had been by the sea since 5 in the morning. The Greece island Ikara was lonely out of season. Only her, the salty air and the sound of breaking waves.
Yet even on the other side of the pier far into the sea she heard the disturbance. Or more like felt it. Dorian might have perceived it through sound. For her it was more like awareness. Irritation. A piece of dust in the eye.
She was never going to be as good as Dorian in sensing or emitting. But the endless meditations by the sea, the Radical Resonance as Dorian called it, taught her a couple unique things.
It saved her, one might say. The first couple of weeks after Isaiah's disappearance she had been restless and plagued by such intense waves of grief the only thing that somewhat came close to expressing that vast emptiness was the sea.
Sitting by it's wild waves, by the unending horizon. The sudden rains and the white foam. The anger and whirling emotion. The more in synch she felt with it, the more her magic resonated.
That was when she understood what magic really meant. Resonance. Understanding. Feeling and seeing the place and the structures and element you were trying to control. Letting it control you back.
Sometimes she went so deep she forgot how to speak. She couldn't communicate in any human language, having to read back her own words. Sometimes her mind would drift away during breakfast or in the middle of conversation.
What else was there to do? They couldn't find Isaiah by any other known means.
Sometimes she had to remind herself she had a body. Fingers frozen and numb from lack of circulation as she stared at the sea from the white beach.
Trying to reach more, deeper, wider.
That was what was left of their pack. Dylan back with their parents in Slovakia. Rip hidden out of sight and lost, cause humans would hunt him and wolves would kill him.
Wolves, who left Vienna in waves, like when all turtles migrate at once. A whole third of the city's population left, Kieran said?
Kieran. Yes, it was his presence, his will burning like a flame down from the driveway.
Kieran, who begged and asked and threatened his way through his family resources to search. Kieran, who came to visit her in irregular intervals, hands bloodied, sporting different black bruises each time.
Dorian wouldn't leave her, so she wouldn't lose herself in radical resonance. Kieran left to get news, progress, to fight.
And yet, they didn’t find anything. They couldn't do anything. There was no law, no institution, no official place to call.
Humans didn't understand what they did, who they made disappear. And wolves turned out to be helpless without the voice of reason and power who represented them inside and out.
Kieran's steps got closer.
Seline got up, making her way towards the house she and Dorian rented on Ikara. To have somewhere to train. To grow powerful while waiting. While searching.
Morning mist covered the beach. Kieran stood at the end of the pier, all in black, curly hair in his eyes, leather jacket covered in salty moisture.
Mist was good. Everything salty and wet was Seline's domain now, like extension of senses. Eyes and hands.
Kieran held his phone out to her as if she could see it from so far away. But she knew what he would show her. So it was no joke.
They really wanted to make a conference about wolves. Talk about their decreasing numbers, maybe? Who would be left with the authority to speak about them? To speak for them?
There was a place at the uni opening up. To research wolves. To give lectures about them.
If she didn’t take it, someone with less knowledge and even less right would.
If they never talked about what was gone, what was missed, how it worked, nobody would know.
