It’s been seven days since the world ended.

  That’s what it felt like, anyway. Seven days since mother breathed her last, her final exhale trailing like a candle wick dying in soft wind. Seven days of hymns that didn’t sound like music anymore. Of incense that clung to fur like sorrow that wouldn’t rinse out.

  They say her passing was peaceful. That the light left her willingly. That she became one with the Radiant Cycle, or whichever poetic loop of death our clergy were spinning this season. The truth is, I don’t remember anything poetic about it. I just remember the silence that followed.

  And how loud the silence has been ever since.

  The day after, the basilica rang with grief. Public grief. Choreographed and ceremonial. Trumpets too bright. Banners too white. Priests weeping in perfect unison like they practiced beforehand—which, knowing them, they probably did.

  The funeral procession wound through the sunlit avenues of the capital, watched by thousands. They brought her body on a dais of carved obsidian and gold, surrounded by armored clergy and bishops, our fur brushed and robed to match. I walked behind my siblings, sixth in line, beneath the banner of her crest: a rising sun flanked by five wolf-pup silhouettes.

  My siblings were the silhouettes, in case that wasn’t obvious.

  The people knelt as we passed. Some threw flowers. Some whispered prayers.

  I didn’t understand then what it meant for a god to die. I still don’t. But I knew something had ended. Something bigger than breath or blood.

  Mother was gone.

  And Sunmire was already shifting under the weight of her absence.

  By the seventh day, the ceremonial wailing stopped. The nobles stopped weeping long enough to start politicking again. The clergy resumed their power plays behind stained glass and sealed doors. The world had paused, and it was done pausing now.

  And so, apparently, were we.

  "To the training grounds," they told us.

  Just like that.

  Because grief, no matter how divine, doesn’t cancel destiny. Not here.

  We were to begin our awakening—the rite of mana perception. The moment where what lives dormant inside us takes shape, becomes visible, becomes ours.

  Or, as one priest explained it far too cheerfully, "The first true breath of the soul."

  If that’s true, I suspect my soul has asthma.

  The training grounds lie on the southeastern bluff of the basilica’s estate—flat, sun-kissed, and etched with faded glyphs from generations of initiates who thought carving their names into sacred stone was a noble tradition. The grass was short, and the air thick with potential and pollen.

  High Priest Quarroth met us there, robed in black and sun-metal. A relic of the old inquisitions; his title made clear in both his bearing and the scar that ran like a sermon down his left cheek.

  “Today,” he began, voice like a cracked bell, “you will not fight. You will learn.”

  I breathed easier. No sparring today. My ribs thanked the cosmos.

  “What is mana?” he asked us, rhetorical and unblinking.

  The silence stretched.

  I opened my mouth, immediately regretted it.

  “It’s… uh. Magic?” I offered.

  One of my siblings hissed through her teeth. Quarroth did not blink.

  “In the crude tongue of a tavern rat, yes, Pophet” he said. “But in truth, mana is memory. Mana is meaning. It is the ghost of intention made manifest. It is what remains when thought and spirit intersect with the breath of the world.”

  I suddenly felt very underqualified to be standing there.

  He stepped toward the center of the circle, drawing a line in the air with two fingers. The air shimmered faintly, a ripple visible only if you believed in it hard enough.

  “Mana exists everywhere. In the soil, in the wind, in you. But until it is awakened—until your soul recognizes itself—it is just background noise.”

  I nodded slowly. So far, I was keeping up. Kind of.

  “This rite,” he continued, “is not a moment of power. It is of reflection. A mirror held inward. It will not give you what you want. It will show you what you are.”

  One of my siblings shifted their stance. Another clenched their paws.

  “You will not shape mana. Mana will shape you.”

  He looked at each of us in turn, and when his eyes settled on me, I tried to hold them. I lasted three seconds.

  “Each of you will perceive it differently,” he said. “For some, it appears as flame. Others, as light, wind, or sound. But the shape it takes is not random. It is forged by your choices, your past, your perception of truth.”

  He paused, then added, “For me, it was a scale.”

  Of course it was.

  “I happened on my awakening quite late. When I did, I saw the world’s deeds weighed against each other. Justice on one end. Evil on the other. I do not see mana as light or heat. I see it as judgment.”

  A few of my siblings murmured. Gorran looked unimpressed. I, personally, was busy trying not to think of what my mana might look like.

  A blanket? A book? A squirrel I never caught?

  I didn’t know. And that terrified me.

  Because for the first time, it wasn’t about how the world saw me.

  It was about how I saw myself.

  We didn’t begin our awakening that day. Quarroth made it clear: this was theory. Foundation. The rites would begin tomorrow, and they would be individual.

  Private.

  He said the soul was not meant to be unveiled in front of an audience.

  Which, frankly, was a relief. I already had enough stage fright from our last naming ceremony.

  As we were dismissed, I lingered a little. Let the others trot ahead. Let the silence catch up to me again.

  The name Lady Aurelith gave me was Pophet, The Gentle Faith that Echoes.

  But what if all I hear is static?

  What if there’s nothing there at all?

  No flame. No light. Just me again, waiting for a name I already have, hoping it means something more.

  So I did the only thing I knew how to do when I didn’t have answers.

  I went to the library.

  The library always smelled like old questions.

  Not decay. Not mildew. Just… curiosity with a layer of dust. The kind of scent that clung to forgotten corners and pages left open a little too long. It was late enough that the stained glass overhead had shifted from sermon-gold to violet, casting long slats of sunset across the stone floor. The reading alcoves were mostly empty. Everyone else was likely eating or praying or pretending to meditate.

  I was here. As always.

  The alcove in the southern wing was my favorite. Raised slightly, with cushions that had long since lost their stuffing and a heating rune someone forgot to deactivate three winters ago.

  It was warm. Familiar. Safe.

  I nudged the book stack with my snout and pulled the top one down with a paw. It thudded lightly, titled in worn gold: Manifestations of the Inner Flame: A Cleric’s Guide to the Awakening of the Soul.

  Subtle.

  I flipped it open to a chapter. Someone had underlined a passage in red ink:

  [“The Awakening is not a ceremony. It is a confrontation. One does not meet mana as one greets a friend, but as one meets their reflection in a darkened pool.”]

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Verrry comforting.

  I sighed and slumped deeper into the cushions. My paws still smelled faintly of training grounds—sunbaked dirt, faint sweat, and whatever divine herb they lined the exercise circles with.

  Tomorrow was the Awakening. Not an awakening. Mine.

  And for all the talk of soul resonance and spiritual insight, all I could think about was this: what if I step into the circle and nothing happens?

  Or worse, what if something does, and it’s pathetic?

  I closed the book. Looked out the stained glass. It showed a depiction of the First Light—a godbeast with a mane of stars, breathing flame onto the world to awaken creation. Very epic. Very not me.

  My ears flicked at a soft memory.

  When I was smaller, and I mean smaller than I am now, which is saying something, I couldn’t reach the second shelf of the archives. Not even on my hind legs with an ambitious jump. I used to sit there and whine quietly, pretending I was contemplating higher truths when really, I was just hoping someone would come by.

  Someone did.

  Sister Elara.

  Silver hair. Voice like a lullaby wrapped in dry wit. She never asked why I didn’t train more. She just… noticed.

  Every time she saw me squinting at some too-high tome, she’d pull it down, dust it off, and slowly place it in front of me without a word.

  Once, she even added a cushion to the alcove.

  I think that was the closest anyone had ever come to saying, “You belong here too.”

  I swallowed and let the silence stretch.

  Somewhere in the main hallway, a bell rang—low and slow. Eighth prayer of the day. The church had a prayer for every hour.

  “The Awakening will not give you what you want. It will give you what you are.”

  Quarroth’s words looped in my head like a sermon I hadn’t agreed to attend.

  What was I?

  A scholar? A stowaway in divine skin?

  I nuzzled another book open. This one was older, cracked at the spine. It was more philosophical than instructional, filled with quotes from godbeasts and saints alike.

  [“I saw mine as a mirror of ice,” wrote Saint Kaerth. “Cold, unyielding. But in it, I saw every truth I had tried to ignore.”]

  [“Mine was a tree with no roots,” said the Arch-Warden Tysha. “Glorious above. Hollow beneath. I wept for hours. Then I burned it down.”]

  [“I saw a wheel, ever turning, and I was the spoke that broke it,” penned someone whose name had been scratched out.]

  There were as many stories of the Awakening as there were people who had undergone it.

  And not all of them were beautiful.

  Some went mad. Some refused what they saw. One account described a noble scion who saw himself as a wolf. He couldn’t stop seeing himself in everything after that. They say he left for the mountains and never came back.

  What if I saw nothing? No flame. No metaphor. Just a reflection of everything I was afraid I might be—insignificant, misplaced, a divine typo with a clever name.

  I closed the book again. The candle was dimming now, purple shifting to blue. One of the clerics would be by soon to snuff the lanterns and shoo out any lingering curiosity. I didn’t want to be shooed away.

  I padded softly through the shelves toward the edge of the wing, to the open corridor beyond. From here, I could just barely glimpse the upper reaches of the basilica tower, where Mother’s chamber used to glow.

  No light now. Just stillness.

  I sat down.

  I hesitated, and then prayed, “I don’t need to be radiant. I just… don’t want to be a disappointment.”

  The words floated up as a breath of fog and vanished, swallowed by stained glass and old stone.

  And maybe, just maybe, the silence felt a little warmer than before.

  There was no reply to my whispered prayer.

  So I left.

  The basilica was quieter now. Post-ritual quiet. The kind that only settled when all the ceremonial noise had ended and only the stones remembered what had been spoken.

  I padded through one of the side cloisters, arches overhead etched with sunfire glyphs dulled by shadow. I liked this part of the complex, half-forgotten, a little colder, and usually empty.

  Tonight, it wasn’t.

  She was already there. Stretched out on the balcony ledge like a banner someone had carelessly folded and forgotten to bring in. Paws dangling over the edge. Staring up at a sky that had more stars than sense.

  Eline.

  Of all my siblings, she was the one I understood the least, and yet the one I’d probably miss most if she vanished.

  Not that she would ever do something as dramatic as vanishing. She’d just wander off mid-conversation and forget to come back.

  I thought about pretending I hadn’t seen her. About turning and finding another corridor to worry myself in. But she spoke before I could.

  “It’s loud, you know,” she said.

  Her voice had that same airy drawl it always did. The kind that made you think she might fall asleep mid-sentence unless the topic turned interesting.

  I blinked. “What’s loud?”

  “Everything. After.” She tilted her head slightly, one ear flicking toward me. “After I awakened.”

  My stomach flipped the way it always did when someone brought it up casually. Like a casual “oh by the way” before dropping something heavy and sacred.

  “You already…?” I started, then stopped.

  She nodded.

  “Just finished,” she said. “Don’t tell the others. I left before the final day’s chant. Too noisy.”

  That tracked.

  Eline had never cared much for ceremony. She’d once slept through an entire sermon on divine lineage, then woke up just long enough to ask if dinner was going to be spicy.

  “Was it… what you expected?” I asked, settling onto the floor beside the balcony.

  She was quiet for a beat. Then another.

  And then she said:

  “No. It was better.”

  She sat up slightly, eyes on the sky, voice still distant.

  “I see mana as light. In people.”

  She pointed, tapping her paw just below her ribs. “Here. Where the wild stuff lives. Instinct. Need.”

  Then her chest. “Here. Where you carry all your heartbreaks.”

  Then between her eyes. “And here. The part that won’t stop thinking, even when you ask nicely.”

  I listened. Really listened. The way you do when someone’s saying something that matters, even if you don’t understand it yet.

  “Most people glow a little,” she said. “Priests? Nuns? They’re like flickering candles. Sometimes steady, but never bright. Their lights are… obedient.”

  She scratched idly at the stone with one claw.

  “The ones like the Grand Vicar, they burn clearer. But only in one place. Like they picked a favorite and starved the rest.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “But during the Awakening?” Her voice dropped, almost reverent. “All three light up. Not too bright, exactly. It’s like someone took off the filter and you finally saw who they were meant to be.”

  She paused.

  “It only lasts a second. Maybe two. Then it fades, and everything goes dim again. But that second?” Her ears twitched. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Another pause.

  “I saw mine. Today. And it was like standing inside a firework made of my own breath. Everything loud, and hot, and honest.”

  She turned her head slightly toward me.

  “And now it’s gone.”

  Of all my siblings, Eline was the one who never seemed to care where she landed. She didn’t train for glory. Didn’t hunger for fate. She’d once skipped combat drills because a passing sparrow had a color in its wings she’d never seen before and she had to follow it.

  She never spoke unless it was important. Never laughed unless she meant it.

  We weren’t close. But she never judged me.

  And that counted for more than I ever said.

  “You’re not scared?” I asked.

  “I’m always scared,” she said. “I just don’t bother saying it.”

  The wind changed. A cooler current rolled over the stone and through our fur, drawing the heat from our voices.

  Eline stood, slowly. Stretched her legs. One of her ears remained at that permanently crumpled angle, like a painter’s signature.

  “Good luck tomorrow,” she said, moving toward the archway. “If you glow funny, I won’t laugh.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “High praise.”

  She paused in the doorway, silhouetted in moonlight.

  “Hey, Pophet?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going to sleep.”

  And then she was gone.

  I, on the other hand, didn’t really sleep.

  There were hours, yes. Time passed. My eyes closed. But my mind kept pacing the floor long after my body gave up. I drifted somewhere between breath and thought.

  And then it was morning.

  Not the kind you notice. No sunlight pouring in. No birds. Just the soft toll of the first bell and the quiet shuffle of priest-robes outside my door.

  They had come for us.

  The meditation grounds lay behind the Basilica, tucked within a cloistered garden of trimmed blackgrass and sun-touched riverstones. It was the kind of place that made even breathing feel like a sacred disruption. Nobody could hear the birds sing, mainly since they weren’t awake yet, it was early dawn.

  A crowds had gathered at the perimeter, acolytes-in-training, priest-warriors in disciplined formation, a few elderly pilgrims leaning forward on trembling canes.

  We were led in from the front entrance.

  Five of us in a silent line.

  Eline wasn’t here.

  That wasn’t a surprise. We’d been told before we came here that she had already completed her Awakening, privately, just yesterday. Apparently, her “resonance signs” had emerged early—whatever that meant—and she had been allowed to undergo the rite ahead of schedule.

  She requested no ceremony. No song. No procession. Left the chamber before dawn and didn’t look back.

  It was very her.

  The rest of us were each assigned to one of the inner meditation rooms. Round, windowless chambers ringed with gold-etched scripture and ceiling runes designed to “focus and amplify” spiritual introspection.

  In practice, they just made the air feel thick and important.

  We were told not to leave unless permitted. Food and water would be brought twice daily by silent clerics who would neither look at us nor answer questions. Each chamber was guarded. Politely, of course—but with the kind of armed politeness that came with reinforced robes and halberds lined with sunmetal filigree.

  Two weeks. That was the time we were given.

  Two weeks to awaken our mana.

  Two weeks to discover what we were.

  After one week, if no signs emerged, a high priest would enter and attempt to “guide” us. The word they used was inspire.

  But the tone they said it with suggested something closer to ignite.

  I didn’t know what that meant, exactly. I didn’t want to find out.

  Apparently, once we were showing signs of any kind, we could seek more for more advice.

  Each chamber was furnished with scrolls, sacred texts, and records of past awakenings, though nothing too specific. No two journeys were the same, they claimed.

  I made a mental note to read everything anyway.

  They ushered us into our cells one by one. I was last.

  Grand Solar Vicar Talem himself stood behind us; tall, unmoving, his ceremonial headdress casting long shadows against the dew-damp stones.

  “Begin,” he said, and it echoed like a sentence.

  We entered.

  The stone of my chamber was cold beneath my paws. The air already heavy with unsaid things. A cushion waited in the center. So did a set of scrolls and a small entree of books tied in silk. Since it was even before dawn, I could hear nothing from outside. Not even the birds.

  I turned once in place. The door clicked shut behind me.

  And then I was alone.