The caravan rattled like it was being held together by a prayer and a few grumpy enchantments.
Outside, night pressed in like a fevered thing, thick and dark and watching. Inside, Lumi sat cross-legged on a crate labeled VOLATILE: DO NOT SHAKE, chewing on a piece of licorice and ignoring the two cloaked beta guards that flanked her on either side.
They reeked of Wolfsbane and obedience. Lumi reeked of defiance.
"Don't touch that," the guard on the left muttered as Lumi reached for a brass lever sticking out of the crate.
"Relax. If it were going to blow, we'd already be halfway to Mermaia." She grinned without teeth and leaned back. "Besides, I made it."
The guard blinked. Slowly. As if weighing whether she was bluffing or just insane. Probably both.
The magical caravan clanked and hissed through the misty lowlands between Wolfstadt and Ambrosia, pulled by two grumbling mechanical deer that looked stitched from bones and scrap metal. Lumi had built one of them herself. The other was older, more temperamental, and currently farting steam into the fog.
It was exactly how she felt.
Trapped. Pressured. Ready to explode.
Well, enough self-loathing, she mused. Let's rewind everything and how she ended up here.
Before she presented, Lumi was just a strange girl in the outskirts of Wolfstadt—part of the Wolfhard pack in blood, but barely tolerated. A tomboy with soot on her cheeks, hands always elbow-deep in contraptions. Her packmates whispered words like "feral" and "defective" when they thought she wasn't listening.
Then came the Awakening.
Then came Omega.
A once-in-a-generation anomaly. A celestial hiccup. A prize.
They smelled it in her like blood in the water.
For two days, it was chaos. Strangers sniffed around her door. One Alpha tried to break into her workshop and got blasted in the face with a spring-loaded wrench trap she'd rigged under her workbench.
Her grandfather—grizzled old Tobias, who preferred nuts and bolts to people—barely said a word, just watched as the world started to tilt on its axis.
On the third night, Lumi woke to shouting and the scent of burnt metal.
Tobias had fought them off—again—but she could see it in his eyes. The guilt. The fear. The choice.
The next morning, she was packed into this damn caravan.
"I wrote to an old friend," he'd said, gripping her hand so tight she felt the bones creak. "The Grandmaster of Castel Granatefel. He owes me more than a few favors."
"Let me guess," she muttered bitterly, "he runs a school for magical freaks."
"He runs an academy for uprising young adults, like you," Tobias corrected gently. "And he swore he'd keep you safe. Maybe even… find someone who can keep up with you."
Translation: a mate.
Lumi had thrown a wrench at the wall so hard it cracked the plaster.
Now here she was, in a box on wheels full of magic and lies, heading straight into the lion's den.
Castel Granatefel.
The academy whispered about in firelit halls and bloodstained ballrooms. Where future kings were forged. Where Alphas ruled like gods.
And now, an Omega was being shipped in like a bomb.
The guards stiffened as the caravan began to slow. Through the curtained windows, Lumi glimpsed looming iron gates wrapped in thorns and spell-woven chains. Beyond them, Castel Granatefel rose like a scar in the earth—black spires stabbed at the sky, stone wings unfurled like a sleeping beast. The castle was older than most wars, haunted by history and worse.
Lumi stood. Smoothed her leather coat. Tugged her goggles down from her messy silver hair.
"Here we go," she muttered, voice like static before a storm.
The guards opened the doors.
Cold wind kissed her skin, and with it came the scent of power. Thick. Sharp. Hungry.
She stepped down from the caravan.
The gates yawned open.
And the castle welcomed her like a mouth opening to swallow her whole.