No one noticed.
I kept a list in my head. Cross-referenced it against the gear guides I'd studied, the accounts I'd read, the hard-won wisdom of climbers who'd survived Denali and those who hadn't.
Base layers: check. Mid layers: check. Outer shell: still needed. Sleeping system: partial. Cooking gear: minimal. Navigation:downloaded to my phone, backed up on paper maps I'd traced from the library's collection.
I couldn't exactly smuggle a mountaineering tent out of the athletic complex. But I had money saved—years of odd jobs and careful hoarding—and I had the gear I needed ordered.
Three weeks. Maybe four. That was my window.
After that, the weather would turn. The route would close. And the wolf in my visions would be alone on that mountain until spring.
I couldn't wait until spring.
The visions came more frequently now.
Not the full immersive experiences—those still hit without warning, pulling me under like a riptide. These were fragments. Flashes. Moments that seared across my mind and vanished before I could hold them.
White. Endless white. The kind that erased horizon lines and depth perception, turned the world into a blank page waiting to be written.
Wind. Not the gentle wind of campus, but something alive and hungry. Wind that could strip heat from your body in minutes, that could knock you off your feet, that could kill you while you were still trying to understand what was happening.
And lately, something new.
A figure. Not the wolf—something else. Someone else. Dark against the white, struggling, falling.
Going down.
The first time I saw it, I was in the middle of Mythology class. Vince was lecturing about hero's journey archetypes, and suddenly my vision split—half classroom, half mountain—and Iwatched someone tumble down a slope that seemed to go on forever.
I gripped my desk so hard my knuckles went white. Ivy glanced over, concerned, but I shook my head. Fine. I'm fine.
I wasn't fine.
That night, I sat in my bed with the lights off and tried to make sense of what I'd seen. The wolf I understood. The wolf was my mission, my purpose, the reason I was preparing for something that might kill me.
But who was the figure? Why were they falling? And why did watching them go down feel like watching myself?
The vision always finds a way to fulfill itself.
Silas's book. The warning written in a dozen different hands across centuries.
The only question is whether you're prepared when it does.
I wasn't prepared. Not yet. But I was getting closer.
And the visions were getting clearer.
That terrified me more than anything.
Saturday morning, I pushed too hard.
The stairs behind the dormitory were brutal in good conditions—two hundred steps carved into the hillside, steep enough to make your thighs scream. In six inches of fresh snow, they were an exercise in controlled suffering.
I ran them anyway. Three times. Four. Five.
On the sixth repetition, my foot slipped.
I caught myself on the railing, heart hammering, and stood there in the gray dawn light with snow melting into my shoes and my breath coming in ragged gasps.
