Daughter of Neptune, Book one

VII

Tori pov

I dreamed of wolves.

I stood in a clearing in the middle of a redwood forest. In front of me rose the ruins of a stone mansion. Low gray clouds blended with the gray beasts milled around me, brushing against my legs, snarling and baring their teeth. They gently nudge me toward the ruins.

I had no desire to become the world's largest dog biscuit, so I decided to do what they wanted.

The ground squelched underneath my boots as I walked. Stone spires of chimneys, no longer attached to anything, rose up like totem poles. The house must've been enormous once, multi-stories with massive log walls and a soaring gabled roof, but now nothing remained but its stone skeleton. I passed under a crumbling doorway and found myself in a kind of courtyard.

Before me was a drained reflecting pool, long and rectangular. I couldn't tell how deep it was, because the bottom was filled with mist. A dirt path led all the way around, and the uneven walls rose on either side. Wolves paced under the archways of rough red volcanic stone.

At the far end of the pool sat a giant she-wolf, several feet taller than me. The she-wolf's eyes glowed silver in the fog, and her coat was the same color as the rocks--warm chocolaty red.

"I know this place." I said

The wolf regarded me. She didn't exactly speak, but I could understand her. The movements of her ears and whiskers, the flash of her eyes, the way she curled her lips--all of it was part of her language.

Of course, the she-wolf said. You began your journey here as a pup. No you must find your way back. A new quest. A new start.

"That isn't fair," I said. But as soon as I said it, I knew there was no point in complaining to the she-wolf.

Wolves didn't feel sympathy. They never expected fairness.

The wolf said: Conquer or die. This was alway our way.

I wanted to protest that I couldn't conquer if I didn't know who I was, or where he was supposed to go. But I knew this wolf. Her name was Lupa, the Mother Wolf, the greatest of her kind. Long ago she found me in this place, protected me, nurtured me, chosen me, but if I showed weakness, she would tear me to shreds. Rather than being her pup, I would be her dinner. In the wolf pack, weakness was not an option.

"Can you guide me?" I asked.

Lupa made a rumbling noise deep in her throat, and the mist in the pool dissolved.

At first I wasn't sure what I was seeing. At opposite ends of the pool, two dark spires had erupted from the cement floor like the drill bits of some massive tunneling machines boring through the surface. I couldn't tell if the spires were made of rock or petrified vines, but they were formed of thick tendrils that came together in a point at the top. Each spire was about five feet tall, but they weren't identical. The closest one to me