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welling up from inside it. It felt like energy, something ancient that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Cold, earthy-smelling air wafted past my nose, and my eyes were drawn to the moss-covered staircase that spiraled around and around, down into the depths of that pit.
    “ It’s time ,” a voice whispered right beside my ear. It sounded like a woman speaking in the gray elf language, but it wasn’t my mother’s this time.
    I turned around to see who it was.
    My breath caught in my throat. I froze where I stood—nose to nose with a shrike. Its lean, powerful body rippled like water as a thousand mirror-like scales on its hide reflected the beauty of the jungle. Its wild eyes were the color of amethysts, sharp and predatory. I felt its hot breath on my face.
    I was absolutely terrified. Without thinking, I took a step backward. My first instinct was to run. I had to get away. I had no weapon, not that it would have helped me much anyway. You couldn’t kill a shrike that easily.
    Suddenly, I felt my feet begin to slip , I was teetering on the edge of that pit. I flailed my arms wildly to try to regain my balance, but it was no good.
    I started falling into the darkness.

 
     
    As usual, I bolted upright in my bed with a cold sweat making my clothes feel damp and clingy. My heart was pounding, and I was scrambling to catch my breath. I squeezed my hand around the bone-carved necklace my mother had given to me when I was a child. I never took it off. It was all I had to remember her by.
    Just like all the other times I’d had weird dreams, the pendant felt warm to the touch. I could feel it pulsing with a radiant heat in my palm. It didn’t make any sense. It was just a piece of bone strung onto a resin cord. To be honest, I didn’t even remember my mother ever wearing it herself.
    It took me a few minutes to collect myself and get moving. I changed into my uniform and gathered up the saddlebag that contained all the possessions I owned in the world—well, except for my old family home. I did own that, courtesy of my older half-brother. But frankly it could have burned to the ground and neither of us would have cared too much.
    It was barely sunrise when I stepped out of the dormitory and started for the Roost. Jace was expecting me by the end of the day, so I needed to get an early start. He wasn’t my instructor anymore, so he couldn’t order me around like he had before, but I wasn’t dumb enough to think there weren’t plenty of other ways he could make my life miserable if he wanted to. So being late probably wasn’t in my best interest.
    Felix was already gone. I knew it because when I walked into the tack room to get Mavrik’s saddle, all his gear had already been cleaned out. It upset me a little. I’d missed saying goodbye. And he hadn’t bothered to throw a boot at my head to wake me up one last time. Things were different now. We couldn’t act like kids. He had a lot of responsibility to deal with, and part of me wished I could have gone with him to his family estate. Felix’s relationship with his parents hadn’t been very good, from what I had learned. He was an only child, and his father had passed away suddenly last year due to an illness. And I knew he had to be worried about leaving his mother alone while he went off to war. Sure, he put up a tough front. He laughed everything off most of the time. But I knew Felix had been struggling with a rocky relationship with his mother for years now. He’d talked to me about it a little, and apparently she hadn’t wanted him to become a dragonrider in the first place. Now that he was the duke of the family estate, he was supposed to be taking care of her as part of his duties. He wouldn’t be able to do that very well from the frontlines, though.
    I tried not to think about it too much. It was his business, not mine. I wasn’t going to try to tell him what to do. I wouldn’t have known what to do in his situation anyway.