Caspian was already there when Seb arrived.
Same wall, same lamp throwing the same yellow circle on the ground, two coffees sitting beside him like he had been there long enough to arrange things. He looked up when Seb crossed the courtyard and something in his expression shifted slightly, the particular shift of someone who was reading a situation before a word had been said.
"You found out something today," Caspian said.
"Several things." Seb sat beside him and picked up the coffee. It was hot this time, properly hot, and he took a long sip before saying anything else. "Mara."
Caspian went still.
"My grandmother's grandmother," Seb said. "A Prime. Victor found her when she was thirty something, took her to the pack council, had her removed because an unaffiliated Prime with no pack loyalty was a threat to the existing order." He looked at Caspian. "You knew about her."
It wasn't a question.
"Yes," Caspian said.
"How long?"
"Long enough." He held Seb's gaze. "I found the council records about eight months ago when I started investigating Victor's history at Crestwood. Her case was in the archive." A pause. "I'm sorry. For what was done to her and for not telling you sooner."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because I was still working out what it meant. What Victor was building toward and how Mara connected to it and what it meant that you were here now." He looked at his coffee. "I wanted to be certain before I handed you something that couldn't be untold."
Seb looked at him. "Are you certain now?"
"Certain enough." He turned to face Seb more directly. "Victor didn't just remove Mara because she was a threat. He removed her because he understood what a Prime could do and he wanted to make sure nobody else had access to that before he figured out how to use it himself."
"Use it how?"
"A Prime's ability isn't just personal," Caspian said carefully. "It doesn't just affect the people immediately around them. At full strength, a Prime can affect an entire pack, multiple packs, the balance of power across an entire region. They can calm a war or start one depending on how the ability is directed." He paused. "Victor has been trying to understand how to harness that for two centuries."
"And now I'm here," Seb said.
"And now you're here," Caspian confirmed.
The courtyard was quiet around them, just the lamp and the dark and the city of Velmoor humming beyond the walls. Seb turned his coffee cup in his hands and thought about everything sitting on the wall in his room, all the lines connecting everything to everything else, and about a woman called Mara who had been forty three years old and hadn't known what was coming.
"What does he want from me specifically?" Seb said. "Not generally. Specifically."
Caspian was quiet for a moment. "There are two things a Prime can do that no other wolf can. The first is what you've already been doing without knowing it, creating calm, dissolving conflict, making spaces feel safe." He looked at Seb steadily. "The second is the reverse. A Prime who understands their ability fully can direct it, focus it, and instead of dissolving conflict they can amplify it. Push a room toward aggression, destabilise a pack bond from the inside, make wolves turn on each other without understanding why."
Seb stared at him. "Victor wants to use me as a weapon."
"He wants to control the ability," Caspian said. "Whether through you or through finding a way to extract it and concentrate it into something he can direct himself." A pause. "Both options require getting close to you first."
"Hence the scholarship."
"Hence the scholarship."
Seb sat with that for a long moment. A weapon. Two centuries of planning and tracking a bloodline and arranging a scholarship and the goal at the end of it was a weapon. He thought about Mara again and the forty three years of her life that had ended because someone looked at what she was and saw a problem to be managed and a resource to be used and nothing else.
"Caspian," he said.
"Yes."
"How do I stop him?"
Caspian looked at him. Something moved in those dark steady eyes, something that was making a decision. "You learn what you are," he said. "Properly. Not just knowing the word Prime but understanding what you carry and how to use it and how to direct it yourself before Victor finds a way to direct it for you." He paused. "That takes time and it takes help from someone who understands how the ability works."
"You," Seb said.
"Me," Caspian said. "And Damon."
Seb looked at him. "You just said Damon's name without your jaw tightening."
"I'm capable of self control."
"You are. You're also someone who said you and Damon don't discuss things." He held Caspian's gaze. "Whatever happened between you two is now a problem for everyone including me because I apparently need both of you and you don't talk to each other."
Caspian was quiet for a moment. "It's complicated."
"I know it's complicated. Complicated things still have to be dealt with." He kept his voice even and direct. "What happened?"
Caspian looked at the lamp for a moment. Then at his coffee. Then at Seb with the expression of someone who had decided something and was following through before they could change their mind.
"Fifty years ago," he said, "there was a wolf living in Damon's territory. A young Omega, no pack of her own, living peacefully with Damon's agreement and protection. She had been there for years without causing any problem." He paused. "Victor decided she was inconvenient. He went to the wider pack council and made the case that a lone Omega under the protection of an Alpha Supreme without formal pack membership was a structural vulnerability. The council agreed to have her relocated."
"And you carried out the order," Seb said.
Caspian looked at him. "Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I was younger and the council had leverage over me and I believed at the time that following the structure was more important than questioning it." He said it without flinching, just the plain shape of it. "I was wrong. I knew I was wrong within a week of doing it and I have known every day since."
"And Damon."
"Damon had given his personal word that she was safe in his territory. His word as an Alpha Supreme." Caspian's voice was even but something underneath it wasn't. "When I carried out that order I broke something that hasn't fully healed."
"Victor engineered the whole thing," Seb said.
"Yes."
"To create exactly the gap that exists between you two now." He looked at Caspian. "And he's been using that gap for fifty years."
"Yes," Caspian said quietly.
"So when I said your history with Damon is now a problem for me that's because Victor made it a problem deliberately and has been benefiting from it ever since." Seb held his gaze. "Which means fixing it isn't just about you two. It's about closing the gap Victor has been operating in."
Caspian looked at him for a long moment. "You got there quickly."
"It's not complicated once you see the shape of it." Seb looked at him. "Can you fix it? With Damon?"
"I don't know," Caspian said honestly. "But I think it needs to be attempted."
"It does," Seb said. "Soon."
Caspian nodded once, slowly, the nod of someone accepting something they had been avoiding for a long time and finding that accepting it felt different from how they had imagined it would.
They sat in quiet for a while after that. The lamp flickered once and steadied. Somewhere across the campus a door closed and the sound of it carried in the cold air.
"The girl," Seb said. "From fifty years ago. What happened to her?"
Caspian was quiet. "She was relocated. She survived." A pause. "I don't know more than that."
"Damon might."
"Damon might," Caspian agreed.
Seb finished his coffee and set the cup down beside him. "Same time tomorrow?"
Caspian looked at him. "You want to keep meeting."
"You still have answers I don't have yet."
"And when you have all the answers?"
Seb looked at him sideways and Caspian was already looking back and the lamp threw its yellow light between them and the city hummed beyond the walls.
"We'll figure that out when we get there," Seb said.
Caspian held his gaze for a moment and then looked away and the corner of his mouth moved in that way it did when something had landed somewhere unexpected.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow," Seb agreed and stood up and picked up his jacket and walked back across the dark courtyard toward Greystone Hall with his hands in his pockets and his mind running quietly in several directions at once the way it always did when things were becoming clear.
Behind him the lamp threw its circle of yellow light onto the empty wall.
He was almost at the Greystone door when his phone buzzed.
A message from a number he recognised now.
Damon.
Are you still awake?
Seb looked at the message for a moment standing in the cold outside the door.
Yes, he typed back.
Walk with me tomorrow morning. Seven o'clock. Main path.
Seb looked at that. Then typed.
Bring coffee.
The reply came in four seconds.
I always bring coffee.
Seb stared at that message for a moment.
Then he went inside.