Prologue

I do not remember my parents or where I came from, but I remember the fire. Even now, years later, I still see it whenever I close my eyes for too long.

The trees were black. Not burnt black like wood left too long in flame, but hollow black, like something had drained the life out of them before the fire ever touched them. Ash floated through the air like gray snow, clinging to my skin and hair while smoke crawled across the ground beneath my bare feet.

I remember being cold, so cold my bones hurt. And yet the earth beneath me still burned like it was alive.

I had been walking for what felt like forever through the ruins near the Red Riverbank—the now forbidden land no wolf in Arkanvail dared cross anymore. I did not know that at the time, of course. I was only a child. A small, hungry child all alone.

But I remember the silence. No birds, no insects. Nothing. It felt like the forest was dead, and I think that was the first thing that frightened the men when they found me.

It wasn't the mark on my lower abdomen, nor my strange eyes. It was the silence that surrounded me.

I remember hearing them before I saw them. Heavy boots crushing ash beneath their feet. Low voices and sharp metallic scent of weapons. By the time they stepped through the smoke, I had already stopped walking.

Five men stood staring at me like I was something pulled out of a nightmare. One of them muttered a curse under his breath. Another slowly reached for the dagger strapped to his waist as if I was a trap set for them. I didn’t understand why, I just looked at them.

I remember studying their faces carefully, confused by the fear I saw there. Their eyes moved over me slowly—my torn clothes, my bare feet, the dirt smeared across my skin.

Then their attention dropped toward my stomach, where a strange warmth pulsed beneath my skin. It was faint but glowing, and I looked down at it too.

The mark stretched across the lower part of my abdomen like silver veins buried beneath flesh. It flickered softly beneath the waistband of my torn pants, symbols curling and shifting in ways that made my head hurt if I stared too long.

One of the men took a step backward. “He’s... different,” he whispered.

Different. I would hear that word for the rest of my life.

Another man crouched slowly in front of me. He was older than the others, dressed in dark robes instead of armor, silver charms hanging from his sleeves. His scent was strange—not fully wolf but magic. Though I wouldn’t understand that until years later.

“What’s your name?” he asked gently.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Not because I couldn’t speak, but because I genuinely did not know.

The man’s expression shifted slightly then. It wasn't pity or concern, but it was fear. His gaze dropped back to the glowing mark beneath my stomach.

“He cannot stay here,” he said quietly.

The others immediately started arguing.

“We should leave him.”

“That thing is cursed.”

“Look at the land around him.”

“What if the rogues left him here?”

But the old man never took his eyes off me.

Finally, he spoke again. “He’ll be taken back to Ironclaw.”

Ironclaw. The pack that would raise me, break me then fear me.

The journey back was long. I remember sitting silently at the back of one of their cars while the wind clawed through my tangled hair from the open window. Nobody spoke much around me after that, and Whenever I looked up, I caught them staring. Like they expected me to suddenly turn into something monstrous.

Maybe part of them hoped I would, at least then they would understand me.

Ironclaw was enormous when I first saw it. Tall stone walls and torchlight glowing against the dark, with the scent of wolves everywhere.

The wizard advisor—Maeron, I would later learn—kept one hand firmly on my shoulder while leading me through the crowd.

“It’s alright,” he told me softly once.

But it wasn’t. I could feel that I did not belong there even as a child. 

The room they kept me in during those first weeks was cold and too quiet. Guards stood outside the door almost every night. Sometimes elders came to stare at the mark while whispering among themselves like I couldn’t hear them.

The nightmares started not long after, and years passed, but things never truly changed.

The other children shifted before they even reached adolescence but I didn't. They grew stronger during training but I didn't. No matter how hard I tried, my body always failed me eventually. I was slower than the others, smaller and easier to overpower.

I didn't even have a name, past or family. Whatever life existed before the fire had taken that with it. So Maeron gave me one, calling me Wayn. I remember repeating it to myself for days afterward, afraid I might lose that too.

But Ironclaw rarely saw Wayne. They saw the strange boy from the forbidden land. The boy who couldn't shift. The boy who never seemed strong enough. Eventually, weak became the word that followed me everywhere. Everyone believed it, everyone except Ren.

I still remember the first time he spoke to me after another boy shoved me face-first into the dirt during training.

“You fight terribly,” he had said.

I thought he was mocking me until he held out his hand.

“But at least you keep getting back up.”

That was the first time I ever saw Ren Storm smile at me, and maybe that was my mistake. Because after that, I started believing he saw me as something more than the strange boy Ironclaw tolerated out of caution.

I followed him everywhere after that. Training grounds, patrol walks, late-night conversations beneath the cliffs.

Ren never pushed me away. He made me believe I belonged somewhere, and that I belonged to someone.

But beneath all of that—beneath Ironclaw,

beneath the mark, beneath the weakness everyone mocked. Something inside me had always been waiting and watching.

And one day,

it would finally wake up.