Chapter 3

We arrived too late. The border was soaked in blood, pack warriors torn apart. The scent of ash and silver lingered.

“Witchfire,” Dax whispered, eyes scanning the trees.

The rogues weren’t acting alone anymore. Something darker had joined the war. I stood before the Bloodfang warriors. Their eyes held doubt, and something colder, fear.

“I don’t need your crown,” I said, voice steady.

“But if you want a future, you’ll follow me now.”

No one knelt. Not yet. But the silence wasn’t rejection. It was hesitation… and hunger. Vaeron smashed through the council doors, shirt torn, fists bleeding.

“Who gave the kill order?” he roared.

His Beta tried to speak, too slow. Vaeron shifted mid-breath, fury and wolf tearing loose. No longer a leader. Just a man desperate to protect what he let go.

He was no rogue. Zoryn removed the glove from his left hand, revealing a sigil, ancient and glowing.

“A child of the Eclipse Circle,” Dax muttered.

A forbidden bloodline. Bound to chaos. He had been watching me for more than loyalty. He wanted something else.

The Moonstone burned in my palm, reacting to my blood. Visions hit me like lightning. A temple. A wolf with silver eyes.

And a voice: "You were never chosen… You were made."

I collapsed, trembling. Seris inside me screamed with joy, or terror. I couldn’t tell which. The mark on my shoulder pulsed under moonlight.

Not pain, something worse. It whispered my name in a tongue I’d never learned.

“Do you hear it too?” Dax asked, voice shaking.

I nodded. The Moon wasn’t speaking to me anymore. It was commanding me. Lira entered the war chamber in crimson, not mourning.

“The Luna throne sits empty,” she purred.

“And the Alpha hesitates. Perhaps I should rule.”

The elders didn’t laugh. They listened. She smiled at Vaeron, then looked at me. This wasn’t politics.

It was seduction, laced with venom.

He found me near the training cliffs, alone.

“I made a mistake,” Vaeron said.

I turned, face blank.

“One mistake or hundreds?”

His silence was answer enough. But when his hand brushed mine, something sparked.

Faint, fractured, still alive. The sky split. The moon cracked in half, not illusion, not dream. All wolves howled at once, instincts writhing in panic.

The old prophecies spoke of this. But they didn’t speak of me. Because I wasn’t part of the prophecy.

I was the disruption.

Dax led me underground, beyond the oldest stone. There, in silence, waited wolves I’d never seen:

outcasts, exiles, mutations.

They bowed to me, not in fear, in recognition.

“You carry the eclipse blood,” the eldest whispered.

“You are our Luna. And the war is already lost… unless you change the ending.”

Vaeron came to me under the bleeding moon. He didn’t kneel. But his voice trembled when he spoke.

“I rejected you not because you were weak… but because I saw the storm inside you. Stronger than mine.”

He touched my face.

“I feared I wouldn’t survive loving you.”

I almost believed him. In the heart of the redwoods, Lira drew a circle of ash. A warlock waited with a blade carved from witchbone. She sliced her palm and whispered names.

Mine, Vaeron’s, Seris.

“You’ll give me her power,” she demanded.

The warlock laughed.

“No. I’ll give you her curse.”

Zoryn led us through ruins no map remembered. There, the creatures waited, not wolves, not men.

They moved like shadows, eyes glowing with old madness.

“Hybrids,” he said. “Born of eclipse and betrayal.”

One reached for me.

“Moon-blood… come home.”

I turned away. But a piece of me… wanted to stay. Inside the dream-temple, the voice called again.

“Prove you are more than a vessel.”

A circle of flame. A mirror of ice. And Seris, snarling behind bars.

“Let me out,” she hissed.

“If I do,” I asked, “will you ever let me back in?”

She only smiled. The first attack came from above. A rain of burning arrows lit the Bloodfang stronghold.

Lira’s army marched with silver spears and charmed wolves.

I ran toward the fire, not away. Because the Moon wasn’t watching tonight. The Moon was bleeding, I was the only one who could make it stop.