Chapter 14: ThePhysician’s Warning

POV: PHYSICIAN BENEDICT HARROW

I have treated every kind of wound a wolf can receive. Nothing prepared me for blood that refused to die.

I stood over the stone dissecting table in the lower cellars of Eclipse Hollow, my leather-gloved hands trembling slightly as I adjusted the oil lamp. Forty years of practice across war zones, pack skirmishes, and winter fevers had made me a man not easily shaken. But the specimen resting in the glass-sealed tray defied every medical textbook, every anatomical truth, and every law of nature I had spent my life studying.

The severed flesh of the mountain creature showed no arterial decay. Where red blood should have clotted, a thick, metallic silver residue pooled, clinging to the bone like living mercury. When I scraped a sample onto parchment, it did not dry. It pulsed.

A soft rustle of silk made me turn. Lady Guine Ravenshade stood at the edge of the examination circle, shrouded in a deep velvet mantle. Beside her stood Alpha Percival Wynthrone, silent as a statue, his amber eyes tracking every movement of my scalpel.

"Tell me what you see, Benedict," Lady Guine said. Her voice was terrifyingly level, devoid of the panic or revulsion I routinely witnessed from noble women faced with morbid sights.

I wiped my brow with the back of my sleeve. "The tissue is corrupted, My Lady. The red cells have been dismantled and replaced by an inorganic, mineralized agent. It starves the brain of oxygen while keeping the motor functions unnaturally active."

"Does the affliction begin with a sudden spike in core temperature?" she asked, stepping closer to the glass tray. "Followed by acute light sensitivity, a loss of familiar recognition, and sudden, violent aggression toward kin?"

I froze, my scalpel hovering an inch above the tray. I looked up into her dark, unblinking eyes.

Those were not the vague, fearful queries of a panicked heiress guessing at an unknown illness. They were precise, clinical diagnostic markers, the exact progression of symptoms I had quietly treated three days ago in a timber village four miles west of the Ravenshade border.

"How do you know those symptoms, Lady Guine?" I asked, my voice dropping into a raspy whisper. "I have published no papers on this. The high council has made no announcements."

"Answer the question, Physician," she countered smoothly, completely sidestepping my inquiry.

I let out a heavy breath, looking toward Alpha Percival, who remained silent, watching Lady Guine with a hawkish, dangerous intensity.

"Yes," I admitted softly. "The sequence matches perfectly. Two days ago, a young stable hand from the lower valley was brought to my dispensary with a sudden, violent fever. His skin burned like hot coals, yet he shivered as if thrown into a frozen river. When his fever broke, he did not recognize his own sister. He snarled at her like a rabid beast."

"Where is the boy now?" Alpha Percival interjected, his low voice cutting through the damp cellar air.

"Confined in my isolation quarters," I replied. "I managed to stabilize his blood using heavy doses of nightshade and silver-leaf tea, but his mind remains shattered. When I interviewed him yesterday during a lucid interval, he could not recall his own name. He only kept repeating one detail."

"The humming," Lady Guine murmured softly.

My jaw tightened. "Yes. He claimed that before the fever took him, he heard a strange, low humming sound rising straight out of the earth, a frequency that made his teeth ache and his wolf thrash inside his ribcage."

Lady Guine closed her eyes for a brief second, taking a slow, steadying breath. When she opened them, the cold resolve in her expression sent a shiver straight down my spine. She stepped back from the table, adjusting her thick sleeve to cover her wrists.

But as she pulled the heavy velvet cloth over her right arm, the lantern light caught the edge of her inner wrist.

My breath hitched in my throat.

Slipped beneath her pale skin was a dark, intricate mark, a slender crescent moon eclipsing a full orb. It was not ink or a tattoo. It was a dark, living mark that seemed to shift slightly under the skin, throbbed in a silent, terrifying rhythm with the silver residue resting in the glass tray on my table.

A cold certainty settled deep in my stomach, turning my blood to ice.

I had read the forbidden, restricted histories buried in the old academy vaults before the high council burned them fifty years ago. The marks of the Eclipse line were not mere noble heraldry. They were focal points, conduits tied directly to the lunar cycles and the ancient, catastrophic shifts of the world.

Whatever horror was waking beneath the mountain soil, Lady Guine Ravenshade was not merely a helpless bystander. She was already connected to it.

"Keep the boy isolated, Benedict," Lady Guine instructed, her voice pulling me out of my horrifying revelation. "Double his dosage of silver-leaf, and permit no visitors, especially not couriers from the Draven household or Lord Thornfield's estate. If word of this fever leaks to the public, panic will burn through the valley faster than the sickness itself."

"I understand, My Lady," I bowed, forcing my hands to remain steady as I gathered my instruments. "I will maintain absolute discretion."

Alpha Percival stepped toward the stone archway, turning his head back toward her. "My warriors will secure the lower timber village, Lady Guine. If more cases appear, we will establish a perimeter."

"Ensure they do not cross my boundary without explicit clearance, Alpha," she replied without turning around, her voice absolute.

Percival gave a single inclination of his head before following her up the winding stone stairs, leaving me alone in the dim cellar with the glass tray and the dead beast.

Night fell heavy and suffocating over the northern peaks. I sat in my private study in the lower wing of the estate, trying to make sense of my medical notes by the dim light of a flickering tallow candle.

The silence of the room was broken by a sudden, urgent knocking on my outer window.

I stood up, pulling back the heavy curtain. Standing in the freezing rain outside was a weary, mud-splattered courier wearing the seal of the medical guild from the neighboring southern territory. He shoved a damp, sealed leather cylinder through the small ventilation pane before disappearing back into the darkness.

My heart hammered against my ribs as I broke the wax seal and pulled out the rolled parchment inside. The message was from Dr. Vance, my senior colleague in the southern province. His handwriting was chaotic, jagged, and blotched with ink, written in obvious, frantic terror.

I unrolled the letter and read the frantic lines:

Benedict,

God help us all. The fever has crossed the river. Three residents in the border township collapsed yesterday with metallic silver clouding in their eyes. We locked them in the quarantine ward, but the medicine had no effect.

An hour ago, the eldest broke his iron chains. He showed unnatural, terrifying strength. Before my guards could draw their blades, he attacked his own wife and brother, biting through their throats while laughing in a language no wolf speaks.

Burn this letter. Lock your doors. The silver sickness is here.

I stared at the blood-stained parchment, the candle flame sputtering out in a sudden gust of wind, plunging my study into total darkness.