The Red Moon (1)

Seraphina's POV

I awoke abruptly, the vibrations from my bedroom door slamming into the wall jolting me from my dreams. My heart raced, the sharp noise still ringing in my ears as I shot upright in bed. "Seraphina!" Stephen’s voice broke through the disorienting fog of sleep, pulling me into focus.

Stephen. His voice trembled in a way I hadn’t heard since we were children. A primal instinct kicked in, my body immediately tense, every nerve alert. Stephen is my twin brother, with the same striking golden hair and sapphire-like eyes as mine. We’ve always shared an unbreakable bond, something deeper than just blood. His gaze is usually soft, comforting in its familiarity. I love staring into his eyes, the way they reflect my image back at me, a perfect mirror of ourselves. Seeing myself in his eyes, calm and serene, often brought me a strange, inexplicable joy.

But now, those same eyes—those beautiful, kind eyes—were filled with terror.

He burst into the room, and in one fluid motion, wrapped his arms around me. His embrace was desperate, almost crushing, his body trembling as he clung to me as though I might slip away. I felt the tremor of fear in his muscles, the way his breath hitched unevenly against my shoulder. Stephen rarely showed fear, which made this moment all the more unsettling. I instinctively reached up, resting my hand on his back, gently patting him to calm his racing heart, though I could feel my own pulse quicken in response to his.

"What is it?" I whispered, though I already knew.

It didn’t take long to understand why he was so afraid.

The red moon hung ominously outside the window, its crimson light spilling into the room like blood seeping through the walls. The sight of it alone made my stomach twist. It was the same moon that had cursed our family for generations.

The Moonbane family. We’ve always been taught that the wolves are the Moon Goddess’s blessing. From childhood, that’s been drilled into our minds. The Moon watches over us, guides us, strengthens us. As the purest-blooded wolves of the Moonbane family, we’ve inherited powers beyond the imagination of most wolves. I could shift at will by the time I was six years old. Most wolves couldn’t do that until they were nearly adults. By the age of twelve, I was already defeating the finest warriors from rival tribes.

Stephen and I, along with every one of our ancestors, have always been called prodigies.

But being a prodigy comes with its own kind of curse. And the red moon is the harbinger of that curse.

When I was younger, I didn’t understand the weight of it. I remember asking Helena, the woman who raised us, why I didn’t have a father like other children in the tribe. She would always speak in riddles, dancing around the truth like she was protecting me from something I wasn’t yet ready to hear. “You did have a father,” she told me once, her voice heavy with sorrow. “But he died on the night you and Stephen were born. It was under the red moon.”

I remember staring at her, confused. How could the moon, something so beautiful and revered, be connected to such a terrible event?

Helena, with her kind eyes and worn hands, explained that it was part of our family curse. Just as every generation of the Moonbane family head must be a pair of purest-blooded twins, the male of the twins was always destined to die when the next set of twins was born. I didn’t fully grasp what that meant at the time. I think, deep down, I didn’t want to. It was easier to pretend it was just another story, one of the many legends Helena would tell us before bed.

But as I grew older, the truth became harder to ignore.

I’ve always seen Helena as my mother, more than anyone else. She was there for us through everything—she raised us, taught us, guided us. As for my real mother—the current head of the family—I rarely saw her.

She was more like a ghost than a mother, a distant figure who only ever appeared on symbolic occasions. Birthdays, mostly. She would send us gifts, but they felt hollow, just another formality. I didn’t meet her in person until I was six years old, the day I awakened my bloodline powers.

That was the first time I saw her.

I’ll never forget that moment. She was breathtaking—an ethereal beauty, so much like me and Stephen, yet there was something otherworldly about her. Her eyes weren’t like ours. They were darker, deeper—like the stars themselves were trapped within her gaze. Mysterious. Distant.

Her attitude toward me was always strange. Sometimes, she would look at me with such coldness, her eyes hard and emotionless, as if I were nothing more than an object—a tool for the family legacy. It made me uncomfortable, like I didn’t matter beyond my role in the bloodline. But there were other times, rare moments when her eyes softened. I’d catch glimpses of something deeper—love, even guilt. In those moments, I allowed myself to believe that maybe, just maybe, she cared for us in her own way. Even if she rarely showed it.