Chapter 4: The Blood Moon Ceremony

“If the mark becomes a crescent,” the Oracle said quietly, “…you are our lost princess.”

She looked into my eyes, and something in her gaze made my stomach drop before she even finished.

“If it becomes anything else…”

The room went silent around us.

“…then the gods have returned.”

⸻

My blood was still wet on my palm when they walked me into the Hall of Prophecy, the cut throbbing in time with my pulse. Scrolls and star maps covered every surface. Portraits of rulers I’d never heard of watched me pass like they already knew how this ended.

Lady Seraphine drew back a tapestry heavy with dust, revealing a woman crowned in painted moonlight.

“Queen Selene,” she said. “The first Moon Queen.”

A symbol glowed faintly at the painted queen’s collarbone … not a crescent. A six-pointed star, the same shape burned into my own skin. My hand rose to my collar without my permission.

⸻

Seraphine spoke like she was handing me something fragile.

Once every hundred years, she said, the Moon Goddess chose one woman to hold the balance between wolves, rogues, witches, and Lycans. The Moon Chosen. Each bore the star. Each awakened something no wolf ever had. Each changed the world before her name was written down.

The last one vanished before her destiny found her.

No one had seen the mark since.

Until me.

⸻

I opened my mother’s journal that night with hands that wouldn’t stay still, and silver ink bled up out of a page I could have sworn was empty an hour before.

When the stars call you home, do not fear the fire.

You were never abandoned.

They stole you before destiny could find you.

The words blurred. I pressed the journal to my chest and let myself cry without hiding it, for the first time in longer than I could remember … not from grief this time, but from the strange, terrifying relief of learning my whole life hadn’t been an accident.

⸻

The court gathered the next morning in a hall built for judgment, nobles packed shoulder to shoulder, some bowing as I passed, more just watching, arms crossed, waiting to be unconvinced.

A duke stepped forward before I’d taken my seat, chin lifted, voice pitched to carry. “A wolfless orphan cannot suddenly become a princess.”

The temperature in the room seemed to drop.

Cassian moved before I could open my mouth, one stride, and the weight of him pressed down over the entire hall like a hand closing around every throat in it. His eyes bled silver.

“Insult my sister again,” he said, quiet, terrible, “…and you’ll leave without your tongue.”

The duke bowed his head so fast it looked painful.

No one had ever stood between me and an insult before. I didn’t know where to put the feeling that gave me.

⸻

The Grand Ceremony Hall swallowed us whole that night … warriors, priestesses, nobles who’d finally stopped whispering, all of them ringing a circle of moonstones set into the floor. I stood barefoot at its center, silver runes glowing faintly against my skin like the stone itself recognized me.

The Oracle raised the ceremonial blade.

“Blood remembers what the mind forgets.”

I cut my palm a second time. Let it fall onto the altar.

The runes caught fire. Every candle in the hall turned silver at once, and outside, impossibly, a full moon bloomed in an afternoon sky. Someone in the crowd gasped loud enough to carry.

⸻

All eyes went to my collarbone.

It should have become a crescent. Every account, every legend, every painting had promised a crescent.

Instead the six points of my mark stretched outward, living light crawling across my skin like flame finding new fuel. Seraphine staggered back a step. A priestess near the front pressed both hands to her mouth, crying.

“That isn’t the royal mark,” someone whispered.

“It’s older,” another answered.

⸻

The star lifted off my skin.

I felt it leave me … a cold, vast absence where heat had been … and watched it hang above my own chest, reshaping itself into a constellation no one in that hall had ever read about in any scroll. Seraphine sank to her knees.

Not in reverence.

In fear.

⸻

The floor moved beneath us before anyone could speak. Statues cracked down their centuries-old spines. Moonstones shattered outward in bursts of white light. And somewhere past the walls, every wolf in the kingdom threw back its head and howled at once … a single voice made of a thousand.

Hundreds of miles away, in Blackthorn, Lucien dropped to one knee on the floor of a hall he’d rejected me in three nights ago, his wolf clawing up his throat with a single word.

Find her.

⸻

Something ancient woke up inside my chest, and it wasn’t my wolf. It had never been my wolf. Silver light tore out of me in a wave that knocked priestesses off their feet, my own heartbeat suddenly loud enough to fill the hall like a second set of footsteps.

My eyes went silver. Then gold. Then a white so total I felt it behind my own eyelids.

Behind me, something enormous took shape out of moonlight and starlight … a wolf built from neither silver nor snow, but from the space between stars. Guards drew steel on instinct. The crowd surged backward.

“Stop!” Seraphine’s voice cracked through the chaos, and everyone froze at once, weapons half-raised, breath held.

⸻

She stared at the wolf of light standing over me like she was looking at the end of everything she’d ever believed.

“She isn’t the lost princess,” she whispered.

The hall went utterly silent.

Tears spilled down her face before the rest of the sentence came.

“…she is the rightful Queen.”

Chaos broke the room in half … some dropping instantly to their knees, others shouting for guards, one voice somewhere near the back demanding my execution before the words had even finished landing. An elder near the dais murmured, almost to himself, “If she’s truly the Moon Chosen… then the prophecy has begun.”

⸻

My knees gave out. The celestial wolf dissolved into light and then into nothing, and the hall went quiet enough to hear my own ragged breathing.

A mark had bloomed across my palm … new, silver, a symbol I’d never seen and neither, from the look on her face, had Seraphine.

Before anyone could move, a voice broke through the hall that hadn’t come from any mouth in the room. It landed inside my skull instead, gentle and ancient and impossibly close.

My daughter.

Every head in the hall turned at once. Even Lucien heard it, hundreds of miles away, I would later learn … every wolf in two kingdoms hearing the same four words in the same breath.

The first seal has been broken.

⸻

The doors at the far end of the hall exploded inward.

A messenger staggered through them, blood soaking one whole side of his tunic, and collapsed to his knees before the dais, chest heaving too hard to speak.

“Your Majesty…”

He forced the rest out on a breath that sounded like it cost him everything he had left.

“…the Shadow King knows she’s alive.”