A broken crown

Luna's POV

We pushed through a last line of undergrowth and came into another shallow dip.

A broken boulder sat at the far side, split cleanly down the middle sometime long ago. The claw prints circled the stone once, twice, then stopped.

“There,” Rin breathed.

At first I didn’t see it. The shape blended into shadow and stone. Then my eyes adjusted, and the world narrowed to the thing lying in the hollow.

A body. On its back. Arms loose at the sides. Head turned slightly toward the broken rock. Clothes torn. Boots still on.

The skin - what I could see of it - was the color of candle wax. Not the gray of someone long dead. Not the blue of cold. A pale that had been made.

We approached in a slow line, as if moving too fast might break the air. Kael stood between me and the body until I touched his arm and said, “I’m all right.” He didn’t move. He said, “You’re not,” and moved with me anyway.

Rin knelt first, careful. She set two fingers at the throat, then pulled them back like the skin burned. “No pulse,” she said. “But…”

“But?” Kael asked.

She swallowed. “There’s no blood.” She slid her hand to the torn shirt and peeled it back by the hem. I leaned in despite everything inside me saying not to.

There was no wound. Not a cut, not a hole, not a tear in the flesh. But the chest was wrong. The ribs lay under the skin like a map drawn by someone who had never seen a body - some jutting, some flat, some curved the wrong way.

Between them, a faint dark vinework spread, as if a thousand hair-thin veins had been inked under the skin in a pattern that meant something to someone not human.

Lera hissed between her teeth. “Gods save us.”

Joss took a step back. “What did that?”

Kael crouched and set the back of his fingers lightly against the man’s cheek. He flinched and then stilled. “He’s… cold in patches. Warm in others.”

Rin pointed to the mouth. “Look.”

The man’s lips were stained a pale gray. At the corner, a faint trace of something metallic gleamed where light found it. Not blood. Silver. It looked like dust and liquid at once.

My stomach turned. “That’s not natural.”

“No,” Kael said.

I closed my eyes for a heartbeat and listened. Sometimes old power left a taste in the air, or a hum under the skin. Here, it felt like the opposite. As if something had been taken away and the world hadn’t noticed yet.

“His boots,” Lera said, forcing her voice to steady. “Look at the soles.”

Joss lifted one foot carefully. The heel was worn unevenly. The tread was filled with ash.

Across the instep leather, a new mark had been scratched with something sharp: three lines, one broken, stitched with a smaller cut.

“Same symbol,” Rin said. “Everywhere.”

“Loyalist,” Joss whispered again, but he didn’t sound sure anymore.

“Help me turn him,” Kael said.

Joss moved to the shoulders. Kael took the hips. On three, they rolled the body gently onto its side. The back was worse.

The dark vinework spread there like frost, following the spine, branching at the shoulder blades, sinking down toward the kidneys.

At the base of the neck, a circle had been burned into the skin - small, perfect, too clean. In the center of the circle, the broken crown had been pressed once, then again, as if the first brand hadn’t taken.

Rin made a small sound.

Kael’s jaw tightened until I thought something might break. “Whoever did this wasn’t in a hurry,” he said.

“They weren’t kind,” Lera said.

Joss shifted his weight, eyes on the tree line. “We shouldn’t be here long.”

“We won’t,” Kael said. “We take what we can learn. We-”

He stopped.

I followed his eyes. On the inside of the man’s forearm, where the sleeve had ridden up, someone had written a short line in soot.

THREE HOWLS. ONE KING.

My mouth went dry. “He left a message.”

“Or someone left it on him,” Rin said.

Kael stood slowly. He looked larger in that narrow space, not because he was tall, but because there was no room for fear and he refused to make any. “We go back,” he said. “We take the path along the stream. We move quiet. No talking unless it matters.”

“Do we leave him?” Joss asked, eyes flicking to the body and away.

Kael’s face moved once, like the question hurt. “We mark the place. We come back with shovels and time. For now-”

A crack split the clear air.

Not a branch. Not ice. Something thinner and sharper, like a taut thread snapping.

The body jerked.

Rin recoiled. Lera swore. Joss dropped to a knee, knife up.

Kael stepped between me and the corpse in a single breath. His sword was in his hand without sound. “Stay behind me,” he said.

“I’m not-”

“Luna,” he said, and my name in that voice made disobeying feel like pulling my hand from a fire.

The man’s chest rose once, shallow and wrong. His head turned toward us by a hair.

The gray lips parted. The breath that left him didn’t sound like air. It sounded like a small scrape of stone against stone.

A thin stream of silver - dust, liquid, both - ran from the corner of his mouth and drew a line into the ash.

Then, very slowly, without eyes that saw, his hand lifted an inch and fell.

We didn’t move. No one breathed.

On the ground beside his fingers, the silver line spread into a shape. Not a word. Not a picture. A symbol.

A broken crown.

And below it, with a last, wet gleam, a crooked stitch.