The light that surged from the stone circle was not violent, nor blinding, but it was complete. It wrapped around the chamber not as flame, not as heat, but as memory made visible, casting every name on every bone into sudden, undeniable clarity. Where once the carvings had been etched in soft red or dulled gray, they now pulsed with color that shifted like firelight through blood, cycling through gold, then ash, then silver, then back again, not randomly, but in rhythm with something deeper, something old.Fenric remained in the center, arms at his sides, eyes wide but calm, as the light passed through him. His body trembled slightly, not in fear, not in pain, but in response to the weight of the recognition now washing over him from the walls, the floor, and whatever still lingered in the bones themselves. It was not power that had entered him, it was acknowledgment.He had spoken the names where they were buried.And now the memory answered.Behind him, Kaela stood with one hand re
The gate split slowly. Stone peeled back with the sound of old teeth grinding through centuries, slow and deliberate, revealing not Fenric but a hallway steeped in gold light and silence. The stairwell he had fallen through was gone now, replaced by a sloping path that shimmered faintly, as if heat clung to its surface, though the air remained cold and stale.Sira stood first. She did not rush forward. She waited, each breath held in her throat, as her silverlight surged faintly beneath her skin, ready to flare at the first sign that what emerged from that golden passage was not Fenric but something wearing his name.Kaela’s hand had already found the hilt of her blade, though she made no move to draw it. Her body was still, but her eyes moved constantly, scanning for weakness, for change, for anything that would prove what they feared in silence, that the chamber had returned something else.Raelin remained at the edge of the room, her arms crossed, her weight shifted back, as though
There was no impact.Fenric did not hit the ground. He did not crash through air. There was no sense of descent, no fall, no motion at all. One breath followed the next, but the rhythm felt wrong, as though his lungs were responding to a sky that no longer followed the same rules as the world above. He did not float, he did not drop, he simply moved through something that felt like air without memory.Then came the sound.It was not wind, nor breath, nor the quiet churn of time within stone. It was a heartbeat, slow and massive, not in his chest but in the space around him, pulsing through what seemed to be walls yet felt more like ribs, as though the very place he had entered had once been a body, long dead, long buried, and only now remembering that it had once been alive.Light arrived next.Not a firelight. Not moonlight. A pale golden wash that crept in from nowhere and illuminated everything with a kind of clarity that had no warmth. There was no clear source, only brightness th
The stairs spiraled downward, far deeper than any foundation stone of the Den should have allowed. Each step echoed dully, not against stone, but against something far denser walls that absorbed sound as though they were built not to guide wolves, but to keep them from hearing what waited below.There was no light beyond what Sira conjured, and even that seemed hesitant, casting more shadow than clarity. Her silverlight flickered against the narrow walls, revealing old carvings, but these were not glyphs. They were symbols, layered, overlapping, some scratched out violently and others etched with a reverence that defied time. And between them all, over and over, a single repeating mark: a broken crescent, fractured through the middle.Fenric recognized it instantly. It was the mark Syra had once traced in the air with her fingertip, the one she claimed to have been born beneath, the one the Elders never spoke of.The Mark of the Moon Before.They reached the bottom at last.The air wa
The night that followed the Reclaiming was not one of rest or celebration, but of unease so deep it seemed to reach beneath the soil itself. There was no wind, no movement of clouds, no rustle of leaves or branches, as though the entire land was holding its breath, waiting for the consequences of truth to unfold. The moon, which should have cast silver over the stones outside the Den, did not rise. Hidden behind a dense veil of smoke and distant mountain fire, it offered no blessing, no light, no omen. And that silence, that stillness, that lack of anything to guide or answer, became the omen itself.Fenric did not sleep.Long after the circle disbanded and the last of the blood had been absorbed into the centerstone, he remained in the chamber, seated with his back straight and eyes fixed on the cold embers of the extinguished fire. His hands rested quietly on his knees, palms up, as if still bearing the weight of the names he had spoken. There was no strength left in his shoulders,
The snowline had not yet receded, and the high passes remained jagged with ice, but still the old ones came.They moved without ceremony, without escort, without allegiance. Some came in fives, others alone. Scarred jaws, white-rimmed eyes, hides mottled with the pigment of generations lost—these were not Alphas nor emissaries, not declared leaders of any Pack. They were older than those titles. They were wolves who had never answered to the Cycle, and whose bloodlines were unrecorded in any archive the Elders had permitted to survive.They came because the mark had returned.They came because something ancient was stirring again.And because the line had finally been drawn in truth, not in metaphor.Fenric stood at the mouth of the gathering den, his shoulders taut and bare, breath steaming in the mountain air, as the final of the old ones approached. Her fur was the color of peatstone, her eyes the same green as thawed lakewater, and when she spoke, her voice carried not through vol