No one spoke as Talric’s forces disappeared into the treeline. The mountain returned to quiet slowly, not with the stillness of peace, but with the uneasy hush that always follows restraint, as though the trees themselves held back their breath in fear that one wrong gust might break the fragile thread that now hung between history and change. Torchlight faded. Armor clinked softly in the distance, then vanished. The silence that followed was thick and unfinished, like a question that had yet to be answered.Fenric remained standing at the edge of the grave, not because he lacked the strength to move, but because he understood what his stillness now meant to those watching. The wolves behind him, those who had chosen to walk this road without certainty, did not speak either. Kaela sheathed her blade but did not let go of the hilt. Raelin’s hand finally dropped from the grip of her weapon, though her eyes stayed on the ridge. Sira stood closest to Fenric, her silverlight extinguished b
The moon had emerged from behind the clouds in full, not shattered or shrouded or dimmed as it had been in recent nights, but clear and painfully bright, casting silver across the mountain ridge in such a way that it made every torchlight seem small and artificial by comparison. Its light did not favor either side. It illuminated all the line of Talric’s soldiers in their armor stamped with old loyalties, the small but unyielding group that stood beside Fenric, and the broken stone grave behind them that had, until tonight, been sealed for over three generations.Fenric did not move from where he stood at the crest. He watched Talric carefully, not in fear, but in recognition. They were not strangers. They had fought once on the same side during the last border cull, had shared fire and silence in the night after burying wolves whose names neither had been allowed to speak. They had never been friends, never truly allies, but they had known the same hunger for justice at least, they h
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