The world tore apart.
One instant Serena was standing in the clearing, Selene’s silver-eyed shadow hounds turning to ash beneath her unleashed power. The next, the ground cracked like glass, and a tidal wave of darkness surged from the guardian’s outstretched hand. It coiled around her like living chains, searing her skin, yanking her into a vortex of black flame.
Her scream echoed—half human, half wolf—before it was devoured by silence.
Lucian roared and lunged, but the barrier of shadows erupted into a dome that slammed him backward. Elias hurled himself at it, claws shredding bark, teeth gnashing, but the black flame burned hotter than silver, branding his skin with blistering pain.
“Serena!” Elias’s voice cracked, raw with desperation. He hammered his fists into the dome until blood streaked his knuckles. “Serena, fight it!”
Lucian rose slowly, amber eyes feral, fury etched into every line o
The Rift pressed against Serena like a living thing. Shadows bled into her lungs with every breath, thick as smoke, sweet as poison. Her knees buckled under the weight of it, her heartbeat pounding a fractured rhythm. The throne loomed ahead—vast, jagged, carved from obsidian that pulsed with veins of blood-red light. Every thrum called to her bones, to her wolf, to the part of her that had always feared she was more curse than girl.Sit, her wolf whispered. Claim what is already ours.Serena clutched at her temples, staggering back. “No. I won’t.”But even as she spoke, her feet dragged her forward, heels scraping across the fractured stone. The throne wasn’t just calling—it was pulling. Invisible chains coiled around her wrists and ankles, dragging her toward its dark promise.From the shadows before it, the Shadow King watched. His form shifted constantly—sometimes cloaked in smoke, sometimes solid, like a warr
The battlefield was still. Not silent—never silent—but suspended, like the entire forest was holding its breath. The crimson eclipse bled across the sky, its jagged cracks spreading like a shattered mirror. The air vibrated with an otherworldly hum, the resonance so low Elias thought his ribs might splinter from the pressure.And then he heard it.Elias.Her voice wasn’t carried on the wind. It wasn’t spoken aloud. It was inside him—soft, desperate, achingly familiar. Serena.His knees nearly buckled. His wolf surged forward in his chest, howling her name with a mix of relief and terror. Around him, the wolves of Silver Ridge tensed, their hackles raised as if they had felt something too, though not the way he had.Lucian’s amber eyes snapped to him instantly. They narrowed, sharp as blades, reading every tremor of Elias’s body. “You heard her,” Lucian growled, his tone equal parts accusation and hunger.Elias forced air into his lungs. “She’s alive.”“No,” Lucian corrected, stepping
Smoke was all that remained of the Shadow Throne. The once-imposing fortress of obsidian and bloodstone had been reduced to ruin, its jagged spires collapsed into charred rubble that hissed and smoked in the crimson haze of the lingering eclipse. Ash coated everything—the ground, the trees, the wolves who had survived the slaughter. The battlefield no longer felt like a place of war but of mourning.Serena was gone.Elias staggered forward, his hands blackened with soot, his silver-gray wolf flickering just beneath his skin in restless grief. His heart thundered as he clawed at the rubble, moving stone after stone though his muscles screamed in protest.“Serena!” His voice cracked, hoarse from shouting. “Serena, answer me!”Nothing. Only the sound of wind threading through the ruins, whispering like ghosts.Behind him, wolves from both Silver Ridge and Nightfang packs lingered, broken and leaderless. No one knew whethe
The Rift did not close when Serena stepped through.It screamed.A sound like a thousand bones cracking in unison tore through the clearing, shaking the battlefield to its roots. Wolves fell to their knees, claws digging into the earth, ears flattened against their skulls as the air split open in a storm of black fire and blood-red moonlight. The shadow of the Eclipse painted everything in crimson, but the figure that emerged swallowed even that light.Serena Vale was no longer the woman they remembered.Her form flickered between flesh and fur, bone and shadow, like the world itself couldn’t decide what she was. Her skin shimmered with cracks of molten darkness, her limbs half-shifted into a monstrous wolf that seemed carved out of midnight flame. Shadows poured off her body like smoke, weaving around her in coils that reached hungrily toward the ground.And her eyes—gods, her eyes.One burned violet, the other a storm of gold and
The world shattered into silence.One heartbeat, Serena stood on the battlefield, shadows clawing from her skin, the Alpha spirit wolf looming before her like a titan of bone and flame. The next heartbeat—nothing.No battlefield. No Elias. No Lucian. No screaming armies.Only darkness.Not the ordinary kind. This was a suffocating, breathing dark, stitched with whispers that crawled against her skin. She gasped, clutching her chest, but her lungs drew no air—only shadow.Where… am I?Her feet touched something that wasn’t earth. It rippled like liquid obsidian beneath her, swallowing the light that flickered from her body. Above her, no sky—only a ceiling of crimson cracks, like veins glowing faintly through the endless black.The Rift.It wasn’t a battlefield, nor a throne room. It was something else—something alive.“Serena Vale.”The voice rolled through her bones like thunder, dragging her to her knees. It was layered, ancient, more growl than word. Dozens of whispers echoed it, r
The first howl was enough to silence the battlefield.It wasn’t like the snarls of the Nightfang warriors or the thunderous cries of Silver Ridge—it was older, sharper, as if it had been pulled from the marrow of the earth itself. The sound carried frost in its edges, piercing through flesh and bone, chilling Serena to her very core.The trees bent under the force of it. Leaves withered and blackened in the crimson glow of the eclipse.And then the shadows split.From the rift behind the Shadow Throne poured the wolves—wolves of no flesh and no true form, their bodies sculpted from fog and bone-light. Their eyes blazed silver, hollow and endless, and their paws left frostfire scars on the earth with every step. They moved in silence, except for the low hum that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.Spirit wolves. Predators born not of blood, but of hunger.“By the moon…” Elias’s voice