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
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
The Shadow Throne pulsed beneath Serena’s body like a living heart. Its stone was cold, yet heat rippled from it in waves, searing her skin as if it branded her from the inside out. She tried to rise, to wrench herself away from it, but invisible chains coiled around her wrists and spine, dragging her deeper into its embrace.And then came the voices.At first, they whispered like wind through broken glass, soft enough to make her wonder if it was just the echo of her own breath. But then they multiplied, layer upon layer, until her skull throbbed with the pressure of countless tongues. Male, female, old, young—wolves and something far older—an entire chorus of rulers long dead.You are ours now.Our heir. Our vessel. Our ruin.Serena clenched her fists on the throne’s arms, nails cutting her palms. “Get out of my head.”But the throne d
The battlefield was silent.Not the quiet of peace, but the suffocating hush that follows devastation—where even the wind seems afraid to move. Smoke drifted in thin ribbons across the clearing, the last embers of the Moonfall firestorm still glowing faintly against the scorched earth. Wolves, Alphas, and Council remnants alike stood frozen, their eyes locked on the figure at the center of the ruin.Serena.She stood tall, unbowed, her hair whipping in the faint night breeze. The crimson eclipse still blazed overhead, bleeding across her features in a light too sharp, too otherworldly to be mortal. Her skin shimmered faintly, like veins of starlight ran beneath the surface. Shadows flickered in her eyes, shifting like smoke, while a faint pulse of violet bled into the glow of her irises.The hybrid wolf was gone.Or so it seemed.No twisted monster loomed beside her now, no skeletal silhouette of a corrupted beast. Yet no one dared bre
The world split open when her fingers brushed the champion’s fur.The starlit wolf convulsed, silver bleeding into her shadows like ink spilled across snow. Above them, the eclipse cracked down the middle, a seam of crimson fire and silver lightning tearing the heavens apart. Half the sky burned blood-red, the other half glared with blinding moonlight, as though two gods warred over a single canvas.Time itself stuttered. Leaves froze mid-fall, raindrops hung like glass beads in the air, and every heartbeat around the clearing slowed to a distorted thunder. Serena felt it crawl over her skin—the weight of eternity pressing down on her shoulders, daring her to collapse.Her Onyx wolf roared inside her. The sound shook her bones, but when it bled outward, it wasn’t hers alone.The starlit champion howled with her.Shadows and silver collided, wrapping around one another in an agonizing spiral until their forms blurred. Serena stagge