ONE

ARCHER

ALPHA KING ARCHER sat on his golden throne, staring at the moon. His eyes were sunken and his expression pained. The glass roof above his head enhanced the illumination of the moon. He used to idolize the moon and its goddess but now, he held her in absolute contempt.

She knew when he lost faith. She knew when he lost love. She knew when the hatred began but she did not care. She never did.

Archer would watch others find their mates and have pups. His younger brother had two pups of his own.

Archer glared at the moon.

He did not care if it was sacrilege or disrespect. Nothing mattered anymore. He was going to die.

Until now, Archer counted the days until his demise. Now he counted the hours. He knew it would not be long before the goddess decided to take him.

His eyes flared at the thought of the goddess. She was never fair to him. Besides making him the strongest wolf in the land, she never did anything for him. The one thing he desired the most was kept hidden from him for centuries. He had no idea if she even existed. Perhaps he was cursed to be mateless.

He sighed.

He could feel himself getting weaker by the day. It was close and he could feel it. With time, he would die and fade away from existence. No one would remember him. Or perhaps they would. He might be remembered as the mateless King.

Another sigh from his lips brought his mother storming out of her chambers. She marched over to him with the ends of her dress in the hands of her maids who scurried behind her.

The heavy red dress was probably too much for one maid, and because of this, three maids assisted the Queen Mother in carrying the dress. Archer wondered why women would wear something so uncomfortable.

"Archer Seth Lucian!" She called out, and he groaned while looking away from her.

"What is it this time, mother?"

"I know I did not raise you to be a pathetic wimp! Why do you accept your fate so easily?" She asked in a razor-sharp voice.

He did not reply, and she smacked his leg with her fan which emitted no reply from him.

"Archer!" She screeched.

Only then did he turn to her. He stared at her without as much as a speck of emotion in his gaze. His wolf gazed at their mother through his eyes, unable to comprehend why she was so angry.

"Look at you! Look at you patiently waiting for the goddess to end your life. Why can't you keep on fighting?" She demanded.

"What is there left to fight for?" He questioned in a tired voice, unable to muster the energy to be annoyed at her disrespect.

"When did it come to this, son?" She asked all of a sudden, her gaze softening.

Archer frowned at the absurdity of her statement but chose to reply anyway. "When the goddess decided to curse me."

"You are not cursed, Archer. The goddess would not intentionally punish one of her children," his mother said with a deep sigh.

"What then will you call this, mother? A blessing? I will be turning a thousand in two weeks. I will be hitting werewolf prime, and I am yet to find my mate.

"You know as much as I do what happens if I don't find her before my hundredth birthday." Archer winced as his wolf clawed at his mental blocks, fighting to come out and find his mate.

The struggle worsened by the day, and it was getting more difficult to reign in the beast that was slowly turning feral.

"Have you truly tried finding her?" The previous Queen asked, gesturing for her maids to drop her dress.

"Are you attempting a joke right now or are you just being sarcastic? Have I not tried almost my whole life to find her?" He opened his mouth to say more but decided against it.

"Let it be, mother, my time has come to an end," he deadpanned, taking his eyes off her to look back at the moon.

"And what if I told you that I may have found a way for you to find her? Would you get off your rear end and find her?"

He scanned his mother's face to find any indication that she was joking, only to see absolute seriousness. He shook his head.

"Let's say I decide to humour you, mother, what other miraculous ways can you come up with to help me find my mate? Trust me, mother, I have tried all of them," he responded, looking away from her again.

Queen Mother Celia looked around to see that they were surrounded by servants and guards.

"Come with me." She signalled for her dress to be picked up again before walking away with her maids, without checking to see if Archer was following.

Reluctantly, Archer rose from his throne and weakly followed his mother. It was difficult to do anything lately but he managed. Despite everything, Archer did not want his people to see him in his final times as a weak King.

He passed through the large darkly lit hallway that he used to run through as a kid. His father would always scold him for always running through the hallway but even that could never stop him.

After his father's death, Archer hated coming there. Archer kept his eyes off the wall, trying to ignore the portraits that littered all the walls. Pictures of all the werewolf kings that had ever ruled the kingdom.

King Edward Julius Lucian was the last.

He stopped in front of the large double doors and entered his mother's room where he found her looking at some papers.

"Before Edward died, I knew he was trying to find a way for you to find your mate but what I did not know was how far he had gone.

"So, going through your father's things today, I found some scrolls and a page of a book. They all spoke of a page containing cryptic directions and a title.

"I traced the page to find that it is a missing page from the book titled The Matebond. While reading through the page, I discovered something shocking." She paused, staring at him expectantly.

Still, the King showed no reaction.

With a deep sigh, his mother continued. "I found out that just like the human and wolf sides are in a werewolf, the mate shares a spiritual bond with both the human and wolf which links the three sides.

"Through that bond, one mate can find the other and form a bond. The bond was discovered during the great war by King Anton Barton Lucian when Queen Eliza was taken by the rogue Alpha."