THE MOON BLESSING

POV: PRIESTESS ILLARA, UNNAMED PRIESTESS, NOVICE GUARD, THE MOTHER

The moon hung heavy over the Alpha’s Hall — swollen, silver, watching.

The Blessing Moon.

The night when every expectant she-wolf stood before Selene’s altar, her belly touched, catalogued, whispered over. Power dressed as piety. Fertility traded like a coin.

I knelt at the altar, sleeves scented with lavender and moonflower, fingers slick with sacred oil. Three years in service, and I’d seen them all — proud matrons with eyes like victory, shamed brides trying not to cry. I thought nothing could surprise me.

I was wrong.

She stepped from the shadows at the end of the line. No silks. No jewels. No escort. Just a plain cloak, hair loose, face half-hidden in torchlight. But the way she held her belly — as though cradling the last flame in the world—made my hand falter.

She wasn’t on the registry.

The High Priestess gave the smallest nod. Better to bless and dismiss than cause a scandal.

I stepped forward, my voice low.

“Child of the Moon… do you seek Selene’s blessing?”

She nodded once, her gaze drifting from the altar to the sky.

A cold wind stirred the banners.

I dipped my fingers into the oil, whispered the chant, and reached for her belly—

And the world came undone.

Heat shot up my arm. Glyphs flared beneath her skin — not Selene’s script, but something older, carved from before the stars were sown.

A voice poured through me, raw and ancient, ripping the air apart as it spoke:

“She is not yours.

She will not kneel.

The gods have lied.”

The banners tore. The altar cracked. Oil caught fire.

In her womb, something shifted. Something that should never have been blessed.

Gasps rose around me. Glyphs spiralled into the air like black-flamed roots. They didn’t burn — they bled.

I couldn’t stop the collapse. My knees buckled, my vision went white, and the words came unbidden from my mouth:

> “The Hollow-Blood stirs beneath your feet.

The one you tried to burn shall blaze again.

Ash will remember her.

Flame will crown her.

And every name you gave the divine… will break.”

The moonstone dimmed. The walls groaned.

Somewhere, Alendra screamed for the guards. I floated above the altar, fingertips dripping black ichor, my voice doubled — half divine, half monstrous:

“She comes clothed in ruin.

Fire for skin. Teeth for gods.

The womb that carried her weeps…

But she will not burn.”

The Alpha’s mate’s voice sliced through the smoke.

“Silence this madness!”

No one moved.

“The Hollow-Blood has returned,” I heard myself say.

“Born not of fate. Not of gods. But in the end.”

The woman’s knees gave way, but the child only hummed inside her — waiting.

The altar is split down the middle. The Moon sigil above veined crimson. Every candle died.

I whispered the truth with the last of my breath:

“She does not kneel. She burns.”

The scribe’s quill clattered to the floor.

“This is no blessing,” he choked. “This is a reckoning.”

“She bears the Hollow-Blood.”

The Alpha’s mate didn’t hesitate.

“Kill the vessel. Before it’s too late.”

---

THE ONE WHO CHOSE MERCY

POV: UNNAMED PRIESTESS

They called it mercy.

I called it murder.

She lay shackled in silver-threaded rope, lips cracked, body trembling. They’d forced bitter herbs down her throat twice — meant to scour the womb, burn the cursed seed from within. Twice, the child refused to die.

The Temple groaned. Glyphs reversed themselves. Sigils bled black.

“The sign of life has flipped,” the senior priestess muttered, and the others crossed themselves in fear.

Still, they prepared the knives.

“If the body won’t listen,” the High Matron growled, “we’ll carve the heresy out ourselves.”

The surgical tools gleamed — silver, sterile, merciless.

I stayed in the shadow of the curtain, nameless and unseen, my hands knotted in my robe. I wasn’t supposed to speak. I wasn’t supposed to feel. But I’d heard her in her sleep, murmuring the same word like a prayer:

Araya.

Not prophecy. Not a curse. A name.

When the last torch dimmed, I moved — no weapon, only cloth, oil, and moonflower balm tucked beneath my sleeves.

She blinked at me from the cot, eyes sunken, voice rasping.

“Are you here to kill me?”

I shook my head.

“I’m here to help you run.”

Her breath hitched. “Why?”

I couldn’t answer. My fingers worked at the ropes instead.

“They’ll kill you for this,” she whispered.

“I can look after myself,” I murmured. “But you… You have to run.”

Her tears fell freely now. “You’re not like the others.”

“Maybe,” I said, voice shaking, “we don’t all have to be monsters.”

---

THE INNER SANCTUM

POV: THE NOVICE GUARD

The Inner Sanctum had been sealed since before I was born.

Not with locks. Not with bars.

With oaths — the kind that curdled a tongue and turned it black if spoken aloud.

I’d never seen the door open. No one had. Even the High Matrons only came to press their foreheads to the cold stone, whispering prayers to whatever listened beyond it.

Tonight, the door did not open.

It shuddered.

The sound was not a creak. It was bone — splintering. The moon-carved arch above the entrance cracked clean through.

My knees wanted to fold. My spear felt useless in my grip.

Inside, there was no light. Only the faint glimmer of silver chains in the dark — twelve of them, each link carved with runes older than Selene’s court. They bound a basin of silver water to the floor.

The water stirred once. Twice. Then began to boil without heat.

What rose wasn’t steam? It was ash, curling into glyphs I’d never seen, trying to form a name… and failing.

The first chain snapped.

The sound rattled my teeth.

A second broke.

Then a third.

The basin split with a muffled scream, black liquid spilling across the floor until it reached the moon sigil carved into the marble. The sigil bled.

The air turned heavy — breathing felt like swallowing molten iron.

And then the voice came.

It wasn’t from the room.

It wasn’t from the walls.

It was inside my bones.

"The fire has stirred"

My spear clattered to the floor. My throat closed. I clawed at it, desperate for air.

The High Matron appeared at the corridor’s end. One step toward me — and every vein in her body flared silver before her skin turned glassy and her eyes boiled white.

Someone behind her screamed and kept screaming.

One priest — the only one still on his feet—staggered through the door against all sense. He didn’t make it far.

When they pulled him back, he had no face. Just smooth skin where the eyes, mouth, and nose should be. In the centre of his palm, a single smoking symbol was carved deep into the flesh:

— The mark of Hollow-Blood.

The basin was gone.

In its place, scorched into the blackened marble, were words that pulsed faintly like cooling embers:

The Hollow-Blood walks.

And the divine will burn.

---

THE VESSEL’S FLIGHT & LAST BREATH

POV: The Mother

Two moons after she cut my ropes, I was still running.

They’d branded me with holy iron. When I did not bleed, they sent hunters — beasts in moonlight, hounds with hollow-star eyes and breath like frost on bone.

I crossed marsh and mountain, ice fields and stone valleys. The child inside never kicked. Never flinched. Only waited.

Every breath burned. My feet bled through the snow.

At the edge of Blackwood Forest, I fell to my knees beside a weeping tree. In my hand, I still clutched the dusk-blue scarf the girl had given me — embroidered with one name:

Araya.

The pain came like judgment. My body convulsed. I screamed her into the world — no altar, no blessing, no witnesses but the mud and the stars that dared not look down.

She did not cry.

She opened her eyes. And in them, I saw the world — ancient, wide, and utterly unafraid.

I wrapped her gently in the scarf, tucking her beneath the roots — warm, hidden, blanketed in my only gift. I lit a dying ember of stolen fire to keep her safe.

Then I ran.

Not toward salvation.

Toward slaughter.

They found me in the half-light, breath steaming, paws silent. Their eyes burned white — not with hunger, but with orders.

I could not run. My legs were stone. My womb burned like I was still carrying the sun.

They came for me slowly. Not to kill. To take.

They peeled my nails one by one, their voices low, chanting psalms in a tongue I did not know but somehow hated.

They branded my womb with silver-scripted iron. The smell of my own flesh burning lodged in my throat. The glyphs seared so deep I thought they might scar the child through memory alone.

They opened my skin to the bone — not in a single stroke, but in cuts so thin I felt the air slip inside.

When I laughed, they broke my jaw.

They tied me to the old altar — black with moss, slick with old blood — and split me from navel to sternum. My ribs cracked like wet wood. My lungs filled with smoke.

“Proof,” they said. “Find proof she carried fire.”

Fingers dug inside me, searching like thieves in a temple.

They found nothing.

They boiled my eyes in moonwine, pressed them into my palms, and stitched my lips with silver. My spine was opened and counted, each vertebra touched like a bead on a prayer chain.

“Let her forget,” they whispered. “Let her soul rot in silence.”

They hung me upside down from the ash tree that had never bloomed. My blood fed the roots. My womb wept soot.

And I smiled.

Not because it didn’t hurt. Because it did. Because every scream I bit back was one they could never take from me.

The world tilted. The hounds blurred. The sky swam in my eyes.

Far above, in a place I could not reach, Selene sat on her silver throne. She did not save me. She only watched — her eyes fixed on something far below.

Not me.

The ember.

Her lips moved. I thought I heard her say:

“She lives.”

I let that be my last breath.

For three nights after, the moon did not rise.

The stars veiled themselves.

The wolves of the north howled to nothing.

Because the child had survived.

And her name was already burning.