CROWNED BY BLOOD
There, beneath the gnarled branches of a dead oak, stepped a figure cloaked in twilight mist.
"Victoria," I murmured, my former friend's name tasting like ash on my tongue.
She looked… changed. Her once-golden curls were now threaded with premature silver strands that caught the moonlight like spun metal. Her eyes glowed faintly with something unholy, something that made my wolf recoil in instinctive fear. She moved with a predator's unnatural grace, pausing only to speak with a hooded figure whose aura reeked of decay and foreign magic that made the very air around him seem to wither.