Ash of the first moon
There were no stars above the Hollow Cliffs.
Only the shimmer of poisoned snow and the deep red pulse of the underground wyrmlight, buried far beneath the surface where the sky dared not look. It was in this darkness that Caelen lived. Not merely survived—but thrived.
He had not aged as men did. Time flowed differently beneath the world. His hair had silvered at the temples, but not from weariness. From focus. His eyes still gleamed with the same wildfire they had held when the Council cast him down.
They had called him heretic. Vision-touched. Moonmad.
But now they would see the truth of what they had feared. He had endured.
The chamber was vast—natural stone merged with carved geometry. Lines of runes crossed every surface, pulsing in silent cadence with a heart long buried. Not his. Its. The First Moonless. The force older than the Council, older even than the shape of the wolf.
Before him, a gathering knelt. Twenty-three souls. Wolves. Humans. Even a dragonkin hybrid cloaked in shadowsteel. They wore no banners. No rank insignias. But their bodies bore scars in identical shapes—spirals, jagged crescents, the inverted fang. They were his Woken.
"Speak," Caelen said.
A young woman rose first—sharp-jawed, eyes like storm glass. "Verik is lost."
"I know."
Caelen's voice was calm. No sadness. Just a shift in the air, as if his heart had recalculated its rhythm.
Another spoke—a broad-shouldered male with teeth too sharp to be natural. "The Ironfang has begun moving. We believe Alaric is coming."
A small smile touched Caelen's lips.
"Good."
The room waited.
Caelen stepped down from the obsidian dais, his boots making no sound on the stone.
"Do you think I built this sanctuary to hide?" he asked softly.
No one answered.
"I built it to listen. To wait. The old world is dying. And in its place, something truer must rise. Not from bloodline. Not from law. From awakening. The wolves sleep because they are bound by memory. By guilt. By the rules we made when we feared our own power. But now…"
He placed a hand on the great stone in the chamber's center.
"…the First Moonless stirs. And she does not care for guilt."
The Woken shifted uneasily. One of them—older, a former Council wolf from a shattered eastern den—dared to speak.
"They say the First Moonless will consume. Not awaken. You were always her voice, Caelen. But never her leash."
Caelen turned to him slowly.
"She doesn't need a leash. She needs a channel. What the Council feared was never destruction. It was liberation. The end of the shape-shackles. The return to what we were before—before we bent to their doctrines, before we became wolves that could be commanded like men."
The First Moonless was not a god. Not exactly. She was a memory too old to die. A force born when the moons still burned blue, and the first shifters took form not to hide, but to reign.
And she had spoken to Caelen in the dark.
Not in words.
In visions.
Futures layered upon futures. Wars yet unwaged. Choices Alaric had not yet made.
She had shown him the fall of Ironfang.
She had shown him Alaric's blood on his own hands—and the choice to spare.
One time. Only once.
Caelen stood before the council of his Woken.
"Let him come. Let Alaric see what his crown cost. When he arrives, we will not strike. We will not run. We will show. Every village they exiled. Every wolf marked unfit. Every child denied the Change. We will give him the choice they never gave us."
"And if he refuses?" asked the hybrid in the corner.
Caelen's eyes flared with gold.
"Then the First Moonless will decide."
The chamber dimmed again. The runes pulsed faster.
In the dark, Caelen touched a shard of blood-stone—linked not to this world, but to the one beneath it.
Alaric was walking toward him, one step at a time.
And Caelen would be ready.
Not with a blade.
With truth—the most dangerous weapon of all.