The Night That Would Not End
[Flashback to how Caelen died]
They dragged him to the Execution Hollow at dawn.
The Council had not allowed a crowd. Only the sentencers, a dozen steel-cloaked wolves, and the ritualist who would oversee his severance. Not of flesh—of bond. His link to the Packmind was to be severed, his wolf stripped, his name erased.
Not a death. A vanishing.
Caelen's hands were bound in blacksteel. The shackles hissed whenever his rage rose.
He didn't beg. Didn't even speak. He looked into the eyes of the Council wolves and smiled, lips bloodied from the interrogation the night before.
"You're afraid of the wrong thing," he whispered.
They didn't answer. They simply forced him to his knees on the obsidian slab, etched with runes that sizzled on contact with his skin.
High Ritualist Brenar began to chant.
Caelen felt the split begin—the tearing of something beneath the soul. A loss not of memory, but of presence. The Packmind faded from him. The warmth of kinship. The tether of ancient blood. All dissolving.
He did not scream.
He did not weep.
But as the final rune ignited, the ground beneath him cracked.
The slab split open with a shriek like metal pulled from bone. A darkness poured from below—viscous and humming. Like tar and wind and whispering all at once.
The ritualist screamed. Wolves stumbled back.
And Caelen fell through.
Through stone. Through time. Through names.
He remembered nothing of the fall—only that it lasted longer than a breath but shorter than a heartbeat.
Then he landed. Alone.
He was in a chamber of no light. No air. But still he breathed. Still he was.
The voice came not from above or around. It came from inside.
> "They feared your howl. But they should have feared your silence."
He tried to rise, but his body refused.
> "The ones above built their truth on forgetting. On walls. On leashes. But you… you remember."
He opened his mouth. "Who—what are you?"
> "I am the first howl that cracked the moon."
Images flooded his mind.
A world before names.
Before rules.
Before the Packmind.
Wolves that did not shift to become human—but humans who learned to howl and tore off their skin to run beneath stars not bound by gravity.
And then he saw himself—falling again, but this time into a great sea of fire. In the center stood a shadow with gold eyes.
Not him.
A mirror of him.
The voice again:
> "You died, Caelen. But the shape of death bent to you."
He gasped as his body convulsed.
The blacksteel cracked.
His bones stretched—not just in strength, but in structure. His wolf emerged not as it had before but taller, leaner, with eyes like molten silver. His breath steamed in the darkness like fire given voice.
The First Moonless did not grant rebirth. She unbound.
The shackles of bloodline? Gone.
The limitations of old rituals? Erased.
He was not a wolf reborn.
He was the truth that survived execution.
When he awoke again, it was at the bottom of the Hollow Cliffs. A hidden chasm outside the known territories. His body broken. His old power gone.
But inside him burned something older.
He crawled for days. Hunted with bare teeth. Fought the madness. Fought the visions. And then—others found him. The exiled. The broken. The lost.
They followed him not because of name or title.
They followed him because they felt it—the hum of a voice that had no mouth.
The First Moonless did not speak to all.
Only those who had nothing left to lose.
---
As Caelen rose from the stone circle in the Hollow Cliffs, years later, his hand closed around a blade made from his own shattered bone. His old name was buried.
But in the dark, they whispered the new one:
The Nightwalker Alpha.
And the world above was not ready for him.