The Hollow stirred long before Lyra lit the offering fire.
A hush blanketed the forest. Not silence—this wasn't peace—but a deep, ancient stillness that pressed against the lungs like a hand around the throat. The air here held no scent. Not pine. Not dew. Not even death.
Just waiting.
The scent of scorched sage and burnt bone coiled in the night wind as Lyra knelt within the blood-drawn circle. The ground beneath her knees pulsed like a heart long buried, beating in time with something that had no flesh and no name. She didn't flinch.
She'd come here alone. No guards. No shadows. Not even Cain knew.
She didn't need witness.
Only truth.
Kael's instructions burned in her mind—etched like her mark.
"The Hollow hears everything. But it only answers sacrifice. Not tears."
She didn't plan to cry.
The clearing she'd chosen sat deep within Bloodveil's forbidden woods, where wolves whispered of ghosts and walked quickly past at night. Old trees arched overhead like gnarled ribs, their roots choked with ash. Lyra had heard the stories as a child—how the cursed alphas of old had come here to make bargains they never walked away from whole.
Tonight, she was no longer a child.
And she was tired of waiting for a truth Cain would never give her.
She pressed her palm to the earth.
It drank her warmth greedily.
The bond—the mark that had once pulsed with the heat of fate—now writhed beneath her skin like a parasite resisting its exile.
Lyra's body trembled, but her voice did not.
"I call the Hollow."
The trees answered in a low moan. The fire flared blue, casting her in an otherworldly glow.
"I call the blood that made me. I call the power that bound me. I call the name that was stolen."
She drew the symbols Kael had taught her—sigils made of hooks and spirals and bone-curved language no longer spoken aloud. She drew Cain's name in ash beside her own. Then she carved a third.
The mark itself.
Three lines. Interlocked. A rune that didn't belong to any Goddess.
Only to pain.
When she slashed her palm, the circle accepted the blood like an oath.
It sizzled, turning red to black in seconds.
The bond screamed.
Not in words—but in sensation. Lyra fell forward, breath stolen, as if invisible chains were coiling tighter around her ribs. The mark at her collarbone seared like molten iron.
She bit down on her cry.
"No," she whispered. "You don't get to control me anymore."
The fire roared.
From the edge of the woods, Kael stepped into the ritual light.
Silver eyes gleaming. Arms folded. Unafraid.
"You're stronger than I expected," he murmured.
"I didn't do it for you."
"I know." His smile was wolfish. "You did it for yourself. That's why it will work."
The Hollow surged behind her like breath. The sigils glowed crimson.
And in that moment, the bond began to fracture.
Far away, Cain was in the war hall when it hit him.
It wasn't pain.
It was annihilation.
The floor beneath him tilted. His knees crashed to stone. Golden eyes wide, chest heaving, he clutched at the burning knot beneath his sternum—the one that had never left him since the day Lyra came back from the dead.
The mate mark.
It was breaking.
He could feel it like claws in his soul. Not severed by age or rejection.
By ritual.
By force.
By her.
"Lyra," he gasped, already rising, already shifting. His bones cracked mid-stride, flesh peeling, fur replacing skin. But the pain was nothing compared to the cold.
She was doing this without him.
Back in the ritual circle, Lyra's body shuddered violently.
The blood she'd spilled was no longer enough.
The Hollow was greedy.
It wanted more.
"You are the bond," a voice hissed from within the fire. "You are the gate. You cannot sever what you summoned."
"I can," Lyra growled. "I will."
She reached into the flame and plunged her marked hand into the heart of the fire.
The skin blistered. She didn't scream.
Instead, she whispered Cain's name—and then her own.
"I release you," she said through her teeth. "I release me."
The bond roared in agony. Then began to tear.
Cain collapsed to the forest floor, fur steaming, heart barely beating. He could feel it—every piece of her slipping away like threads unraveling in a storm.
"No—no—no—"
He forced himself up, his wolf body limping, bloody pawprints marking his path as he tore through the trees.
Too late.
Too late.
He reached the edge of the clearing just as the fire exploded outward in a ring of dark smoke and silver flame. It repelled him, tossed him backwards, bones snapping against a trunk. He shifted back mid-air, coughing blood.
He crawled forward. Screamed her name.
But she was on her knees.
And the bond was gone.
Lyra opened her eyes to silence.
The world had dimmed. The Hollow had retreated. The fire was dying.
She was still alive.
But not whole.
She blinked—and saw Cain in the trees, broken, shaking, bleeding from the chest.
His mark had vanished.
So had hers.
They stared at each other across the ash.
Neither moved.
Neither spoke.
The bond between them had always thrummed like a heartbeat—subtle, steady, constant.
Now…
Nothing.
A void.
An absence she hadn't expected to ache quite so deeply.
She looked down at her chest.
A faint scar remained—three overlapping slashes. A reminder.
Not of love.
But survival.
Kael stepped into the silence, voice low. "It's done."
She didn't answer.
He offered his hand. "Come with me. There's no place for you here anymore."
She didn't move.
Cain dragged himself to his feet. "Don't."
His voice was hoarse. Hollow.
Lyra looked between them.
Kael. Smooth. Beautiful. Promising liberation.
Cain. Broken. Silent. Still bleeding.
Neither was her salvation.
Neither was her home.
"I need time," she said.
And she walked away—from both of them.
That night, Cain returned to the keep in silence.
The wolves who looked to him for leadership said nothing. They had felt it. The bond shattering. The mark disappearing from their Alpha's chest like the severing of a star.
He said nothing.
He locked himself in the war chamber and faced the maps.
And for the first time in years… he felt truly alone.
Kael, miles away, stood on a cliff overlooking the valley.
He held a strip of Lyra's torn cloak in his hand and smiled.
"She's free," he murmured to the shadow beside him. "Now we begin."
The shadow shifted. An old voice replied, "The Hollow is awake. The gate is open."
Kael turned.
And behind him, the stars began to bleed.
The bond was broken.
But what Lyra had severed had not died.
It had only been set loose.