Three moons had passed since the Final Shroud collapsed.
The world believed the nightmare was over.
They were wrong.
The Eclipse Pack had returned to the mortal realms, to a hidden valley ringed by iron-black mountains and steaming geothermal vents. They called it Havenfall. A place to breathe. To heal. To pretend, for one fragile season, that the war was finished.
But every night, Xavier woke screaming.
The scar over his heart, the eight-pointed star born when the Heart-Crystal fused with the Bloodpearl and Bloodstone, burned cold. Inside it, something vast and ancient moved like a wolf pacing the bars of its cage. Sometimes it whispered in a voice made of devoured galaxies.
You cannot hold me forever, enigma.
I am patient.
I am inevitable.
Tonight the whisper was louder.
Xavier stood on the highest ridge of Havenfall, shirt torn open, moonlight carving silver rivers across the ridges of muscle and old scars. The eight-pointed star glowed sickly violet, veins of void-light crawling outward like frost across glass. Roshan lay driven into the stone at his feet, humming a low, mournful note.
Lyra found him there.
She said nothing. Simply walked up behind him, pressed her blood-oath palm flat over the burning scar, and let their scars kiss. The violet light recoiled from her touch, hissing like acid on steel. Xavier's shoulders loosened a fraction. He leaned back into her, eyes closed, breathing her in, wildflowers and gun-smoke and home.
Still no kiss. They didn't need it anymore.
The bond was deeper than mouths now.
Below them, the valley slept. Lucian's low laughter drifted from the forge where he and Zamiel worked late, hammering runes into new weapons forged from the bones of the Final Throne. The sound was warm, ordinary, human. A lie they all desperately wanted to believe.
Then the sky tore open.
A wound of violet fire split the night from horizon to horizon. From it poured a single, colossal shard of void-glass the size of a mountain. It hung above Havenfall like a guillotine made of stars, edges dripping molten black.
And every wolf in the valley felt it at once.
The god inside Xavier laughed.
A voice not his own rolled out of his throat, deep as collapsing suns.
"Brothers… sisters… I have returned."
The shard cracked. From the fissure stepped nine figures cloaked in living darkness, each wearing a crown of broken moons. Their eyes were the same violet as the scar on Xavier's chest.
The Nine Harbingers.
Fragments of the unbound god that had been scattered across creation when the First Enigma originally shattered it.
They had come to reclaim what was theirs.
The tallest, a woman whose face shifted between beauty and abyss, raised a hand. Reality folded like paper.
"Give us the vessel," she said, voice a chorus of a billion graves. "Or we unmake everything you love, one scream at a time."
Xavier's lips peeled back from lengthening fangs. The eight-pointed scar split open. Violet light poured out, and for one terrifying heartbeat his left eye turned pure void.
Lyra stepped in front of him, claws dripping silver fire.
"Over my corpse," she snarled.
The Harbinger smiled with too many teeth.
"That can be arranged."
The valley erupted into war.
Lucian roared from the forge, Wrath's End now a blazing greatsword of white rune-fire. Zamiel's tablet was gone, replaced by twin gauntlets of living ward-light that turned the air around him into a storm of violet glyphs. Hundreds of Havenfall wolves, refugees, survivors, omegas and alphas who had followed the Eclipse Pack here, poured from caves and cabins, eyes glowing with desperate courage.
Xavier tried to move.
Couldn't.
The god inside him surged, trying to seize his limbs, his voice, his will. Violet veins crawled up his neck like strangling vines. He dropped to one knee, snarling, fighting for every inch of his own body.
Lyra spun, cupped his face with blood-slick hands, and pressed their foreheads together.
"Look at me," she commanded.
Gold fire met green fire.
"Listen to my heartbeat," she said, voice cutting through the chaos. "Not its. Mine."
The violet retreated an inch. Then another.
Behind her, the first Harbinger raised a hand. A wave of void-fire rolled toward the valley, enough to erase a continent.
Lucian and Zamiel met it head-on. Wrath's Cleave and twin gauntlets of ward-light slammed together, forming a dome of molten white that shattered the void-wave into harmless sparks.
But there were eight more Harbingers.
And they were only getting started.
Xavier rose slowly, trembling, every muscle at war with the thing inside him. Roshan leapt into his grip, blade now half white, half violet, screaming.
He looked at Lyra.
Looked at Lucian and Zamiel standing shoulder to shoulder.
Looked at the wolves of Havenfall ready to die for the sliver of hope he represented.
And he made a choice.
He let the god speak, just once, through his own mouth.
"Come and take me," Xavier said, voice layered with two timbres, his and something ancient beyond naming.
Then he smiled, feral and terrible.
"But you'll have to go through my family first."
The nine Harbingers descended like falling stars.