Omicron Wolf Village woke before the sun.
The inverted silver tree at the mountain's heart glowed cold and steady, roots clawing at the sky, branches buried in stone. Every leaf rang like a bell when the wind moved through them, and the wind never stopped. The sound was the village heartbeat.
At the first bell, four thousand wolves were already moving.
Xavier stood naked to the waist on the highest training ledge, frost riming the black hair on his chest, the four-rune mark glowing soft gold beneath his skin. Lyra stood to his left, shirt tied around her hips, scars catching the silver light like rivers of old moonlight. Lucian and Zamiel (whole again, flesh and blood, violet eyes bright with new life) stood to his right. Their shadows fell long across the obsidian floor.
Elder Kael'vhan waited in the centre of the circle, cloak of silver pelts stirring though there was no wind.
He did not speak.
He simply raised one hand.
Every training ground in the village went still.
Then he dropped his hand.
And hell began.
Kael'vhan's voice rolled out like an avalanche that had decided to be gentle.
"Five years.
One thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days.
Twelve Supreme Demon Wolves.
You will kill them one by one, or they will erase you from every story ever told.
There is no third choice."
He looked at Xavier.
"You carry the cage.
They will try to open it.
Your job is to become the kind of lock not even gods can pick."
He looked at Lyra.
"You are the key that must never turn.
Your job is to become harder than any force they can bring."
He looked at Lucian and Zamiel.
"You are the chain that binds the key to the lock.
Your job is to become unbreakable."
Then he smiled, and it was not kind.
"Begin."
The first day was not training.
It was annihilation.
Kael'vhan snapped his fingers.
The ledge beneath their feet cracked open like an egg. They fell (hundreds of feet) into a cavern lit only by veins of crimson ore that pulsed like arteries. The fall should have killed them. It didn't. The air itself caught them, slowed them, slammed them into a floor of polished black glass hard enough to crack ribs and spill blood.
Before they could rise, the glass rippled.
And the first trial began.
From the walls rose twelve statues (towering wolves carved from the same crimson ore, each wearing a crown of broken moons). Their eyes opened. Violet fire. The exact shade of the unbound god's heart.
Kael'vhan's voice echoed from above.
"These are echoes of the Twelve.
Not the real ones.
But close enough to kill you a thousand times before breakfast.
Survive until the tenth bell.
Then we begin the real work."
The statues moved.
The first lunged at Xavier (its crown shaped like a ring of frozen screams). It did not walk. It unfolded, joints bending wrong, claws longer than Roshan. Xavier met it with bare hands. He caught the wrist, twisted, felt bone shatter that was not bone. The statue screamed in a voice that was almost the god inside him laughing. He answered by driving his forehead into its face. The crown shattered. The statue dissolved into crimson dust that tried to crawl into his mouth. He spat blood and kept moving.
Lyra fought the second (crown of bleeding eyes). Every time she struck it, the wounds opened on her own body instead. She laughed, a sound like breaking glass, and kept striking until her knuckles were raw bone and the statue finally fell apart.
Lucian and Zamiel fought back-to-back against the third and fourth. Lucian took the one made of chains and screaming faces, Wrath's End singing as it carved links that tried to wrap his throat. Zamiel fought the one that bled light, gauntlets flaring violet-white, every ward he cast reflected back at him until his eyes bled. They never stopped moving, never stopped trading places, never let the other fight alone.
Hours passed.
The tenth bell never came.
The statues kept rising.
Twelve became twenty-four.
Twenty-four became forty-eight.
The cavern floor became a lake of their own blood.
Xavier's ribs were broken in seven places. Lyra's left arm hung useless. Lucian's chest was a ruin of chain-whip cuts. Zamiel coughed violet fire with every breath.
Still they fought.
Because stopping meant dying.
Because dying meant the god woke up.
Because the Twelve were real and coming.
When the sun finally set outside the mountain (though none of them saw it), Kael'vhan's voice returned, calm as winter.
"Enough."
The statues froze mid-strike and crumbled to dust.
The cavern floor tilted. They slid upward on a river of silver light, spat out onto the ledge where they had begun.
They collapsed in a heap of blood and broken bone.
Kael'vhan stood over them.
"Day one," he said. "One thousand eight hundred and twenty-four left.
Tomorrow will be worse."
He turned to leave, then paused.
"Oh. I almost forgot."
He tossed something small and black into Xavier's lap.
A single shard of void-glass, still warm.
"From the first statue's crown.
The echo of the Supreme who rules Memory.
Its true name is written on the inside.
Learn it.
One day you will carve it into its real heart."
Xavier closed his fist around the shard.
The war had begun.
And the Eclipse Pack had just taken its first lesson.