The red sun fades, swallowed by the bruised sky, leaving only the aftertaste of its impossible light. The forest holds its breath. No wolf moves. No whisper dares disturb the ash still drifting through the air, glowing faint like embers without fire.
I cradle Dahlia against me, her body slack, her skin burning with the mark she should never carry. It pulses through her veins, rhythm matching my own heartbeat, as though some hidden choir is conducting her blood in time with the end of the world.
The pack stands motionless, eyes fixed on her, waiting for her to stir—or for me to tell them it's over. But I can't. I know it isn't. Silence here is not mercy. Silence here is dread, deep and echoing, like the pause between verses of a dirge.
The air is wrong. The ground beneath us hums with the ghost of that collapsing Threshold, as if the bones of the world are unsettled. Even the beasts of the forest—wolves, ravens, the hidden things in the thickets—have fled. And still, the mark beneath her skin glows faint, whispering of prophecies twisted.
This is not victory. This is a warning.
---
The silence shatters, not with a scream, but with whispers.
What if she isn't one of us anymore?
What if the mark means she belongs to something else?
Fear is louder than reason. I hear it in the trembling growls, the shifting feet, the way their eyes refuse to meet mine as I clutch her closer. Dahlia breathes shallow, the glow beneath her skin an echo of something neither living nor dead.
"Enough," I snarl, though the sound wavers. My voice has never faltered before, and they hear it—they smell the crack.
Sareth kneels, fingers hovering above Dahlia's arm but never touching. His eyes narrow, the lines of his face etched in a grim recognition I've never seen before.
"This isn't Choir work," he mutters, half to himself. "Nor Hollow Order. It's something else. Something that shouldn't exist."
The words strike harder than any blade. I'd have preferred him to say she bore their curse. At least that enemy has a name.
The pack recoils, tension sparking like flint against stone. Suspicion thickens the air—directed not at me, but at her. At us. At the bond we swore before the gods, now tangled in something deeper, darker, unnamed.
I bare my teeth to silence them, but in my chest a question claws: what if they're right?
---
Her breath caught against my chest, shallow, uneven, but alive. Then her lashes flickered, and for the briefest instant the world seemed to lean closer, waiting.
Her lips moved before her eyes opened—whispers bleeding out, not hers, not human. The sound was jagged, like glass dragged over stone.
"Veyrath ka'losen… sha'morath ven… ilythra daenor… sel'ash ka'rhun…"
The syllables shivered through the marrow of everyone who heard them, as though her voice had dipped beneath the Hollow, into a layer even Sareth hadn't charted.
She clawed weakly at my shirt, eyes fluttering open. They weren't the soft storm-gray I knew, but fractured with threads of faint crimson light.
"Not Choir… not Hollow…" she rasped, voice breaking into two tones, one hers, one Other. "…beneath them. Beneath the roots… the Ash sings where no god listens. Do you hear it, Damon? They have no mouths, yet they sing…"
Every wolf around us recoiled. Even my own grip faltered, shame prickling at the hesitation.
I cupped the back of her head, forcing myself to hold her tighter though the heat of that mark beneath her skin scorched through me. "Dahlia—stay with me. Stay mine."
Her gaze trembled, unfocused, and she whispered again, words that felt like a curse unlatched from her soul.
"Ashthar vel'kora… ehn'drel ka'vorth… Thal'irrun dosh."
Sareth's staff thudded against the stone as he nearly dropped it. His mouth moved, but no sound came at first. Then, hoarse, "Those words—no Choir, no Hollow, no god I've ever studied. That's… something older."
The pack's silence thickened, heavier than blood. Suspicion, awe, and dread wound together. Some stepped back. Others bowed their heads as if afraid her gaze might brand them too.
And all I could think was that she was slipping through my arms—into a place where no wolf, no mate, no oath could reach.
---
The first flake drifts down, pale as snow, but when it lands it hisses like flesh against iron. The pack flinches, some crying out as searing brands bloom across their arms and faces. The sky isn't shedding ash—it is unraveling, scattering the remnants of glyphs as they collapse into burning dust.
I lift my face to it and feel nothing. No sting, no scorch. The fragments fall over me as if I were their home, and when they touch my skin they sink inward, drawn beneath the surface like thirsty ink. My veins hum, glowing faintly where each ember disappears. Damon's grip on me tightens, his body angled like a shield even as he feels me drinking down what would destroy him.
The forest grows unnaturally still. The night-creatures hush, even the restless wind strangles itself. Only the faint crackle of burning glyph-ash remains, whispering like tiny curses as it clings to hair and fur. Wolves stagger, clawing at the brands seared into their flesh, the smell of scorched skin fouling the air.
Above the silence, a chorus rises—thin at first, then swelling, threads of shadow weaving into a single terrible cadence. From the treeline, voices coil, spectral and distant, belonging to the retreating Hollow Order. Their words strike like iron across bone:
"Cathan Veyrthuun, Sahl drak venarh…"
"The Daughter has been marked."
"Thryss on'val, morreth ul'kaan…"
"The Verse has been broken."
The chant rolls again and again, each repetition more venomous, more triumphant, as though the very breaking of their prophecy feeds them. Damon snarls at the sound, a raw animal fury bursting from his chest, but the wolves around him look shaken, as if the words confirm a fear they already knew.
And me—I stand in his arms, ash-light flooding into me, their chant digging into my marrow like truth I can't deny.
---
The flakes seared into my skin, each mark a faint brand of pain, but her body drank them whole. Not a flinch, not a scar—Dahlia absorbed the falling ruin as if she were born of it. I held her tighter, yet my arms trembled with a sickness that was not weakness but truth clawing through me.
I had sworn before moon and pack, before blood and death, that I would protect her. I carved that oath into my flesh the night I bound myself to her, a vow older than my throne. Protect her, even if the world itself burned.
But as the glyph-ash fell and the Hollow Order whispered their venomous chorus into the silence, the fracture split open inside me. What if she was no longer mine to protect, but theirs? What if the thing rising in her veins was no longer Dahlia at all?
Her heartbeat pulsed against me like a second drum, not wolf, not human—something else, something vast. And in the hollow echo of her breath, I felt the weight of my dread. For the first time, my love and my vow stood apart, not braided as one. To hold her now meant to shelter what could unmake everything.
My wolf snarled beneath my skin, a feral voice urging me to claim her, to cage her, to keep her no matter what she became. But the man in me—the Alpha bound to more than desire—knew the horror of that choice.
My hands shook around her shoulders, nails digging half-moon scars into her flesh. I clutched her as if holding her kept the world from shattering, yet my fear whispered otherwise: perhaps it was my holding her that doomed it.
And still, even trembling, I could not let go.
---
The silence broke not with thunder, but with Sareth's voice, hoarse and shaking as if the ash itself had scraped his throat raw. His eyes darted between the sky, the falling glyphs, and the mark beneath Dahlia's skin that drank the fire like a vessel. He drew in a ragged breath, then spoke the words none of us wanted to hear.
"The Verse has fractured. The prophecy… it no longer holds."
Every Ironsworn flinched as though he had cursed. Prophecy is immutable, their law carved into marrow since before time. And yet the ashes branded them, and even they could not deny the impossible.
Sareth raised a trembling hand, and with his blood he scrawled the words in the dirt, the old and the new.
The old prophecy bled like memory:
"When the second sun bleeds, the Daughter shall fall, and the Moonblood shall rise through her ruin. The hollowed shall reign, and the pack shall scatter like ash."
But the ash in the air twisted, reformed, and in his voice came a verse never recorded in any shard or scripture:
"When the second sun dies, the Daughter shall awaken, and the Moonblood shall bind the broken Verse. Not hollowed, not scattered, but reborn in blood and flame—the world remade in their choosing."
No one moved. No one breathed. Even Damon's grip on me shifted, as if the words themselves threatened to split him open.
The Ironsworn fell to their knees, some whispering prayers, others muttering denials. Their whole world—their reason for obeying prophecy—was unmade before them.
And in that breath, we understood. We were no longer resisting prophecy. We were rewriting it.
---
Dahlia stirred in my arms, her lips cracked, her breath no stronger than a dying ember. Her eyes, half-lidded, seemed to burn with a sight I couldn't see. The words that slipped from her mouth were frail, but they carved into all of us like a blade—
"The Choir has begun to sing a new song… and it starts with blood."
Her head fell back, unconscious once more, and the silence that followed was unbearable. Even the firepit guttered low, as though the flames feared what she had spoken into existence.
Then a figure staggered into the clearing, armor cracked and smeared with blackened blood. One of the Ironsworn. His helm was gone, his face torn open by claw marks, yet his eyes carried a terror I had never seen in their kind. He fell to his knees before us, choking on air, and forced the words out like each one was a stone lodged in his throat—
"The Hollow Order isn't retreating… they're circling. They're coming back—and this time, they bring their God."
A stillness swept the clearing, deeper than death. My wolf pressed hard against my skin, every hair on end, my pulse a drum of warning.
And then we all felt it.
The ground beneath us quivered, roots trembling as though the forest itself was trying to pull away from what was rising. A low, impossible hum seeped up from the earth, thick and resonant, rattling my bones. It wasn't wind, nor beast, nor stone—it was the sound of a throat opening.
The Choir was no longer whispering.
It was preparing to sing.
---