The moon was wrong tonight.
Not just too big. Not just too red. It pulsed.
A slow, steady throb in the sky like the heartbeat of something alive—something watching.
Selene felt it in her bones before she even looked up. The air was thick, metallic, charged with an energy that made her skin prickle. She had been fighting for hours—through mud, through screams, through the endless clash of claw and steel—and yet when she saw the crimson moon hanging low, she stopped. Everyone stopped.
The battlefield was frozen.
Blood dripped in the silence. Smoke curled from dying fires. Somewhere far away, an injured beast moaned, but the sound was swallowed by the oppressive weight pressing down on them all.
Kai's voice was a rasp. "It's starting."
Selene turned to him. His hands were still coated in blood—hers? his? someone else's?—and his eyes, already storm-grey, were darkening to black. "What's starting?" she asked, but she already knew.
"The night the moon bleeds," he said. "The night the gods wake."
Her stomach knotted. "We're not ready."
"Neither are they."
The "they" was obvious—the enemy lines across the ruined valley, the forces of the Ravenscourge still scattered but not broken. They were staring too, their faces pale in the ghostly crimson light, fear uniting friend and foe alike.
Selene's fingers twitched toward her weapon. "We should finish this before—"
The ground cracked.
Not a single crack—a web of them, spreading like lightning through the earth, splitting rock, swallowing corpses. The battlefield itself groaned as if some enormous creature was waking beneath it.
Then came the sound.
A low, ancient rumble, deeper than any thunder, vibrating through their chests until it felt like their hearts were matching its rhythm.
Kai stepped closer to her, his voice barely audible. "Don't run. It will smell fear."
"What will?"
Before he could answer, the earth exploded.
A column of molten light shot into the sky, red as the moon above, blinding in its intensity. The shockwave threw Selene backward, slamming her into Kai's chest. His arms locked around her just as chunks of rock and shards of bone rained down around them.
When she opened her eyes again, she wished she hadn't.
Something stood in the crater.
Something colossal.
It wasn't entirely there—its body shimmered like heat haze, parts fading in and out of sight—but the pieces she could see made her throat close. Muscles like twisted roots, skin streaked with glowing runes, a face that was both human and wolf and something else entirely. And eyes—eyes the color of dying stars.
"The god of chains," Kai whispered. "Xerathos."
Selene couldn't breathe. The air itself seemed to recoil from the thing, leaving a vacuum of silence before it spoke.
Its voice was not sound—it was pressure, a thought forced into her skull.
—WHO DARES WAKE ME?—
The Ravenscourge screamed first, dropping weapons, fleeing into the shadows. Some didn't make it far; Xerathos's gaze fell on them, and they simply… unraveled, like smoke blown away by wind.
Selene's instincts screamed at her to run, but Kai's grip was iron. "Hold," he murmured. "If you break now, it will choose you."
She swallowed. "Choose me for what?"
"To carry its chains."
Her mind flashed back to the dreams she'd been having for weeks—cold iron wrapped around her arms, voices whispering from beneath an endless black sea. She'd thought they were nightmares. Now she wasn't so sure.
Xerathos's gaze swept over the battlefield, lingering on her. The runes across its skin flared brighter. —BLOOD OF THE FIRST HOWL—
Selene stiffened. "It knows me."
"It knows what you are," Kai said. His tone was grim. "And now so do I."
Her breath caught. "Kai—"
"No. Not now. Survive this, then we talk."
The god moved, each step shaking the ground. Its chains trailed behind it—not bound to its wrists but embedded in its very flesh, each link the size of a man's torso. They writhed like living things, coiling and snapping toward anything that moved.
One of those chains lashed toward Selene. She ducked, but it wasn't aiming for her—it wrapped around a Ravenscourge captain and yanked him screaming into the air before slamming him into the earth with enough force to crater it.
Selene's pulse roared in her ears. "We can't fight that."
"We don't," Kai said. "We bind it."
"How?!"
His eyes were on the moon now, calculating. "The blood's the key. Yours."
Her gut turned to ice. "No."
"Yes. You're the last of the Blood Howl line. That's why it's looking at you like that—it remembers your ancestor, the one who bound it last time."
"And you think I can just… do it again?"
"You can if you live long enough to try."
Xerathos roared—an endless, bone-deep bellow that made the moon itself ripple in the sky. The air stank of iron and ozone.
Kai yanked her hand. "Move!"
They ran—not away from the god, but toward the shattered remains of the old temple at the valley's center. The stones were still glowing faintly from the eruption, carved with symbols she recognized from her dreams.
"Tell me you know what to do," she gasped as they skidded to a stop.
"I know enough," he said. Then he sliced his own palm and pressed the blood to one of the symbols. "But this needs more than me."
Selene's mouth was dry. She glanced back—Xerathos was coming, slow but inevitable, the chains dragging trenches in the earth.
She cut her hand. Her blood hit the stone.
The ground screamed.
Light exploded upward, forming a dome over the temple. The god stopped, head tilting, those dead-star eyes narrowing. The chains thrashed harder.
"Now!" Kai shouted.
Selene closed her eyes and reached inward—not for strength, not for courage, but for the thing she'd always kept buried: the part of her that wasn't entirely human.
It woke like fire in her veins.
Her heartbeat doubled, then tripled. Her senses sharpened until she could hear the blood moving through Kai's veins beside her. She opened her eyes—and the world was brighter, every line of magic in the god's form burning in her vision.
She spoke the words from her dreams. They tasted like ash.
The chains shuddered.
Xerathos roared again, the sound pure fury now. —YOU DARE—
"Yes," she snarled. "I dare."
The runes on the temple flared to life. Chains of light shot upward, wrapping around the god's real chains, pulling, tightening. The air burned, every breath like inhaling knives.
Kai gritted his teeth, holding the blood seal steady. "Almost—"
The god's eyes locked on him. A chain whipped forward, piercing the dome, striking his shoulder and lifting him off his feet.
"KAI!" Selene screamed.
The blood seal faltered. The temple's light flickered. Xerathos surged forward.
She didn't think—she dove after the chain, grabbed it with both hands. It burned through her flesh instantly, but she held on.
The fire in her veins roared. Her blood dripped onto the chain, and where it touched, the metal smoked. Xerathos recoiled, more in surprise than pain.
Selene yanked with everything she had—her strength, her rage, her bloodline—and the chain snapped.
The god howled, a sound that made the moon above them shudder.
The runes blazed one final time. The light chains constricted, dragging Xerathos backward into the crater, into the molten glow below. Its voice thundered in her head: —THIS IS NOT OVER—
And then it was gone.
Silence.
Selene collapsed, her hands still smoking. Kai staggered to her side, blood running down his arm.
"You did it," he said, voice ragged.
"No," she whispered, staring at the pulsing red moon. "We bought time. That's all."
Kai followed her gaze—and froze.
The moon was still bleeding.
And far above, in the shadows between the stars, something else was watching.