Eighteen years before the chains.
The screams started before the wolves howled.
Moonkeep trembled.
Wind slammed the stone walls like fists, each gust colder than the last. Outside, the forest writhed — as if the trees themselves knew what was coming. Leaves bled red beneath a sky bruised with unnatural clouds. Thunder stalked the high towers, crawling down the spires in silver streaks of fury.
Inside, the Queen of Wolves was dying.
"I said hold her still!" the midwife barked, sweat pouring into her eyes.
Four werewolves struggled to pin the queen's shifting form to the birthing slab. Her claws had already torn through one healer's throat. Her eyes — once pale gold — had turned near white, flickering with otherworldly fire.
She thrashed, fangs bared, snarling through clenched teeth.
"She's not shifting," growled one of the guards. "It's not the wolf. It's the blood. Something's wrong with the blood."
"Of course something's wrong," muttered the midwife, voice cracking. "She's giving birth to hybrids."
The word hung in the air like rot.
At the edge of the chamber, a man watched. His hands trembled. Not from fear — but from the weight of what he was about to lose.
King Everen stood wrapped in silence, his face pale, unreadable. Vampire-born royalty. Strong. Stoic. Broken.
His mate was dying. And the kingdom didn't know it yet.
"Is she conscious?" he asked hoarsely.
The midwife looked back. "She's fighting it. But the magic's flaring. We can't keep her steady."
The queen screamed again. The sound was raw. Not a wolf. Not a vampire. Something older. Something ripped from between worlds.
Lightning struck the tower above. A crack split the wall. Dust rained down in soft clouds, coating the queen's matted silver hair.
The air shifted.
Then came the whisper.
Soft. Inhuman.
"…one lives… one falls…"
The queen's eyes snapped open.
They weren't hers anymore.
"Get the child out!" Everen roared, rushing forward.
"No," the queen gasped, voice thick with blood. "No, they mustn't—"
She convulsed, bones snapping beneath her skin.
The guards backed away.
The scent of blood hit the room like a slap.
"She's tearing!" shouted the midwife. "Gods, she's tearing from the inside!"
"No—no—I feel them—" the queen rasped, lifting her head. "—I feel both."
"Both?" Everen choked.
Twins.
She had hidden it. Even from him. No one knew. The Queen of Wolves had hidden her second child from every seer and sage and shifter.
But not from fate.
The chamber went still.
Then, from between her thighs, came a cry.
Shrill. Piercing. New.
The midwife's trembling hands held up a blood-slick infant. A girl.
"Vampire eyes," she whispered.
The child screamed again, louder.
And in that moment… the queen stopped moving.
Everen saw the breath leave her. Just once. A long, slow exhale. Like she'd been holding onto the world and wants to let go.
"No," he breathed, stumbling forward. "No no no—"
"Wait," the midwife said sharply.
Another scream. Smaller. Weaker.
A second child emerged. A twin. Pale, nearly lifeless.
The guards stepped back.
Two daughters.
One cried like thunder. The other barely breathed.
The moon outside turned red.
The castle broke open with rage.
A flash of fire. A roar of claws. The vampires had arrived.
Not at the gates — inside the walls. Hidden. Waiting.
The plan had been in motion long before the queen labored.
"By this blood, may curse be upon those who betray me," the Queen of Wolves whispered, her voice a slow tremor slipping between cracked lips, thick with blood and betrayal.
The earth was cold beneath her, greedy for warmth, drinking from the wound in her side —wicked, wrong, sacred only to traitors. Her fingers twitched against the birthing slab, nails clawing into the frozen ground as if to leave a mark, a memory, something the gods could not erase.
Above her, the red moon watched—distant, uncaring. Around her, shadows moved, not of wolves, not of kin. Just whispers now. She could not hear them clearly.
The curse was not spoken in anger. No. It was something colder. Something older. It came from marrow, not mouth. It spilled with her blood, seeping into roots, into the bones beneath the forest, into the breath of every beast that once called her Luna.
She tried to lift her head. She didn't. The weight of death was not heavy. It was final.
Her breath dragged once. Then again. Shallower. Quieter. Like a candle that remembered it once fought wind, but now bowed to it.
Her eyes, still open, reflected the sky.
The Queen of Wolves died cursing the bloodlines of her betrayers, and the trees around her trembled. Not from wind—but from what they now carried.
"Protect the children!" Everen barked, his vampire shifting half already surfacing.
But it was too late.
The shadows moved.
The midwife's neck snapped with a flick.
A cloaked figure stepped over her body and seized the quiet twin, vanishing into smoke.
"No!" Everen charged, too slow, too blind.
The crying child — the louder one — remained.
The silence in the chamber stretched like bone.
Everen scooped the surviving child into his arms. She blinked up at him, her eyes were violet with slashes of black around the iris.
"You were supposed to save us," he whispered.
His wolf howled.
Later, when the fires burned low and the vampires fled with half the royal court dead, Everen stood before the throne and did not sit.
"Bury the queen in secret," he told the last of the Thorne pack. "Say she died of illness."
"And the child?" Lyric Dane asked, voice sharp from where she nursed a broken arm.
He didn't look at her. "The people can't know."
"She's the heir."
"She's the reason the queen's dead."
"That's not true."
"It doesn't matter."
He turned, clutching the infant. "Lock her beneath the estate. Seal the doors. Feed her just enough to survive."
"Would you bury your daughter alive?"
He looked at Lyric. His eyes were hollow.
"The blood running in her veins is old and sacred to be among wolves, I will bury her to keep her alive."
The chains were forged from silver and blessed by blood priests.
The door is sealed in stone.
Only a few knew the truth. And even fewer lived long enough to speak it.
As the moon darkened over Moonkeep, and the girl with violet with slashes of black around the iris
screamed in the dark…
…shadows across the continent whispered of a throne broken.
And a queen who never got to rule.
Eighteen years passed.
The child did not die.
But she did forget.
Who she was.
Where she came from.
And the blood that still waited inside her to burn.