"Alaric, please...please don't do this. We are family. Please." Gabriel's voice, usually a commanding rumble that filled the Alpha's hall, now trembled like a reed in a winter wind, barely audible above the crackling hearth. His eyes, the color of twilight skies, pleaded with a desperation he rarely showed, fixed on the man who held a gleaming blade against his throat.
Alaric's laughter was a soft, terrible sound that scraped against the ancient stones of the keep. "Family?" he echoed, the word cutting the air as if it were the very sword he held. He stepped closer, the flat of the cold, dark steel pressing against Gabriel's jugular. "You have the nerve to call me brother after you took everything from me? Do you think I forgot how they favored you? How their faces softened, how they smiled when they put that wretched crown on your head?" His voice tightened, edged with a bitterness that curdled the air. "No. This throne was mine by blood, Gabriel. I am the first son of this family. I was meant to sit on that throne. But you…." His words shredded whatever fragile peace had ever lingered in the hall, echoing the violent fury in his silver eyes. "You schemed, you connived, you charmed your way into what was rightfully mine. And now… now I'm going to kill you, and everything you love."
Gabriel swallowed hard, the sound a dry rasp in his constricted throat. The cold pressure of the blade against his skin was a stark reminder of his mortality, a concept he, as Alpha, had rarely contemplated. "I never wanted this," he said, and it was the strangest, most honest thing he had ever uttered. His voice, though still strained, held a profound sincerity. "The throne, the power, i never wanted any of it. Our parents… they were in pain when they made that choice. I was in pain too Alaric, burdened by a destiny I hadn't chosen. I never asked for their favor, Alaric, only for their love."
Alaric's face contorted, not with mercy, but with a chilling, self-righteous fury that made him appear monstrous in the flickering torchlight. His features, so similar to Gabriel's, were twisted by a long-held resentment that burned brighter than any flame. He leaned forward until their faces were inches apart, his breath a cold puff against Gabriel's cheek. "You know what, Alpha Gabriel?" he whispered, his voice a venomous hiss, "I have a little secret."
Gabriel's eyes widened, a flicker of confusion battling with a desperate, impossible spark of hope. "What...what are you talking about?, what secret?" His brow furrowed, trying to piece together Alaric's cryptic words.
Alaric's whisper fell like poison into Gabriel's ear, a secret shared with malicious glee. "I killed our parents," he said, the confession delivered with an unnerving calm. "And I am going to do the same to you for stealing what was mine, for stealing my birthright."
Gabriel's protest died in a strangled sound, a gurgle of horror and disbelief. "You… what? You monster." The words were a plea and an accusation wrapped together, a desperate attempt to appeal to a humanity that Alaric had long since shed. His body tensed, a desperate, futile struggle against the inevitable.
"Shh, shh, Gabriel," Alaric hissed, a sickeningly tender sound. In the sudden, profound silence, the blade slid. It was quick, efficient, a practiced movement. The light vanished from Gabriel's eyes as if someone had snuffed a candle, taking with it the last vestiges of his life. His knees buckled, and then Gabriel crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut, his body a heavy weight falling to the cold, unforgiving stone. The sound of his corpse hitting the floor was final, an obscene punctuation mark in the quiet, shadowed hall. A metallic tang, the unmistakable scent of fresh blood, bloomed in the air.
Beyond the chamber, small, frantic noises began to rise— a woman's cry, the distant stench of smoke curling in from the servant's quarters, the panicked scattering of loyal retainers. Alaric moved with a cold, almost surgical efficiency, his mind already set on completing his bloody purge. He extinguished one life, then one more: Gabriel's wife, who had rushed in, their faces streaked with tears and terror, only to be silenced as easily and brutally as the Alpha himself. Their blood, a dark crimson against the grey flagstones, spread outwards, a stark, horrifying stain that sent a metallic twinge into Dominic's small, innocent, beating heart.
"Daddy! Mummy!" Dominic screamed. "Uncle why did you kill mommy and daddy? You're a bad uncle, very bad uncle Dominic said with tears in his eyes, he was only four and he has lost his both parents and not only that he saw his favorite uncle kill his parents. He reached for them—his father's once-strong hand, his mother's now-cold cheek and found only empty air, a vast, echoing void where love had once resided.
"Take him," Alaric ordered, his voice devoid of emotion as he addressed the hulking men who now stood like shadows in the hall, their faces grim. "Take the boy to the river."
The men moved like an incoming tide, relentless and uncaring. Hands that had once stoked his hair now hauled him roughly out of the room, and the world tilted violently, losing all sense of proportion. Torchlight became a smeared, sickening blur of color. The familiar walls of his home blurred into a confusing kaleidoscope of smells—smoke, iron, and the acrid tang of fear. Dominic's cries scratched at his throat until his small lungs burned, raw and aching. They dragged him down spiral steps, each descent a further fall from grace, a plummet from the edge of his known world, where the wind hissed from the river below like a hungry, waiting mouth.
At the riverbank, the moon hung low and swollen, a full, spectral eye watching the unfolding scene with detached silver light. The men forced Dominic out across slick, moss-covered stones, the river's relentless sound rising around them, whispering old, secret songs that the child, in his terror, could not comprehend. He stamped his feet, trying to find purchase, his small hands scrabbling desperately at anything that promised safety, anything to anchor himself. A heavy boot heel pressed into his tiny chest, forcing the air from his lungs. Alaric's voice, near and unnervingly calm, sliced through the rising panic: "Hold him steady."
Dominic spat out whatever brave, defiant words he had left, his voice cracking with the effort. "Don't…please I beg you uncle" he begged, his tiny voice breaking, barely a whisper against the roar of the water. The words dissolved into choked sobs, his breath catching painfully.
"Silence the boy," one man barked, his voice coarse and impatient.
They carried him, brutal and unfeeling as a sack of grain, and forced him down toward the river's icy embrace. Cold water splashed his ankles, then his knees. He gasped, a short, sharp intake of breath, and the world became a bright, blinding flare of wet, of reflected moonlight dancing on the dark surface. Then, the boot on his chest pushed harder, a crushing weight. Strong, unyielding hands shoved his shoulders back. Someone yanked his arms, twisting them painfully, so that he could not brace himself, could not fight back. Dominic's face met the river first—then the frigid, swallowing water took him whole.
It was not sudden, not mercifully quick like the stories. It was slow, a long, agonizing drowning where sound was a rubber band snapping at his ears, choking him, and his small body, which had been promised warmth and safety, was now only cold, colder than he had ever imagined. Bubbles, frantic and useless, rose to the surface and burst, reflecting the cruel moonlight. The river had no mercy; it took and it took, ceaselessly. Dominic's lungs burned and burned, a fire that consumed him from the inside out. He reached up with young, useless hands, desperate for any light, any glimpse of the world above—and the river was a vast, cold mouth that would not release him.
Memories, vivid and heartbreaking, came in flashes. His mother's laugh, like the chime of silver bells. The way his father taught him to skip stones across the pond, his strong hand guiding Dominic's. The soft, lingering press of a kiss on his forehead that had smelled of lavender and woodsmoke.
His vision began to smear, like wet paint blurring on a canvas. The world spun, the riverbed rotating beneath him. The distant torchlight was now just a distant, alien glow. But then, a presence—like warmth seeping in under a heavy winter quilt—touched the inside of his chest. Dominic blinked, and for a fleeting moment, the suffocating water seemed to recede, making room. A sound thrummed, deep and resonant not from the brutal world of stone and water, but from somewhere else, somewhere ancient. It was a chorus like a long, low howl that filled his bones with echoing light. It was not meaningless. It was the sound of something vast, something primordial, answering his silent plea. His small chest heaved, a breath he hadn't realized he was taking, and he…..
There was a brightness, a shimmering seam opening in the fabric of the night. Dominic, who had only ever known the human warmth of his parents, reached toward it with the simple, fierce instinct of a child wanting to go home, wanting refuge. The water was still cold, burning in his lungs, but the brightness was a hand, warm and impossibly real, that took him and did not let go. In that impossible place, suspended between breath and death, he felt a colossal presence fold around him like a cloak—a presence ancient and huge, like the very memory of wolves, of moonlight, of primal forests. It breathed on him, a whisper of wind and earth. It called him by name, not with words, but with an intrinsic knowing that echoed in his very soul.
"Dominic," the presence said, though it was not a voice in the human sense. It had no discernible shape, and yet something like a massive, unseen paw pressed gently against his ribs, and a profound, comforting warmth unfurled within him.
There, halfway between the world of breath and the other, shadowy place beyond, Dominic's eyes opened—too wide, too knowing. For a second, he did not belong to the keep, to the human world, at all. The light in them was not merely the moon's reflection, but something deeper, something ancient and untamed. He was not alone.
When they finally dragged him up from the river, his small body limp and cold, the men truly believed he was dead. They wrapped his little frame in a coarse blanket and dropped him unceremoniously into the river and let him drown.
Dominic's eyes had opened—and in them shone a pale, impossible light, a fierce, untamed thing that would not be easily named, a legacy from a world unseen. He was four years old, and he had crossed a threshold no human should, forged by the very forces that had sought to destroy him.