~1,700 words
The seal slept like a bruise: still warm, tender around the edges, and not to be prodded. The stone dais hummed with a faint, low tone that vibrated through bone; runes glowed in sleepy blue, as if the heart of the mountain itself had been lulled. Dust drifted down in lazy columns. The Devourer's echoed howls faded into something like angered distance.
Ronan stayed beside Aria as if the ground under them might shift without warning; he did not trust stillness. The bond between them climbed and fell in gentle waves now, a living rhythm they shared without speech. When she breathed hard he breathed for her; when she listened to a memory he leaned in and held the present around her.
"I don't like the sound of it," the stranger muttered, kneeling to examine the new pattern etched into the heartstone. His fingers traced the fresh grooves with reverence and fear. "It held for a while because she fed it. But one feeding does not make a permanent ward. The Devourer will be cunning. It will seek a way to unbind what we have bound."
Aria pushed herself up slowly. Every movement left a sheen of moonlight on her skin; the glow didn't vanish but had folded into something quieter, like a sleeping ember. She wrapped both arms around her midriff as if to keep the ember in.
"How far did it push when it reached for me?" she asked. Her voice was softer than anyone hearing her might expect after what she'd done. A kind of modest fear sat beneath the strength.
"It felt you," the stranger said. "Farther than I've ever felt anything feel another. Not merely a body or an appetite — it tasted your past, your blood, the shadow-thread you carry. It recognized kinship and fear. It used the idea of your abandonment to pry the bond. If not for Ronan and the seal…" He let the caution hang unsaid.
Ronan tightened his jaw. "Elias bought us that chance."
The name landed hard. In the hush that followed, Aria's fingers found the place on Ronan's shoulder where he had gripped her the night Elias had pinned himself down. A small smear of old blood, now dried, traced like a tragic memento.
"He chose his end," she said quietly. "He made himself keep the shadow from reaching us."
Ronan had not cried for Elias yet — his grief came in other shapes: clenched fists, the way he checked corners before stepping, the way he touched Aria's forehead whenever she shivered. Now, with her hand on his skin, the grief softened into a promise. "We'll honor him," he said. "We finish this, we end what he started."
The stranger looked up from the dais, his face gaunt under the hooded robe. "There are old songs about the Devourer," he said. "Old names for it—things meant to keep children inside their beds. But in those songs there is also a place. A place the First Luna used to call Luna's Cradle. It's a hollow where the moonlight pools, a ridge of carved stone that reflects the moon. The Devourer hates reflected light — it cannot hold form when faced with its opposite. You fed the heartstone; the seal held by drawing from you. But to finish it, we need more than a single human heart."
Aria's eyebrows pulled down. "A place that reflects the moon? Where is it?"
The stranger's lips thinned. "Across the northern pass, above the Frostweald. There is a broken shrine — the last place where the First Luna walked in flesh. It once rendered the moon into a blade; now it renders light into a mirror. If we can draw the Devourer there and force it to pass into a field of reflected moonlight, we might shatter it."
Ronan's laugh was a sharp, startled thing. "We take a crippled girl with molten power and we drag an ancient shadow across frozen passes? Sounds like a plan that will get all of us killed."
"Then we don't give it the chance," Aria said. Her voice didn't tremble. It had the quiet of someone who had been to the edge of something and refused to step over. "We don't wait for it to come find us. We go there first and prepare."
The stranger's eyes softened. "You were not built for waiting."
They left the dais reluctantly. The heartstone's hum fell behind them like a memory. The cavern beyond the seal opened into a narrower tunnel, hewn by hands long gone, slick with frost and lined with old glyphs that hinted at protective rites no human tongue still spoke.
The descent took them to the mountain's seam. Outside, the world smelled of iron and snow. They climbed the last stretch onto a jagged ledge that looked out over a valley of frozen trees and the sharp teeth of the northern peaks.
Ronan crouched on the cliff's lip like a hunting wolf. Snow lashed at their shoulders. Below, the Frostweald spread like a white sea, restless and whispering. The sky overhead had not yet turned night; the moon was a waning sliver, pale and cold.
"We can't travel fast without drawing attention," the stranger said. "But the Devourer will not strike openly until it is stronger. It will test the wards; it will send shades. We must move at dusk if we want to reach Luna's Cradle before it truly awakens."
Aria wrapped her cloak around her shoulders, the fabric smelling faintly of iron and rune-smoke. She shifted where she stood, a small ripple of silver beneath the skin that was no show: her power adjusted its boundary to the cold.
"You'll come with us," Ronan said abruptly, looking at the stranger. "Can you guide us there?"
The stranger nodded. "I have walked those ridges seeking remnants of Moonborn lore. I can recall the path. But you will need more than me. The shrine's mirror slabs must be repaired — they are carved from a stone that responds to blood and moon. The First Luna taught how to tend them; the knowledge survives in shattered fragments across three places." He counted them like beads. "A shard at the White Hollow, another in the Vaults of Veyr, and an iron-bound relic that rests with the Silverborn in the high passes."
Aria hesitated. "We go to three places for shards… we split ourselves? That's suicide."
"We do not split," Ronan insisted. "We prioritize. We take the shortest route to Luna's Cradle while a small party retrieves a fragment. Or we rally the pack to drive off the smaller shades while we search the Vaults. We do not wander like lost lambs; we move with purpose."
He met her eyes. "I will not leave you."
She closed her mouth, swallowing hard. There was a tremor of gratitude and fear. "Then we take the passes together. We find allies when we can. We buy time, and we make Luna's Cradle into the Devourer's grave."
They made a plan under the waning moon. They would move south and east to the old road that led across the ridge. The stranger would send word to a contact in the Frostweald — a woman who kept the markers of the Moonborn in a private grove. If the woman could be persuaded, they could rally whispers of help: trackers, a smith whose iron sang with runes, an old Silverborn who owed the stranger a debt.
Ronan's mind kept returning to practical things: shelter, food, safe hiding places on the route, the weight of a healed wound. Aria wanted maps and lore and the rhythm of the lineup of power. The stranger catalogued the relics they would need. The mountains around them exhaled slowly as if listening.
When the time for leaving came, the valley was a sheet of moon-slick. They moved with the cautious speed of those who kept their ears open for trouble. Small shadows followed them — a testing party the Devourer sent to taste their will. Ronan fought with raw, brutal efficiency; Aria wove light like a net. Each shade that fell stitched them closer together, a bandage of shared danger.
At dusk they came to a cluster of pines where the Frostweald opened into a narrow trail. Hidden beneath low branches was a signpost, half-buried in ice. Runic notches lay carved into it — a marker left by the First Luna's people. The stranger knelt and traced the lines with reverent fingers. "We're on the path," he breathed. "But the way is old and angry."
That night they camped in the lee of a fallen stone, a small ring of fire warded with Aria's light and the stranger's murmurs. They ate dry meat and stale bread and the kind of conversation that keeps fear at bay: stories of small kindnesses, of past foolishnesses, of quiet towns that smelled of cinnamon and saffron in summers far away. Ronan teased Aria about the wrong way she'd wrapped a cloak, and she punched him, not hard, her fingers warmed by the memory of his hand. It was a fragile, human moment — proof that even in the valley's stillness there could be laughter.
At the edge of sleep, Aria told him, almost to herself, "When this is done—if it is done—will you stay? With me? Not as an Alpha protecting a charge, but as—"
Ronan's face shifted into something soft and horrifyingly hopeful. He didn't answer immediately. He simply drew her close and held her like he already had the answer baked into his bones.
"I will stay," he said at last. "I will stay."
The moon dipped behind the jagged teeth of the pass, and for a few ragged hours the world seemed to breathe, preparing for the next move. The Devourer was not a creature of hurry; it was a patient thing that built hunger over centuries. But patience was not on their side. They had time bought with blood and luck, and that time would be the sword they forged in the coming days.
In the morning they would break into smaller parties or gather more allies. They would find the broken shards and mend a mirror strong enough to blind a god. They would teach the world that love could be an armor as much as metal — that promises could be the hinge of fate.
And somewhere inside the mountain, the Devourer turned and bared its teeth once more. It would come for them, yes. But when it did, it would find its meal hard to reach — and the hunters harder than it imagined.