Kael's POV
One word. "Fight." Then I fell into the dark. Into the beginning of my ruin. Three Years Later, the sky never clears in the wastelands.
Ash falls like snow here, thin and biting, clinging to fur and skin. I don't remember the last time I spoke in a full sentence. Maybe that's a mercy. Words taste like rust now, heavy with blood and regret.
My paws crunch over bone. Not human. Not wolf. Something in between. Like me.
I've become a whisper in the forests that still fear moonlight. A ghost story the pups are told.
Don't stray too far, or the Broken Alpha will find you. They should fear me. I don't even know who I am anymore.
My ribs show through my skin. I've forgotten the warmth of the pack, the rhythm of a voice that once grounded me. Her voice.
Elira. Her name haunts the wind. I hear it when I close my eyes, feel it pulsing through the ache in my chest like a heartbeat I've forgotten how to follow.
Sometimes, I catch her scent. But it always fades. Just smoke. Just grief.
The Moon used to sing to me. Now she stays silent. Watching. Distant. I roam. I starve. I survive. But I don't live.
The storm breaks around midnight. The blood moon stains the sky again, like it did that night.
I find shelter in a cave carved into a jagged cliff. It smells of ash and wet stone.
The fire I manage is pitiful, but it gives light. Enough for the shadows to dance.
I stare into the flame, and my vision begins to blur. No... not blur. Change.
The fire shifts... turns silver. A shape moves within it.
Long hair, glowing eyes. Shackles. A torn dress soaked in moonlight.
"Elira…"
She's there. In the fire. Her lips move. I can't hear the words, but I feel them.
Find me. Save me. I don't remember your name.
"No," I rasp, crawling closer. My hands tremble. "You remember. You have to remember."
The flame swells and then dims. Another figure appears behind her. Cloaked in black, crowned in thorns.
The Moon Goddess? No. She feels wrong. Distant. Cold.
Her voice is wind and blade. "You let her fall. Why would she remember you?"
"You were meant to die."
I scream, lurching toward the fire... It gutters out. The cave goes dark.
Only the scent of her remains, soft and cruel. Lilac and mourning.
She's alive. And she's forgotten me. Dawn barely bleeds across the horizon when they find me.
I hear them before I see them, boots crunching leaves, steel sliding free from scabbards. Their scent is familiar, Pack. but not my pack.
I lurch from the cave mouth, but they're already surrounding me.
"By the stars," one laughs, "I thought he was a myth."
"Look at you, Alpha." Another spits at my feet. "You smell like rot."
"Not Alpha anymore." The third one steps forward... young, scarred, wearing my father's blade at his side. "Just a mutt choking on memories."
I don't fight. I let them beat me. Fists. Boots. One breaks a rib. I barely grunt.
Blood fills my mouth. I spit. They laugh. "I heard he used to talk to the Moon Goddess herself," one sneers.
"Yeah?" The scarred one grins. "Well, now the only thing talking to him is dirt."
Then... A word. Slipped. Quiet. Almost careless. "The Seer Queen's gonna love hearing we found her little ghost."
My heart stops. "What did you say?" My voice is gravelly.
The scarred one leans in. "Oh, now he wants to talk." He grabs my jaw. "You deaf, mutt? The Seer Queen. You know... our blessed ruler?"
He smirks. "Pretty little thing with silver eyes. Real cold. But beautiful. You'd almost think she was born for it."
Elira. The rage ignites like wildfire in my veins.
I howl. It's not clean. It's not proud. It's broken and ragged... but it's mine.
I break one's nose with a headbutt, twist out of the second's grip. My claws find ribs. Throats.
I don't fight clean. I don't fight fair. I fight like a ghost with something to live for.
Blood sprays across snow as I tear from the circle and vanish into the trees. I run until my lungs are on fire and my legs nearly buckle beneath me.
Somewhere, wolves howl... searching, but they won't find me.
I crest the ridge, and I stop. The wind changes. It carries her scent.
Not imagined. Not faded. Real. Elira. Alive, but colder. Older.
Changed, and then... like frost on bone...
I know.
She doesn't remember me. "She's alive," I whisper, breathless. "But she doesn't remember me."
The words echo, carried on the wind like a curse... and a prayer.
I drop to my knees, the weight of it all crashing into my spine like a blow. The wind claws at me, biting through the filthy remnants of my clothes. My claws sink into the frozen dirt. She's breathing somewhere under this damned sky… and her soul no longer knows mine.
The bond... our bond, hadn't just frayed. It had been replaced.
I can feel it now, like a ghost lodged in my chest. Where her presence used to burn like the pulse of the moon, now there's only cold. Void. Someone else stands in the space where I once belonged.
I want to scream. To shift. To run until my paws bleed, but I can't... not fully. The curse still rots inside me, a snarl of broken divinity tangled with mortal pain. My wolf form won't come cleanly anymore.
My limbs warp halfway through, bones popping, ribs stretching, but never completing. It's agony every time I try. So I stay like this... half-man, half-wolf, all ruin.
I close my eyes and force the pain down. Force clarity up.
"She's a queen now," I murmur. "The Seer Queen."
They crowned her. Or worse… controlled her.
The image from the fire surges behind my eyelids... Elira, in chains. Not golden and divine like a ruler. Shackles. Dark ones. Her eyes weren't cold because she'd forgotten me. They were cold because something made her forget. Or forced her to choose forgetting. The pain in my chest sharpens to a blade.
They twisted her. The very ones who ripped her from my arms three years ago now parade her like a holy symbol, and she doesn't even know what they took from her.
I rise, unsteady. But something is different now. The world isn't entirely gray. The hopeless fog that has strangled me for three years begins to thin.
Hope.
A curse and a weapon, both. I stagger toward the edge of the ridge. The scent is still strong… lilac and cold fire. It rides the breeze like a thread meant to pull me forward.
Then I see it.
In the distance. A silver banner unfurling in the sky. A massive keep carved into the mountain's edge, its towers glowing with runes that pulse with magic I don't recognize. Guard patrols shift like clockwork ants below. At the heart of it, a spire taller than the rest, crimson flags flapping beneath the moonlight.
That's where they keep her. Or that's where she rules. I don't know which is worse. My knees shake. I've been alone too long. Feral. Hunted. Weak, but something sparks beneath my ribs again. Not just pain this time.
Purpose. She's alive, and I'm going to find her. I'll make her remember me. Or burn down the world trying.