I write this by firelight.
Not candle. Not lamp.
Fire — real fire, fed with driftwood and the last of the wolf-bone.
It crackles like old joints. Like laughter long forgotten.
Outside, the ice groans.
Not the sharp snap of breaking, but the deep, wet sigh of something ancient giving up.
The glacier is opening.
The bones beneath are rising.
And the wind—
the wind carries a sound I haven't heard in eighty winters.
A howl.
Not from a beast.
From the earth itself.
I am the last.
Not of my blood, though that is thin enough.
But of those who remembered.
Who kept the skin-tales.
Who sang the Oath in the dark so the Wolf would know it was not alone.
They called us liars.
Then fools.
Then ghosts.
Now, perhaps, prophets.
But prophecies are useless when no one is left to hear them.
Still.
I write.
Because once, a Beta placed her hand on an Alpha's chest and said, "You're trembling."
And he said, "I've been waiting for you since the first snow."
And that moment—small, quiet, unrecorded—
was the beginning of everything.
Love is not the end of the story.
It is the first breath.
And we forgot that.
We built cities and called them progress.
We silenced the wild and called it peace.
We broke the Bloodlines and called it freedom.
But the Wolf was not in the fang.
It was in the space between breaths.
In the warmth of a palm against a fevered neck.
In the way a man, half-mad with the stir, would look at one woman and say, "Come back,"
not as a command—
but as a plea.
I held the last of them as she died.
Her name was Elsi.
She was Beta.
She had no children.
No one to carry her voice.
But when the end came, she did not cry.
She sang.
In the old tongue.
The one with no letters, only breath and bone.
And when she was gone, I took the knife and carved the final line of the Oath into her thigh bone:
"The wolf did not abandon us.
We forgot how to listen."
Now the world is sick.
The air is thick with the breath of machines.
The rivers run with poison.
The young do not dream.
And the ones with the Blood—
they feel it now.
A pull.
A hunger.
A memory under the skin.
They do not know what it is.
Only that when the wind rises from the north,
their bones ache.
Their teeth feel too sharp.
And they wake in the night,
sweating,
whispering a name they've never known.
The Blood is waking.
Not because of moons or stars or fate.
Because the world is dying.
And the wild remembers.
I do not know who will find this.
Perhaps no one.
Perhaps it will burn with me.
But if you are reading this—
if your hands are warm and your heart beats too hard when a stranger looks at you too long—
then listen:
It does not begin with war.
Not with fire.
Not with a king.
It begins with a touch.
A breath.
A woman saying, "I'm not afraid of you,"
and meaning it.
It begins with an Alpha who does not roar—
but kneels.
And it ends—
not with the last howl—
but with the first word spoken after the silence.
Love.
Burn this after you read it.
Or pass it on.
But do not forget:
The wolf was never the monster.
It was the witness.
And it saw everything.
— Carved on birch bark, found beneath permafrost near Kvitøya, Svalbard.
Ink: lichen, blood, soot.
Hand: unverified.
Date: unknown.