The silence that followed the second assault was not peace. It was the brittle quiet that comes when the world is too tired to scream.
Smoke still clung to the gorge. It hung heavy over the barricade, thick with the stench of burned flesh and blood. Wolves padded the length of the wall, muzzles dark and dripping, some limping but refusing to show weakness. The humans slumped against the timber, reloading by rote, hands trembling too much for precision. Fae moved quietly among them, their hands glowing faint green as they bound gashes and pressed calm into frayed nerves.
Elara leaned hard against the wood, her chest rising and falling like bellows. Her fingers were raw from clenching her weapon. The silver inside her wouldn't settle — it prowled beneath her skin, restless, tugged ever upward by the swollen moon above. She wanted to breathe, to let her legs buckle, but her heart beat too fast, like a drum warning her that the night wasn't done.
It wasn't.
From the gorge below came a sound like a throat clearing — claws scraping rock, a growl building in dozens of ruined throats. The ferals were gathering again.
Amber spat a line of blood into the dirt, wiped her mouth, and straightened her back. "They're not stopping," she said, voice flat and cold. "They'll keep coming until the moon burns them out."
Garrett cracked his knuckles, the sound like snapping bone. "Then we hold until it does."
On the centre beam of the barricade, Riven stood like a statue. His golden aura simmered faint under his skin, banked fire that threatened to break free. He hadn't shifted, not yet. He didn't need to. Wolves' eyes followed him like iron filings to a magnet, their ragged breathing steadying simply because he was there.
"This is the hinge," the Alpha said, his voice low but carrying like thunder. "Hold, or break."
Every wolf stiffened. Every human scrambled into place, fear and exhaustion forgotten in the face of his authority. Elara felt his words settle into her bones, a weight and a promise.
And then the gorge broke.
The ferals poured out.
Dozens, maybe hundreds, a frothing tide of twisted flesh. They clambered over the bodies of their own dead, turning corpses into ladders, using snapped arms and broken backs as footholds. The sickly yellow of their eyes burned in the torchlight. Their mouths foamed. They weren't clever — but hunger was enough.
They slammed into the timber. The impact shook the whole structure, dust sifting down. Wolves howled and met them, snapping teeth through gaps. Humans loosed bolts and bullets, the air snapping with the twang of strings and the crack of rifles.
But the ferals didn't care. They hurled themselves forward, clawing and tearing, bodies piling, snarls drowning out thought. The barricade groaned. Splinters sprayed.
"Left flank!" Amber's voice tore through the noise.
Elara's head whipped round. A post had split down the centre. The gap widened with each slam of clawed bodies. Fingers hooked through, grasping for flesh. Wolves lunged, snapping them off, but there were too many.
Garrett shifted mid-stride, his massive wolf form slamming into the breach. He braced his shoulders against the timber, snarling as claws raked his flanks. Luke darted in beside him, smaller but ferocious, blood already soaking his side. Amber danced at their heels, blades flashing silver arcs, severing arms that forced through.
But it wasn't enough. The hole gaped wider. Ferals forced their way through, tumbling onto the platform, jaws snapping.
Humans faltered. Some stumbled back. One dropped his bow entirely, hands frozen. A woman on a platform vomited and kept firing with a grim mouth. Fear spread like fire in dry grass.
And then, up the bare face of the cliff, shapes moved — small, lithe, terrible. The ferals had found another route. Where the gorge's lip gave them a blind edge, they sent climbers, men and women slick with desperation, their fingers seeking holds. If they reached the top, they could come down from behind — from the high ground where tarps and stores sheltered the village.
Kara's shout cut across the din. "Cliff climbers! They're going up the face!"
For a heartless second the line held its breath. The cliff face was a nightmare of handholds and loose stones; to climb it in daylight was folly. To climb it now, under moonlight and with beasts below, was madness — unless you were desperate enough not to care what the word meant.
Then the night cracked with the noise of wings.
A clutch of shifters—those who had once been bound with birds—came over the lip. They flexed open like living sails: shoulders narrowed, backs arched, limbs rearranging into feathered planes and taloned fists. They didn't ride up from the darkness like ghosts; they broke through it, bright-feathered and lethal. Their wings beat the air into a pressure that smelled of rain and iron.
They were not many, three or four, but they were precise.
The winged shifters dived. Talons flashed, catching in silk and skin. A climber lost his grip as a talon hooked an arm and dragged him backward; he tumbled, rock scrabbling for purchase, and a hawk-shifter's beak found the back of his skull with a sick, clean snap. Another was snagged by the thigh, ripped off the face like a rag. A woman halfway up turned, saw the shadow wheeling, and her scream was cut short as wings wrapped around her and dropped her into the black without ceremony.
The air filled with the sound of tearing and the smell of old feathers and newly broken bones. The cliff climbers were beaten back not by the line below but by the sky above. Where the ferals had hoped for surprise, they found a storm.
Elise's arrows rose to meet the falling bodies in mid-air; one lit the night with a clean, small flare as it struck. Kara's bolts flew at the wings as if to clip flight itself. Clint, grinning with the lunacy of survival, swung an axe at a falling man and connected, sending him spinning into dust and silence.
Torvee's hand clamped Jonah's jaw without looking — a firm hold so the boy couldn't shriek or cheer. Jonah watched with his mouth open, the snake in him flicking a tongue of sensation. Torvee didn't trust his grin.
The winged shifters wheeled, talons hungry, and then rose up along a thermal that no one had expected to find in the cliff's mouth. They vanished into a slit of moonlight as if the night had swallowed its own knives.
The cliff was no longer a threat. The fire lifted, for now, from that side.
But down at the breach the tide kept pounding.
Humans tried to hold. One man managed to shove his way past the first cluster of ferals onto the platform and then froze as a feral's fingers closed across his throat. A wolf flipped, snarling, knocked the screens of clawed hands back. The line shivered, but it did not break.
Elara felt the fear like a hot wind moving along her spine. She could see the hands trembling, the blind panic in the unblooded, the way a man's face thinned to tackle or to flight. She did not want to watch them break.
"Stand!" she bellowed.
The word shredded the air. Silver spilled from her like breath from a bellows and ran along the line, through fur, into bone, into tendon. It braided into the wolves' muscles and the men's resolve. It steadied fingers that had been loosening on weapon hafts. It set a rhythm in chests.
Clint's axe found purchase with preternatural certainty. Elise sang a string of perfect shots. Kara's fox-quick eyes found every climber that still had a toe to hold on. The man who had dropped his bow at the first impact snatched it up and made his next arrow count.
Garrett roared — a sound like rock falling — and slammed his wolf-form into the hole, a living wedge. Luke, only nineteen and bleeding, bit down on pain and answered with a savagery that surprised even him. Amber's knives were steel ghosts, rising and falling.
The ferals faltered. Confusion threaded their ranks. Their shrieks turned to frantic cries. Some turned on one another in a blind hunger that made them useless as a fighting force; others slid back into the gorge in clusters, licking wounds.
Above, Kara breathed once and said, "Cliff's clear." Elise nodded and hoisted a fletched bolt into the body of a climber who'd tried to hide behind a ledge. Clint spat a gob of blood and grinned his mad, wonderful grin, and the sound cut the air with a joy that had nothing to do with life's comforts.
Torvee's hand never left Jonah's arm. The boy's eyes had gone that other color again—bright, reptile-slim. Torvee felt Pride like a blade, and the fierceness of a mother and a warrior both.
The relief was short-lived.
A massive feral, larger than the rest, slammed into the breach. It was a nightmare black-and-scarred thing, nostrils flaring, a body that seemed to have been stitched together of several beasts. It hit with the force of a boulder. Garrett staggered under the blow. Luke went down, rage turning to a raw, rattling cough as blood flooded his mouth. Amber's knives found cartilage and were pulled free slick with gore.
The timber shuddered. Cracks ran like white veins.
Elara's stomach dropped. She looked at the Alpha — at Riven, bristling with controlled fury — and then felt the silver like a living thing rising in her.
She did not think. She did not measure. She let the silver out.
This time it surged like a tide. It poured over the defenders: wolves, fae, men, the whole braided line. It was not merely courage. It was strength, a sharpening of sinew and bone. The silver braided through muscles and mind; it was not magic that made a man's arm stronger so much as a truth settling—you will not break.
Garrett roared, found the feral's throat, and crushed it with a sound that made everyone flinch. Luke dragged himself up by sheer will and drove his knife in with both hands. Amber's blades sank with surgeon's precision. Clint screamed his hell-laugh and heaved once, breaking the beast's shoulder like twig.
The massive feral faltered, then fell. Its body thudded, splinters flying from the timber where it hit. The other ferals around it stuttered, their frenzy broken as if a hand had been slapped across their mouths. One by one they retreated, slipping back into the gorge like a tide pulling away from a beach that refused them.
Silence fell. Not peace, but absence — the tired kind that comes when a hard thing has been done.
Bodies lay in grotesque piles. Wolves panted, tongues lolling, fur smeared red. Humans sagged against the barricade, some vomiting, others staring like sleepwalkers. The fae knelt, hands humming with green light as they dragged life back to fragile places.
Elara sank down, back on timber, knees trembling. The silver in her veins faded to a faint hum. Her whole body smelled of smoke and blood and something metallic. She could barely breathe.
Riven came down from his beam like a god stepping off a plinth. He looked at her as if seeing a thing he'd half-feared and half-hoped for. Awe showed on his face — not pity, not worship, but the sharp recognition of a weapon unexpectedly found.
"You held the centre," he said, words soft but carrying. "Without you, it would have broken."
Elara swallowed. "I… I didn't mean to—"
Riven's mouth tipped in the barest semblance of a smile. He turned and addressed the surviving line, his voice steeling itself for what must be said. "This next wave," he said — and every head lifted, listening — "decides whether we live or die here."
Below them, the gorge rumbled. Louder now. Not just the whisper of bodies but a growing, hungry noise: many things aligning into a larger thing.
Every head turned. Every body stiffened.
The siege wasn't over.
Not yet.