Riven didn't wake up.
He burned.
Something inside his chest was cracking and splintering like fragile glass under unbearable pressure. His heartbeat thundered erratically, each pulse sending waves of agony through his limbs. He gasped for air that wouldn't come, lungs seizing as if they no longer remembered how to breathe.
Moonlight pierced his closed eyes.
When he finally screamed, the sound wasn't human.
Riven's body arched violently, bones shifting beneath his skin. Muscles tightened, tore, and rebuilt themselves in seconds. His senses detonated outward and suddenly he could hear everything. Heartbeats. Footsteps. The distant howls of wolves celebrating their slaughter.
He rolled onto his side, retching, claws gouging deep lines into the stone beneath him.
Claws?
Riven stared at his hands.
They were wrong.
His fingers had elongated, nails darkened and sharpened into lethal points. Veins pulsed with faint silver light beneath his skin, radiating outward from his chest where something new throbbed painfully.
A Lunar Core.
But it wasn't stable.
It fractured and reformed over and over, reacting violently to his panic and grief. Hybrid Resonance developed, an unnatural twisted evolution rejecting every rule the werewolf world lived by.
Riven staggered to his feet.
The world felt too close. Every smell was sharp enough to cut blood, ash and fear. His thoughts blurred, instincts screaming at him to hunt, to kill, to survive.
Footsteps approached.
Three werewolves emerged from the smoke-filled street, their eyes widening when they saw him standing.
"A feral," one muttered. "No wait. That's..... ."
Riven didn't understand their words.
All he knew was that they were threats.
He lunged.
Instinct took over completely. His body moved faster than his mind, claws ripping, teeth snapping. The fight was chaotic and brutal no technique, no control, only raw survival. One werewolf went down screaming. Another fled in terror.
The third didn't get the chance.
When it was over, Riven collapsed to his knees, shaking violently. Blood stained his hands, their blood.
He retched again, horror finally piercing through the instinctive haze.
"I didn't want this," he whispered.
Above him, unseen by his broken mind, the moon shifted behind the clouds.
And deep within the territories of the Four Orders, ancient wards trembled.
A prophecy long buried, long manipulated stirred awake.
A human-turned-werewolf has been born.
A curse.
A king.
And before Riven Thorn could even understand what he had become, the hunt for his life began.