Blood of the Last Moon

Chapter 2 — The Silverfang Heir

By day the Silverfang stronghold might have passed for the skeleton of a dead city; by night it was a living thing. Towers of scavenged steel and timber rose like ribs against the sky, their surfaces braided with thorned vines and carved runes that glimmered when moonlight struck them. Gateways were bolted with iron reclaimed from the old world and inscribed with the crescent tongue of Selene; banners stitched from faded flags and animal pelts snapped in the wind, showing the pack’s sigil — a fang crossed by a silver moon.

Elara had never seen anything like it. In the ruins she had learned to read survival in small things: which alleys kept the best cover, which roofs collapsed last, where the rats hid. But this — this was an entire polity built from salvage and oath. It hummed with a different kind of life, a current that thrummed beneath stone and steel: ritual, law, and the thick sweetness of pack blood.

They dragged her through the main courtyard. Dozens of eyes turned; dozens of noses lifted to drink her scent. The shifters who milled there were not the savaged wolves she had glimpsed at a distance. These were men and women who carried the wolf in line and bone: pale crescents tattooed at their temples, fingers scarred where they had once been teeth, eyes that caught moonlight and held it. Some spat, some laughed, some made the sign of Selene across their chests. Children drew behind mothers’ skirts, curious and frightened.

“A human,” someone breathed.

“Impossible,” another muttered.

“Cursed blood,” someone else spat.

The phrase was like a stone thrown into still water; ripples spread.

Elara lifted her chin because she had learned to steel herself. Showing fear was a language they would read and use. Her wrists were still bound with rough cord where Alexander’s men had tied them; the crescent on her inner wrist, veined faintly beneath the skin, pulsed like a small heartbeat. It had pulsed since the ruins — stronger when the wolves had touched her, stronger now under this cathedral of metal and rune-work. The mark had a way of reminding her that she did not belong to the world of ruins alone.

Alexander walked ahead of her with a silence that felt like weather. He moved through the crowd like an axis; people gave way without thinking. He wore his rank not as ornament but as gravity — shoulders set, jaw clenched, the wound along his lip a pale stripe that caught the moonlight. He did not speak unnecessary words, but when he spoke the pack listened, because his voice carried the history of every campaign, every hunting season, every hard choice taken under Selene’s gaze.

In the great hall — a wide, vaulted chamber built around a collapsed domed ceiling — the Alpha King waited. Tharon Silverfang sat on a throne fashioned from twisted rebar and carved wood, his presence as massive and old as the stronghold itself. Silver threaded his black hair; a deep scar cut his lip and ran like a river through his face. Where Alexander carried the tense, taut energy of youth stepping into legacy, Tharon carried the settled, cold certainty of rule.

When Alexander announced them — “We found her in the ruins, Father” — the murmurs folded into a hush as if the hall itself were listening for the gods’ judgment.

Tharon’s gaze cut like winter. The old packsman rose, his weight making the throne creak. He walked to Elara with the slow, deliberate steps of a hunter who had seen all the ways prey could lie. He grasped her wrist with a hand like iron and lifted it so the hall could see the faint crescent.

“She bears a mark,” Alexander said. “It glows in moonlight.”

The King’s face closed. He bent, eyes narrowed, expression a map of disdain and calculation. The mark pulsed silver. A low ripple of murmurs fed itself into conversation as some of the gathered warriors leaned forward, hungry for portent.

“She’s cursed,” Tharon spat. He dropped Elara’s wrist and the corded rope cut a white line across her skin. “If the old blood walks among us, it is a threat. Kill her at dawn. Let the next moon rise clean.”

A silence like a held breath settled. Even the fire in the brazier seemed to wait.

Alexander’s jaw flexed. He looked at his father the way one looks at a cliff edge — with an awful understanding of what a fall could mean. “Father—” He started, then stopped. His voice, when he next spoke, was careful as setting bones. “I believe there is more to her than your fear permits. At least let me question her.”

Tharon’s mouth twitched, a small break in the implacable mask. “You believe too much, Alexander. You have always believed the worst of omens can be tamed with mercy.”

“Mercy is not weakness,” Alexander said. His tone bore the steel that had learned to hold men’s tempers in. “We should know what she is before we spill blood — if she is a danger, we will act. If she is the Last Blood spoken of in old prophecy, we do not kill our key.”

Some heads turned at the word: Last Blood. Wherever whispers of the old faith lived, that phrase carried the weight of legends and ancient fear. Selene’s name, though seldom used aloud outside rites, threaded the air like incense.

Tharon’s stare was a winter wind. “Prophecies are for poets and old seers. We have hunters to feed, borders to guard, and a pack to keep. You would gamble those for a story?”

“I would not gamble. I would prepare,” Alexander said. “Let Yael examine her. Let the Seers read what the moon keeps.”

The elder in question stirred where he sat — Yael, the pack seer, a man whose hair had silvered with age. His eyes were clouded but bright when the moon touched them, and he moved with the deliberate patience of one who had seen too many lifetimes. He rose, slow as tide, and approached Elara without the pomp of youth. He smelled of herbs, smoke, and parchment; where he went, the air took on the tang of old books and dust.

Yael pressed his palm lightly to the crescent. His face changed, not in shock but in the remembering of something long buried. “The mark remembers,” he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. His voice was a rasp of paper. “It remembers moonlight before men took to the sea of iron.”

“Remembers what?” someone demanded.

Yael’s cloudy eyes looked up through the hall, seeing things no one else could. “A child of Selene. A returning ember.” He glanced at Tharon, and the Alpha King’s scowl deepened. “But prophecy is not a simple path. It is a knife with two edges.”

Tharon barked a laugh that had no mirth. “Enough riddles. You wrap danger in words instead of flaying it. The pack will not be put at risk for riddles. At dawn she dies.”

Alexander’s hands curled into fists. He moved closer to Elara, though he did not touch. “If you insist on killing her, you risk igniting the very war you seek to avoid,” he said quietly. “The Crimson have been stirring. A bloodline like hers — if true — will draw other ambitious packs like moths. We should learn first.”

A murmur of agreement rose; a murmur of dissent. The name Crimson threaded through the hall like warning smoke. The Crimson Pack had been the source of raids and burnt border posts for seasons. Their leader, a cruel strategist named Ares, had ambitions that needed no fuel but opportunity. The presence of a child of Selene would be a beacon to that fire.

Tharon’s expression shifted — not in response to Alexander’s words but to the beating of old fear. He had lived through enough seasons to know that monsters took advantage of fissures. Yet he was not a man to hand his sceptre’s power to fear. “You would risk a civil war over a phantom?” he asked. His voice carried a personal edge; this was not all politics. Tharon had seen what power did to blood, and there was a hard, personal history that threaded his caution.

“You said the same in the campaign of north ridge,” Alexander reminded him. It wasn’t insolence; it was a memory marker. Tharon’s silence said more than a hundred protests. The men at the edges shifted.

Yael’s hand tightened on Elara’s wrist, and he closed his eyes. “The moon will tell,” he said. “But not tonight.”

Tharon gave a sudden, sharp nod. “Then Alexander — you spare her until dawn. You are to hold her in the old barracks under guard. If you fail to contain her, you fail both me and the pack.”

Alexander inclined his head, a soldier’s acceptance. But when their eyes met—Elara’s wide, star-raw, and his tempered by a brittle mercy—there was an unspoken clause laid between them. He would not let them kill her. Not without trying to bend fate into something else.

When the hall cleared and the brazier’s smoke unfurled into the night, Alexander did not return to his father’s side. He guided Elara through corridors lined with trophies of hunts: skulls mounted with solemnity, banners stained from campaigns, and a carved relief depicting Selene with wolves at her feet. Each token, each artifact, whispered the pack’s lineage into the bones of the stronghold.

They arrived at the barracks: a narrower chamber of heated stone and straw, heavy doors bolted with rune-etched iron. Inside, two of Alexander’s lieutenants waited — Hector, a young hunter whose face still held the rough bloom of youth and suspicion, and Aella, a lean woman whose eyes had the steady calm of someone who had watched death and learned not to flinch. Both approached with weapons half-unsheathed more from reflex than intent.

“You keep her here,” Hector said bluntly. “She should be tied and watched. If word of this leaks—”

“She won’t be alone,” Aella cut in, softer than his barbs. She looked at Elara with a kind of pragmatic curiosity. “We need answers. Yael asked for time.”

Alexander’s voice, when he spoke, was not a command but an appeal. “You watch her not as prey but as an asset to be understood. Keep her safe.”

Hector snorted but bowed his head, grudging. “If she tries anything, she dies as Tharon ordered.”

Elara could not stop her limbs from shaking when they untied her, though Hector offered water and bread with the clumsy courtesy of one who had seen too many broken things. Aella’s fingers were sure and cool when she checked the bindings; there was tenderness in it that didn’t ask for return.

Once the door closed and the bolt slid into place, the room felt too small. Elara sat on a pallet of straw and rocked slightly, the exhaustion of the night weaving with a new, sharper current of unease. Alexander paced, restless as a storm in a throat, then stopped at the edge of her pallet and regarded her with an intensity that made her feel naked.

“You’re not a liar,” he said after a long moment. “Most humans lie. Survival teaches them that.”

“So I’ve been told,” Elara replied, the dry humor a brittle shield.

He stepped closer. The light from the small brazier painted his face in slow, honest strokes. “I should have killed you when I had the chance,” he admitted, not a boast but confession. The words cracked something open in him. “But when I saw the mark—” He swallowed. The memory of the flare of light where their skins met was an ache he could not easily set aside. “I thought of the stories my grandmother whispered of the Moon’s tears. I thought—maybe we are on the edge of something we do not yet understand.”

Elara’s throat tightened. “My mother said the moon would remember,” she whispered. “She said to run to the light when the moon bled.”

Alexander’s expression changed in a way that startled her. For a man who wore command like armor, tenderness did not come easy; when it did, it was small and startling: “Your mother must have loved you fiercely.” He paused. “I have carried the shape of leadership too long without being allowed to be small.”

There, in the cramped heat of the barracks, two lonely beings acknowledged the edges of their private worlds: a girl born into the memory of gods and a man born into the weight of a thousand responsibilities. The room was too small for the future that might grow between them, and the moon outside made promises they both felt but could not yet trust.

Hector’s muttered growl from the doorway reminded them of the world outside, of politics and predators. Alexander moved to the brazier, tamped the coals, and then met Elara’s gaze.

“Sleep,” he said, softer than any command. “At dawn, Yael will speak with the Elders. Until then, rest. You’ll be under my watch.”

His hand hovered a moment above her wrist, then dropped. The mark pulsed faintly. For a breath, Elara thought she felt it reach toward him, like a moth to a cautious flame.

Outside, beyond bolted doors and rune-etched stone, the Silverfang stronghold breathed in the moonlight and held its secrets like a mouth full of stones. Within those walls, in a small room shared by strangers and promise, the fragile threads of a dangerous covenant were being tied — between a girl who carried divine memory in her blood and the heir who would decide whether that memory meant salvation or ruin.

And the moon remembered.