Untouchable Luna

The weight of nothing

The failure began in my fingertips.

It started as a dull ache, the sensation of my own weight returning like lead poured into a mold. For the last twenty minutes, I had been a trick of the light, a flicker of non-existence sustained by sheer, agonizing willpower. Now, the sleet wasn’t bending around me anymore. It was hitting my skin, each drop a tiny, frozen needle reminding me that I was made of flesh and bone.

The world snapped back into focus with a sickening jolt. The grey veil dropped, and suddenly the Archive door wasn't just a smudge in the air—it was cold, unyielding granite and rusted iron.

And the wolf was right there.

Silas didn't snarl. He didn't lung. The massive charcoal beast let out a sound that shattered something deep in my chest—a broken, high-pitched keening that belonged in a slaughterhouse. His muzzle was inches from my throat. I could feel the heat of his breath, a humid, meaty draft that smelled of raw hunger and sickness. His amber eyes were cataracts of misery, looking not *at* me, but *into* the space I occupied, as if he were trying to find a soul in a vacuum.

"Silas! What do you see?" Rían’s voice cracked from the balcony above.

I didn't look up. I couldn't. I was pinned by the wolf’s desperation. Silas’s paws were frantic, scraping against the mud, his body vibrating with a frequency that threatened to shake my teeth loose. He was starving for the mate-bond, for the scent he’d been told was a defect, and his madness was a physical pressure against my lungs.

Don’t let the heat go, little ghost. Kael’s voice whispered in the back of my mind, a jagged shard of ice. The moment you feel pity, you are his.

I looked into Silas’s eyes and felt a flare of pure, unadulterated rage. This was the beast that had remained silent when I was beaten. This was the man who had called me an abomination. Now that he was "sick," now that his wolf was rotting from the inside because the Moon Goddess didn't like being lied to, I was supposed to feel something?

"There is nothing here for you," I hissed, the words barely a vibration in the air.

I reached for the "Shadow Walking." It wasn't the light-bending of the distortion; it was the violent act of pulling my atoms through the threshold of the physical world.

Above me, I heard the heavy thud of Rían’s boots hitting the wooden balcony floor. He was leaning over the railing, his face pale and gaunt. He looked like a man who had been hollowed out by a parasite.

"The Council... they’re coming today, Silas," Rían shouted, his voice thick with a pathetic, trembling fear. "If we don't find the map, if we don't prove she’s dead and the line is gone, they’ll strip the Alpha-title. They’ll put us in the pits. Please, Silas... find something!"

The desperation in his voice was a oily smear on the morning. He wasn't mourning me. He was mourning his status. He was mourning his own skin. The "Mourning Ceremony" was a political shield, a way to explain away the absence of a Luna he had murdered in all the ways that mattered.

Silas lunged.

It wasn't an attack. He tried to press his massive, filthy head against my chest, seeking the anchor he’d lost.

"Get off me," I snarled.

I didn't use my hands. I used the Void.

I visualized the heavy, iron-bound door behind me as a sieve. I pushed my consciousness into the cold iron, calling upon the dry, burning heat Kael had anchored in my gut. I didn't just step back; I fell.

The transition was a scream inside my head. The iron door didn't feel like stone or metal—it felt like a wall of frozen glass shards. My skin felt as though it were being peeled back by a thousand tiny hooks as I forced my density to match the dead matter of the Archive.

For a heartbeat, I was caught in the middle. Half of me was in the sleet, staring into the bloodshot eyes of a mad wolf; the other half was in the airless, pitch-black silence of the vault.

Silas let out a roar of pure agony, his jaws snapping at the empty air where my face had been a second before.

Then, I was through.

I collapsed onto the stone floor of the Archive, my lungs seizing. The air in here was old—stagnant and tasting of dust and ancient parchment. I lay there in the dark, my body trembling so violently I thought my bones might snap. The drain was total. My power level was a flicker, a dying ember in a hurricane.

Outside, I could hear Silas howling. It was a sound that would haunt the Ironclaw for generations—the sound of an Alpha’s wolf losing its mind in the mud. I heard Rían’s voice, frantic and pleading, trying to soothe a beast that no longer recognized his authority.

I pulled myself up, my fingers dragging across the cold floor. I needed to move. I needed the map.

The Archive was a single, circular room lined with shelves of rotting leather and bone-scrolls. There was no light except for the faint, grey luminescence filtering through the high, barred slits near the ceiling.

I forced myself to stand, my legs feeling like brittle stalks of dead grain. I reached for the shelf where Kael said the Sun-Stone map would be kept—the Third Tier of the Royal Lineage.

My hand touched the wood, but it wasn't empty.

"The scentless one returns," a voice purred.

It wasn't a wolf's voice. It was sibilant, like the sound of dry leaves skittering over a grave.

I froze. My internal alarm, the one Kael had sharpened during our training, shrieked. I didn't turn around; I stayed perfectly still, my hand hovering over the shelf.

A soft, rhythmic clicking sound echoed in the room. Fingers—long, unnaturally thin fingers—tapping against a metal cylinder.

A figure stepped out from the darkness behind the central pillar. He was dressed in the crimson and black robes of the Shadow Council. He was tall, gaunt, his skin the color of a drowned man, and his eyes were covered by a blindfold of hammered silver.

In his left hand, he held the Sun-Stone map—the gold sheet I had come for.

"I wondered if the King of the Lycans would be bold enough to send his new pet," the Councilman said. He tilted his head, his nostrils not even moving. He wasn't smelling me; he was sensing the ripple I made in the silence. "The Ghost of Ironclaw. Or should I say... the last error in the Goddess's design?"

He smiled, revealing teeth that had been filed into jagged points.

"I am Bishop Vane," he said, holding the map up. The gold caught the dim light, mocking me. "And I’ve been waiting three years to see if you were truly as empty as they claimed. Tell me, little ghost... does the King's heat feel like life? Or is it just another way to burn?"

I looked at the map, then at the Bishop. My power was gone. I was a human girl in a room with a monster, and the exit was guarded by a mad wolf and a broken Alpha.

"I'm not empty," I whispered, my hand sliding down to the silver dagger Kael had hidden in my boot. "I'm the hole you're about to fall into."

Vane laughed, a dry, rattling sound. "Let's see if you can bleed in the dark."