Chapter 16 : The Broken Circle
260 Words
The air thickened.
Clara gasped as the world tilted—trees vanishing, stone melting away. She tried to hold onto Liam’s hand, but the tunnel was gone, and with it, the present.
This wasn’t a dream.
It was remembrance.
---
Then
The forest was younger.
Wilder.
Moonlight dripped like oil through gnarled branches. A circle of fire burned in a glade. Around it, five figures knelt—hooded, hands raised, mouths moving in a forgotten tongue.
In the center, a man writhed.
Naked. Blood-slick. Screaming not in pain, but in splitting.
Bones cracked the wrong way. His eyes turned white. And from his mouth, a sound burst out that didn’t belong to humans or beasts.
A howl.
The first.
---
He was not cursed.
He was chosen.
A guardian forged when man and beast were one breath, one hunger, one shadow beneath the stars.
But he wanted more.
He wanted freedom from the moons. From the rules. From the Pactmakers.
And so, he broke the circle.
Ate the fire.
And the Pactmakers scattered the truth like ash.
---
Now
Clara staggered, coughing smoke, as the vision ended. Liam caught her.
“You saw it too,” she whispered.
He nodded, jaw clenched. “The First Wolf was one of them. One of us.”
“Before he became something else.”
They stood in the heart of something older than Silver Hollow, older than bloodlines. The stone door groaned behind them.
And above, in the waking world, the howls had changed.
Calling not for prey—
But for a king.
- Writer
