His Rejection: Rewritten

P. 2

Both races mourned their dead.

Both blamed the other.

The wolves called it the Great Betrayal.

The witches, if their name for it ever survived, called it something else.

The agreement was abandoned. Whatever knowledge the witches possessed about controlling the madness of the full moon went with them. Borders closed. Promises were forgotten. Wolves who had once prepared to welcome witches into their homes now taught their children to fear them.

The witches withdrew. The wolves followed. And war came soon after.

Neither race could afford it, yet pride has rarely concerned itself with what men can afford. The witches lost more of the bloodlines they had sought to preserve. The wolves buried warriors they could not replace. Each death became justification for another until no one seemed to remember that the two peoples had once gathered beneath the same moon because both feared extinction more than they feared one another.

Eventually, the witches vanished from wolf lands, but the Witch Princess did not return alone... her wolf went with her.

Or perhaps she went with him.

There were whispers that they fled beyond both territories, refusing to choose witch or wolf when neither would accept them together. Others said witches loyal to their princess hid them behind wards no wolf could cross. There were even tales that wolves sympathetic to the pair helped them escape. Whatever became of them, neither surrendered the other.

And in time, they had children. Those children carried wolves within them, but they carried something else as well.

Magic did not disappear when it entered wolf blood. It changed...

The first children were said to possess abilities neither parent fully understood. One could call fire without spell or ritual. Another heard voices that had never been spoken. There were children who healed, children who dreamed of things before they happened, and those whose wolves behaved in ways ordinary wolves did not.

Most peculiar were the sons.

When the full moon came, they shifted but they did not lose themselves. The moon could command their flesh. It could not command their minds.

That alone would have made their blood priceless. It also made it dangerous.

The descendants of the Witch Princess did what their parents had done before them.

They survived quietly.

They married where they could. Hid what they were when they must. Some knew the truth of the blood they carried. Others lived and died believing themselves merely strange wolves blessed—or cursed—with gifts they could not explain.

There were other forbidden unions in the centuries that followed. A witch who loved a wolf despite the hatred between their peoples. A wolf who crossed borders and never returned. Children hidden beneath false names. Bloodlines that vanished for generations only to awaken unexpectedly in a distant descendant.

They were never numerous.

Too many died. Some were hunted. Some were feared. Some simply disappeared. And yet enough survived for the blood to continue.

And so the old warning endured.

Magic buried is not magic slain. It sleeps beneath flesh and waits within bone. The moon may call the wolf, but old blood answers to something older still.

There was said to be more. A final warning, perhaps. Or a prophecy...

The words changed with every tongue that carried them, until no one could say what had first been spoken and what had been added by frightened men afterward. Only their meaning remained.

One day, a child would be born in whom the old blood did not whisper.

It would roar.

The wind would know her. Water would answer her. Flame would recognize her. And the earth would awaken beneath her feet.

Whether such a woman was ever truly foretold, none could say. Perhaps frightened wolves invented her. Perhaps dying witches dreamed of her. Perhaps there had never been a prophecy at all. But old stories have a peculiar habit of surviving long after the people who began them are dust.

And blood—

blood has an even longer memory...