Half-Awaken Wolf
1067 Words
Ashen
“Auron.”
A faint warmth touched my ribs.
I am going to sleep now.
Then he was gone.
Not gone.
Sleeping.
But the silence he left behind was so deep it hurt.
The frost on the windows stopped growing.
The candles straightened.
The floor cracked once.
I stood in the center of my mother’s kitchen, one hand pressed to my chest, breathing like I had run through a storm.
Moon touched my arm.
I flinched.
Not away.
Just from the shock of being back in my body.
Her hand stilled.
“It’s okay,” she whispered.
I looked at her.
“I heard him, and now he’s gone.”
Nara stepped forward.
“No.”
I turned to her.
Her eyes were different. Lighter. Moon-bright at the edges.
“Novett says he isn’t gone.” Her voice trembled, but it held. “He’s half-awake.”
“Half-awake?”
“One chain cracked.” Nara looked at my chest like she could see through the bone. “The rest are still holding him. He used too much just now. You used too much when you grabbed Solan, and the bond woke him, but he’s tired. He had to sleep.”
Solan touched his throat again, then wisely said nothing.
Veyra came down the last step.
Her face was pale beneath her glamour.
“A half-awake royal wolf can still shake wards,” she said. “That explains why the cabin let Solan through. It recognized royal blood approaching royal blood.”
Solan blinked. “Royal blood?”
No one moved.
The room tightened.
Moon looked at me.
I looked away.
Not now.
Not yet.
But Solan had heard enough tonight to know there was more.
He looked at the ring.
Then at me.
Then at Nara.
“Frostveil,” he said quietly.
Veyra sighed. “Royal mouse has teeth and a brain. How inconvenient.”
Solan ignored her.
“Ashen,” he said, voice rough from what I had done to him, “If Dorian is claiming to be the White Wolf, and if the council is naming you the false one, then whatever you are hiding will not stay hidden long.”
I looked at him.
“I am not hiding.”
Veyra gave me a look.
Nara gave me a worse one.
Moon’s expression was soft enough to hurt.
I swallowed.
“I am trying to understand.”
Solan’s gaze sharpened, but not unkindly.
“Then understand quickly.”
The warning settled over us.
Outside, wind moved through the pines.
Inside, the bond between Moon and me pulsed faintly, like a second heartbeat I had not earned but could not deny.
Mate.
The word still lived under my skin.
Auron’s voice was silent.
But for the first time in my life, the silence did not feel empty.
Nara did not sleep easily.
None of us did.
Solan stayed downstairs with Veyra, watching him like a cat watching a bird it had not decided whether to eat. Moon insisted on cleaning the marks on his throat, though every time she looked at them, guilt cut through the bond and landed in my chest.
I stood near the window.
Not because anyone asked me to.
Because I did not know how to sit beside them after what I had done.
Moon tried twice to come to me.
Twice, I told myself to let her.
Twice, my body stayed stiff as stone until she stopped halfway and gave me the space I did not know how to stop needing.
By dawn, the cabin had fallen into a restless quiet.
Nara finally slept on the small sofa upstairs beneath Veyra’s cloak.
That was when she dreamed.
She told us later that the dream did not feel like a dream.
It felt like stepping out of the cabin and into another world.
A field stretched beneath a silver moon, covered in frost that did not melt under her bare feet. Snowflakes floated upward instead of down. In the distance, a forest of white trees bent toward her as if bowing.
Novett stood beside her.
Not small.
Not hidden.
A white wolf with moonlit eyes and frost along her fur.
Nara stared at her wolf and started crying before she could stop herself.
“You’re beautiful,” she whispered.
Novett pressed her head against Nara’s chest.
Then the moon split open.
Light poured down in ribbons.
A woman’s voice spoke from everywhere and nowhere.
Daughter of Frostveil.
Nara lifted her head.
“I’m not—” she started, because she had spent her life being told what she was not.
The voice stopped her gently.
You are.
The frost beneath Nara’s feet glowed.
A mark appeared on her palm.
A crescent moon wrapped in a line of ice.
Nara gasped.
Moon Priestess Guardian of the Frostveil Bloodline.
The title moved through the field like thunder wrapped in silk.
Nara shook her head. “No. Ashen is the special one.”
The Moon Goddess’s voice softened.
He is the heir.
The mark on Nara’s palm burned brighter.
You are the guardian.
Images flashed around her.
Me standing in chains of black ice.
Moon reaching for me through silver light.
Dorian wearing a white wolf’s lie.
A council chamber filled with false prophecy.
Blood on snow.
A witch’s hands wrapped in red thread.
Nara saw herself standing between me and a shadow that had no face.
She stumbled back.
“I can’t.”
Novett growled softly.
The Moon Goddess answered:
You have been protected long enough. Now you will protect.
Nara looked down at her glowing palm.
Her voice shook.
“Protect Ashen?”
Protect the bloodline. Protect the bond. See what lies beneath false moonlight. Break what blood magic binds.
Nara’s breath came fast.
“He won’t let me.”
For the first time, the Moon Goddess sounded almost amused.
Then make him.
Nara woke before sunrise with frost glowing on her fingers and tears drying cold on her cheeks.
Across the room, I slept badly in a chair I had not meant to fall asleep in.
She said that, for one moment, she saw him.
Auron.
A great white wolf behind me, curled in chains, eyes closed.
Sleeping.
Waiting.
Novett whispered inside her.
We protect him now.
Nara closed her fist around the crescent mark burning faintly in her palm.
Then she whispered into the dark:
“I know.”
- Writer
