THE HOLLOW THRONE OF ASHVEIN

CHAPTER 2: THE CROWN INSIDE THE STONE

The crowd's screaming changed pitch as the Moonstone split fully open, the two halves falling away from each other like the doors of a tomb finally given permission to open after centuries shut.

Inside, suspended in a hollow the stone had clearly been carved to hold, sat a skeleton.

It had been there a long time. The bones had taken on the same pale gray as the stone around them, fused in places where moisture and time had worked their slow erosion. But there was no mistaking what crowned its skull. A circlet of black iron, ancient and unadorned except for a single carved wolf's head at its center, its eyes set with stones that still, impossibly, caught the torchlight and glittered.

The Crown of the First Alpha. The crown every child in Ashvein had been taught was lost forever, taken into legend along with the wolf who wore it.

The High Priestess fell to her knees. Around her, guards and nobles alike stared in a silence more total than the screaming that had come before it, as though the deaths of two heirs and the unveiling of a forbidden grave had finally exceeded what any of them had the capacity to process at once.

Zephyr felt the strange woman's grip tighten on his wrist.

That's not possible, she murmured, more to herself than to him. He's supposed to be buried in the Hollow Vault.

Before he could ask what she meant, guards descended on the dais in a wave, shouting for order, shouting for the area to be cleared, shouting for anyone who had been near the bodies to be detained for questioning. Zephyr watched as four of them converged on the strange woman, seizing her by the arms before she could finish whatever sentence she'd started.

Wait, he said, though he didn't know why he said it.

She did not fight them. She only looked back at him once, her expression unreadable, and let herself be led away into the chaos.

He gave his name to a guard captain too rattled to ask follow up questions and slipped out before anyone thought to detain him too. It was not loyalty to the kingdom that kept him from running entirely. It was the symbol burned into the stone, the one only he seemed to have noticed, the one that matched a memory he had spent half his life trying to forget.

He did not sleep that night. By the time dawn broke gray and reluctant over Ashvein, the capital had already begun reshaping the horror of the evening into something it could manage. Word spread that the woman detained at the ceremony had given a false name, that she carried no seal, no writ, no proof of which pack she belonged to. Word spread that she had been seen near both heirs in the hour before the ceremony began. Word spread, as it always did in a frightened city, faster and looser with the truth than anyone meant for it to.

Her name, eventually, came out. Nyra.

Zephyr found himself outside the detention hall by midmorning, telling himself he had only come to see whether the guards had found anything useful. He did not examine too closely why the thought of her sitting alone in a cell bothered him as much as it did.

He never got the chance to speak with her.

A horn sounded from the direction of the Hollow Court, three sharp blasts that meant a member of the royal council was summoning attention. Zephyr followed the crowd that had already begun to gather, weaving close enough to hear what was being announced.

The skeleton was gone.

Sometime between midnight and dawn, with the entire dais supposedly under guard, the bones of the First Alpha and the crown upon its skull had vanished from the broken Moonstone without a trace. No one had seen anyone approach. No one had heard anything unusual. The grave that had waited centuries to be found had been emptied again within a single night.