The Lunar Sovereign and Her Alpha Shield

Prologue Eight hundred years is a terrifyingly long time to live when you're stuck looking like a twenty-two-year-old college student. I stand by the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of my penthouse, watching the city below. From up here on the eighty-fourth floor, the people look like tiny, glowing dots moving through neon-lit concrete canyons. Bullet trains hiss past on elevated magnetic tracks, cutting through the smog of the commercial banking district. Everything is chrome, glass, and artificial light. I take a sip of my coffee, but it tastes like nothing. Honestly, most things do these days. If you pick up a digital tablet or go to a library, you'd probably find my life story catalogued under "Folk Tales & Children's Bedtime Stories." The Sovereign and the Shield. Kids read about me to help them fall asleep, imagining some mythical wolf princess and her giant blacksmith husband fighting monsters in an ancient, snow-covered valley. They think it is all a fairy tale. They have no idea that the girl from the story is alive, well, and running a multi-billion-dollar investment firm under her fifth different legal alias just to dodge the government's questions about why she never ages. The world changes so fast it makes my head spin. The heavy stone walls of Oakhaven were torn down centuries ago to lay tracks for steam engines. Then came the skyscrapers, the internet, and automated factories. The massive timber forests where my people used to run? Completely gone. Now, they're just corporate nature resorts where wealthy city folks pay thousands of credits a weekend just to see a real tree. And my people... the werewolves. We didn't survive the way I thought we would. We didn't conquer anything. We just integrated. Over the last eight centuries, the packs thinned out, blending completely into the booming human population. Today, humans outnumber werewolves ten thousand to one. Most wolves now are just hybrids who have no clue what they actually are. They're corporate lawyers, software engineers, or mechanics, completely oblivious to the fact that the weird, burning sensation they get in their chests during a full moon is an ancient somatic signature trying to wake up. I walk away from the window, the silk of my robe dragging against the cold marble floor. I stop in front of a vacuum-sealed glass case on my dresser. Inside sit two dull, scratched copper rings. I feel a familiar ache in my chest. I remember it all... the Ashes Of Love. I pick up the two copper rings and walk back to the window, as the memories flood back in. It all happened eight hundred years ago. And if you're reading this story, you're one of the few who know that the story of The Sovereign and the Shield is not a fairy tale but the true story of a Luna Princess who was born to bring peace and her Shield who was always meant to guard her path.