The Luna's Dark Protector

The Council's Disdain

Kael stood frozen for a heartbeat, a statue of fury and calculation. The circle of silence was a tangible barrier, a wall of dead air that bent light and devoured sound. Inside, the vortex of stolen essence whirled around Elara, a shimmering, soundless tornado of her own life force being siphoned downward, into the stones, into the tomb below. Her mouth was open in a silent scream, her hands clawing at the unmoving air.

The thing wearing Kaelen smiled, its attention fixed on the horrifying beauty of the sacrament. Theron groaned, trying to push himself up from the base of the altar, his sword just out of reach.

Kael’s gaze swept the hall. The vacant wolves were conduits, unbreakable in their trance. The witch-light torches were power sources that fed the circle. Kaelen was the conductor. Direct assault was impossible; the silence-field would stop any physical or shadow-strike he could muster. He needed to break the pattern.

His eyes landed on the high, stained-glass windows depicting the lineage of Lunas. Moonlight streamed through them, painting colored shapes on the floor… shapes that were distorted and broken where they met the edge of the silence circle.

Light.

He moved, not toward the circle, but along its perimeter, his steps silent on the flagstones. He stopped at the edge of a patch of cobalt blue light cast by a window showing the first Luna kneeling before the moon. He knelt, placing both palms flat on the stone within that colored light.

He didn’t summon the shadows within him. He called to the shadows outside the natural, faithful shadows cast by the moonlight. The long, deep darkness behind a column. The black pool beneath a stone bench. The umbra of a sconce.

They answered.

They slid across the floor like spilled ink, not toward him, but toward the pool of blue light around his hands. They didn’t merge with it; they piled onto it, layer upon layer of darkness, compressing the moonlight, concentrating it. The patch of blue light began to glow, not brighter, but denser, taking on a solid, almost liquid quality.

Inside the circle, Elara felt the draining pull falter for a microsecond. Her knees buckled. The Not-Kaelen’s head snapped up, its green-lit gaze finding Kael. “You disrupt nothing, ghost! You fight the geometry of gods!”

Kael ignored it. With a grunt of effort, he lifted his hands. The solidified pool of concentrated moonlight came with them, like a disc of glowing blue ice. He held it, trembling with the strain of containing so much refined light the opposite of his nature.

Then, he turned and threw it.

Not at the circle. Not at Kaelen.

At the nearest stained-glass window is the one depicting the first Luna.

The disc of condensed moonlight struck the ancient glass with the sound of a ringing bell. The window didn’t shatter. It ignited. Every color the cobalt, the silver, the amethyst flared with inward light, becoming a brilliant projector. And what it projected was not an image, but a concept: the pure, founding vow of protection between Luna and pack.

A beam of multifaceted, holy light lanced across the hall and struck the outer edge of the silence circle.

The reaction was violent. The dead air screamed a high, psychic shriek that finally had sound. The field didn’t break, but it rippled, distorting like a heat haze. The vortex around Elara stuttered, fraying at the edges.

The Not-Kaelen snarled, a sound of rocks grinding. “Heretic! You wield what you are not!”

“I wield what is hers,” Kael growled, already moving to the next patch of colored light, this one blood-red from a scene of a legendary battle.

But the distraction had been enough. Theron, seizing the moment, found his sword. He didn’t attack the possessed prince. He did something more primal, more pack. He shifted.

One moment he was a wounded man, the next a massive silver wolf. He lunged, not for Kaelen’s throat, but for the nearest vacant wolf, a conduit in the circle. His powerful jaws clamped on the creature’s foreleg, and he yanked with all his Alpha strength.

The vacant wolf didn’t cry out. It simply toppled, breaking the perfect geometric circle.

The silence was shattered.

Sound rushed back in the howl of the vortex, Elara’s gasp of air, Theron’s wolfish snarl. The ritual’s perfect structure fractured. The draining pull on Elara snapped, the stolen energy rebounding in a shockwave that threw her to her knees.

Kael was a blur. He abandoned the light and became a shadow, crossing the space between him and Elara in the time it took a heart to beat. He grabbed her, hauling her back from the center of the now-chaotic dais, putting his body between her and the Not-Kaelen.

But the enemy was not done. With a roar of frustration, the possessed prince raised his hands. The six remaining vacant wolves collapsed, not in death, but in dissolution, their forms melting into streams of that same black-green energy. The energy didn’t attack. It arrowed downward, through the cracks in the dais stones, into the tomb below.

A deep, subterranean thud shook the entire keep. From the cracks, a plume of sickly green mist erupted, smelling of grave dirt and sour magic.

“You have been delayed!” the Not-Kaelen shrieked, its form beginning to blur at the edges. “But the door is cracked! She is awake down there! And she is hungry!”

With a final, echoing laugh, the green light fled from Kaelen’s eyes. He collapsed like a marionette with cut strings. The malevolent presence was gone, its work partially done.

The Grand Hall was a wreck. Theron shifted back to human form, clutching a bleeding bite on his arm from the vacant wolf’s unnatural flesh. Kaelen lay unconscious. Elara trembled in Kael’s grip. And from the cracks in the most sacred floor in Silvermane, an evil mist seeped.

The doors to the hall burst open. Elders Cameron and Linnea, along with a contingent of armed guards, rushed in. They took in the scene: the unconscious prince, the bleeding Alpha, the collapsing vacant wolves, the strange mist, and Elara in the arms of the Shadow-Stalker.

Elder Cameron’s face purpled with outrage. “By the Moon! What sacrilege is this?!”

“The Stalker!” Linnea pointed a trembling finger. “He has attacked the Alpha! He has defiled the altar!”

“No!” Theron roared, his voice pained but clear. “He fought corruption! Kaelen was possessed”

“And where is this possession now?” Cameron shot back, advancing. “All I see is a fallen ally and a standing monster! He has unleashed some foul magic in our hearts!” He gestured at the green mist.

The guards fanned out, swords pointed at Kael. The distrust, carefully cultivated by whispers and fear, had bloomed into full-blown hostility. They saw what they had been prepared to see: the outsider, the shadow-wielder, standing over the ruin of their traditions.

Kael slowly released Elara, stepping forward, his hands open at his sides. “The corruption has partially awakened the First Luna’s remains. That mist is a necrotic aura. This hall, this entire wing, must be sealed. Now.”

“You will give no more orders here, creature!” Linnea spat. “Guards, take him! To the black cells!”

“You will do no such thing!” Elara found her voice, stepping beside Kael. “He just saved my life! He saved the Alpha! The enemy is in the tomb!”

“The enemy,” Cameron said, his eyes cold, “is the one who brings shadow to our light. The one whose very presence coincides with every disaster. Arrest him!”

The guards hesitated, looking at Theron. The Alpha was pale, swaying on his feet, his mind clearly reeling from the shift, the injury, the psychic assault. The clear command they needed was lost in his pain and confusion.

“Stand down,” Theron finally managed, but his voice lacked its usual force. “The Stalker is… under my protection. For now.”

It was the worst possible thing he could have said. It sounded weak, coerced. It confirmed the elders’ belief that the Alpha was under the monster’s t****l.

Kael looked from the armed, hostile guards to the bleeding Alpha, to the furious elders, and finally to Elara. In his stormy eyes, she saw a grim, heartbreaking resolve. He saw the battlefield clearly: to fight would be to s*******r Silvermane guards and prove every lie true. To be taken was to be removed from her side when the tomb-dweller fully awoke.

He made his choice.

He slowly knelt on the defiled stone, placing his hands behind his head. A gesture of surrender that screamed of wrongness. “I will go,” he said, his voice flat, “if Luna swears on her mother’s memory that she will not set foot in this hall or near this wing until the mist is purified and the tomb is sealed by sunlight.”

It was a gambit. A desperate move to bind her to safety using the one vow the pack would respect, even if they hated him.

Elara stared at him, her heart splitting. He was surrendering to save her from the pack’s wrath and from the tomb. He was asking her to promise to stay away from the very heart of the danger.

“I swear it,” she choked out, the words ashes.

The guards moved in, shackling Kael’s wrists with cold iron. As they pulled him to his feet, Elder Cameron stepped close, his voice a venomous whisper only Kael and Elara could hear.

“We know what you are, Shadow-Stalker. A flawed weapon. A carrier. The Blackwood taint never left you, did it? We have our own sources. You don’t protect her. You’re the beacon that draws the dark.” He smiled thinly. “The cells will be a fitting place for a plague-bearer.”