Marked by Five Alphas

The moon was wrong. Nyxara felt it before she saw it. A pressure behind her eyes, a hum beneath her skin, like a thousand bees trapped inside her bones. She stood barefoot in the sacred clearing, the cold grass pressing between her toes, and stared up at the sky. The moon was supposed to be silver. It was red. "Blood moon," one of the elders whispered. Old Maren, whose white hair hung to her waist, pressed her fingers to her lips. "By the ancestors. A blood moon on an Awakening Night." The pack shifted nervously around Nyxara. Forty wolves, their breath rising in white clouds, their eyes flickering between the sky and her. She could feel their unease the same way she could feel the wind, physically, like something pressing against her chest. Her father stood at the edge of the ritual circle. Aldric Vaelith, Alpha of the Greymoor Pack, a man who had never once shown fear in her eighteen years of life. But right now, watching her from across that ring of moonstone, his jaw was tight and his hands were clenched at his sides. "Nyxara." His voice was steady. Controlled. "Remember what I told you. Breathe through it." She nodded. Then the wolf inside her woke up. It did not rise slowly the way the elders had described. They had told her it would feel like stepping into warm water. Gentle. Natural. A part of you finding its way home. This was not that. It erupted from somewhere deep in her gut, a roar of pure fire shooting up through her spine, and Nyxara hit the ground before she even realised her legs had given out. She screamed. She could not help it. Her bones were moving, cracking, rearranging themselves with a sound like green wood snapping, and the pain was so sharp and so total that her vision went white. "Hold on!" her father shouted, stepping forward. "Do not enter the circle!" Old Maren threw her arm out, blocking him. "The ritual must be completed. If you break it now, the wolf can not settle. She could be lost between forms forever." Aldric stopped. The look on his face nearly broke Nyxara in half. She pressed her palms flat against the cracked earth and breathed. In. Out. In. Out. Power moved through her like lightning chasing itself, like it had nowhere to go and was tearing through her trying to find an exit. The moonstone ring around her began to glow. Not the soft pearl glow it usually held during Awakenings. Something violent. Something electric. Then she felt it. A thread. Thin and warm, pulling outward from the centre of her chest. She grabbed onto it instinctively and it steadied her, just for a second, just enough to breathe. Then it snapped. Once. Nyxara gasped. Her hand flew to her chest. A second thread pulled taut. It snapped again. Twice. The elders began murmuring to each other in low urgent voices. A third. Snap. Her father took one step forward. "What is happening to her?" A fourth. Snap. The ground cracked. A jagged split opened in the earth beneath Nyxara's hands, and the grass on either side of it withered and turned grey. A fifth. Snap. The sound that followed was not a sound at all. It was a wave. Nyxara felt it leave her body in every direction at once, a ripple of invisible energy that bent the trees at the clearing's edge and sent every wolf around her stumbling backwards. Old Maren dropped to one knee. Two younger elders fell completely. The silence that followed lasted exactly one breath. Then everyone started talking at once. "That is not possible." "Five bonds. She can not have five bonds." "This has never happened. In all the recorded histories, this has never happened." Nyxara was not listening to any of them. She was on her knees in the ruined earth, her chest heaving, her fingers pressed hard against the ground to keep herself upright. Behind her eyes, images were flashing. Quick and sharp, like lightning strikes. A man with silver hair and a scar across his jaw, standing on a ridge she did not recognise. A man with dark eyes, looking up at the sky in shock. A man with burns across his left hand, going completely still in the middle of a crowded hall. A man with braided hair the colour of rust, dropping to one knee in a forest. A man standing alone at the edge of a black mountain range, turning his head slowly, as if he heard something. She had never seen any of them in her life. "I can feel them," Nyxara said out loud. Her voice came out strange and quiet. "All five of them. I can feel them breathing." Nobody spoke. Then the moonstone exploded. Not cracked. Not shattered. Exploded, every piece of it launching outward in a burst of white light that forced the entire pack to shield their faces. When the light faded, there was nothing left of the sacred stone but a ring of grey ash and a faint smell of burning. Old Maren stood slowly. Her face was the colour of milk. "This is a dark omen," she said. "The Council must be called. Tonight." Aldric crossed into the circle. He pulled Nyxara to her feet himself and held her by the shoulders, looking hard into her eyes. "We are going home," he said. "Now." Far away, in the Ashen Peaks, a man stood alone at the mouth of a cave and looked out over the dark valley below. His warriors were asleep behind him. The fire had burned low. There was no reason for him to be awake. But he had felt it. A thread, thin as wire and warm as sunlight, brushes against the centre of his chest and then pulls tight. Alpha Zevran pressed his fist slowly against his sternum. "She's alive," he whispered. He turned back toward the cave. "Wake up," he said, his voice low and flat and absolute. "All of you. We move before dawn."