Marked by Five Alphas

CHAPTER 3: The Council's Verdict

Nyxara stood in the centre of the stone floor, barefoot, still wearing the loose shift she had been given after her transformation. Twelve elders sat in a curved row above her, their grey robes making them look like a wall of stone. Old Maren sat at the centre. Her face gave nothing away.

Aldric stood to Nyxara's left. She could feel him holding himself very still.

"Nyxara Vaelith." Elder Coss, a thin man with deep-set eyes, spoke first. His voice bounced off the stone walls. "You are brought before this Council following the events of last night. Five bonds. Five foreign Alphas are now moving toward our territory." He folded his hands on the table. "You understand what you have done."

"I didn't do anything," Nyxara said. "It happened to me."

"It happened through you," Old Maren corrected quietly. "There is a difference."

Elder Coss leaned forward. "You are a curse on this pack. You destabilise everything your father has spent thirty years building. Five armies are marching because of what lives inside you." He looked down at her the way someone looks at a problem they are calculating how to remove. "You are a threat to the balance of every territory on this continent."

Nyxara felt her father shift beside her. He said nothing. She understood why. There were twelve of them and two of Greymoor's oldest alliances sat on that council. He was choosing his words.

She would choose hers too.

"We have reached a decision," Old Maren said. She did not look happy about it. That was the only thing that made Nyxara pay very close attention. "The bonds must be severed."

Silence.

"There is a ritual," Elder Coss continued. "Old enough that most of us hoped we would never have need of it. It severs a mate bond at the root, before it can fully form." He paused. "All five at once."

Aldric's head turned sharply. "You said that ritual has a survival rate of"

"Forty percent," Old Maren said. Her voice did not waver but she did not look at Nyxara when she said it. "We know."

The number landed in Nyxara's chest as a stone dropped into still water. Forty percent. She was eighteen years old. She had shifted for the first time twelve hours ago.

"No," she said.

It came out differently than she intended. Not loud. Not angry. It came out from somewhere below her ribs, low and certain, and it filled the entire chamber without effort. The candles along the walls flickered even though no wind had moved.

Every elder went still. Old Maren's eyes sharpened. Elder Coss leaned back slightly, as if he had not meant to and was annoyed at himself for it.

A younger elder at the far end of the table leaned toward the woman beside him and whispered, "That tone."

Nyxara barely heard him. Something had cracked open behind her eyes. Images, fast, sharp and vivid. A room with black stone walls and high ceilings. A throne made from something dark, bone, or obsidian, she could not tell. And in front of it, five figures on their knees. Massive. Powerful. Kneeling.

And herself standing above them, her hands steady, her chin raised. Blood on the floor. All of it belongs to someone else.

The image vanished immediately as it came. Nyxara blinked. The council chamber came back into focus and she realised every elder was watching her.

"We begin the ritual at dawn," Elder Coss said, recovering himself. "Regardless of"

The explosion hit like a fist.

The stone floor jumped beneath their feet. Several elders grabbed their tables. A crack split the ceiling and dust rained down in a thick curtain. Somewhere outside, someone was screaming.

Then another explosion. Nyxara heard fire before she understood what she was hearing. A roar of it, not a burning building but something being thrown, something launched deliberately from outside the walls.

"The northern wall," a guard shouted, slamming through the chamber doors. His armour was smoking. "We are under attack. Zevran's forces. They are outside the gates and they are"

Another blast cut him off. The chamber shook again, harder this time, and through the narrow high windows, Nyxara saw orange light painting the sky.

Flames. Raining downward.

Then she felt it.

One of the five bonds, the one that had always hummed the loudest since last night, surged so hard and so suddenly that she grabbed the front of her shift with both hands and bent forward. It was not pain. It was fury. Someone else's fury, pouring through the bond like heat through thin metal, possessive and violent and absolutely focused.

On her. Coming for her.

"We need to move her," Aldric said, reaching for her arm.

He never finished the sentence. The gate at the far end of the courtyard, iron and oak and three inches thick, came apart like it was made of paper. The sound it made was enormous. The smoke that poured through the gap was black and thick and for three full seconds, nobody could see anything.

Then the smoke shifted. Five wolves stepped through it side by side. Each one was massive. Each one moved differently, one low and liquid, one straight and deliberate, one crackling with something that made the air smell like a coming storm. But they moved together, holding the same line, their eyes all finding her at the exact same moment.

They were not fighting each other. They were not even looking at each other. Nyxara stood completely still in the ruined courtyard with fire behind her and twelve frozen elders at her back. Every one of those wolves had come for her.