✨ *THE LAST OATH OF THE MOON* ✨*

The moon was bleeding. Eira had been seven years old the first time her mother told her that the moon could die. They had been sitting on the roof of their hut, wrapped in a single deer pelt, watching the full moon turn the entire Keeper's village silver. Her mother, Lira, had pointed a long, elegant finger at it. "Do you see her, Eira? She is not just a rock in the sky. She is a mother. She is watching us. And as long as our family wears her heart, she will never die." Her family wore her heart. The Moonstone. A smooth, opal-like stone that glowed with its own inner light, passed from mother to daughter for a thousand years. That night, the moon was perfect. Whole. Silver. Tonight, seventeen years later, it was not. Eira saw it first through the smoke. A terrible, pulsing, red crack split straight down the middle of its white face, like a vein that had been cut open with a dull knife and would not close. It was not a trick of the smoke from the burning huts. It was real. The light that fell on the snow, on the screaming faces, on her mother's terrified eyes, was not moonlight. It was bloodlight. Red and sickly. And then she heard the screams. "Warlocks! Moon Pack, help us! Keepers, run!" The warlocks did not come like men. They did not come on horses or with swords. They came with fire that did not need wood. Black fire that ate the snow and did not melt it, but turned it to ash. It curled around their bone-white masks, dripping like ink. Where their bare feet touched the ground, the earth died. There were five of them. Only five. And they were burning a village of fifty Keepers in one night. Eira stood frozen in the doorway of their small hut, her bare feet in the snow, wearing only her thin sleeping dress. The air was so cold it burned her lungs, twenty degrees below zero, but the stone under her dress, against her skin, was burning hotter. So hot she thought it would leave a scar. She should have run when the first hut burned. She should have grabbed her knife. But her legs would not move. She was seventeen, but she had never seen death. Keepers were healers, not fighters. "Eira! No!" Her mother's hands grabbed her from behind, rough and shaking. Lira, the strongest Keeper Eira knew, the woman who could heal a broken leg with a touch and had never cried in her life, not even when Eira's father died in the winter hunt, had tears frozen on her lashes. Lira ripped the Moonstone from her own neck — the leather cord snapping — and shoved it into Eira's palm. The stone that Eira had never been allowed to touch before. It was warm. No — it was alive. It pulsed against her skin like a second heart, beating out of sync with her own. It was so bright it lit up the space between their faces. For a second, when her skin touched it, the bleeding moon in the sky flared brighter, as if it recognized its heart coming home. "Listen to me," her mother hissed, her eyes darting to the warlocks who were getting closer, chanting in a language older than men, a language that made Eira's ears bleed and her nose bleed. "They are not here for the village. They are here for this. For you. The prophecy. The last Keeper born under a blood moon. You." "What? Mama, I don't understand —" "You will! Don't let them take it, Eira. Do you hear me? The moon dies without you. We all die without you. You have to take it to them! Take it to the Pack!" "The Pack is dead! You said wolves don't —" "RUN!" Her mother pushed her so hard she fell backward into the snow, the wind knocked out of her. The Moonstone cut into her palm. Behind her mother, the three warlocks in bone-white masks had reached their hut. Their hands were already raised, black smoke curling from their fingertips, forming into claws. Her mother turned. Eira saw her mother's back straighten. She saw her mother raise her hands, and for the first time in her life, she saw her mother's silver light — the true Keeper's light — explode from her chest, trying to make a shield. It lasted two seconds. The black fire ate it. The last thing Eira saw was her mother's silhouette, glowing faintly silver, trying to shield her daughter's escape, before the black fire swallowed her whole. There was no scream. That was the worst part. Eira did not scream either. The sound got stuck in her throat. She ran. She ran through the forest she had played in as a child. Only now the trees were not friends. Branches clawed at her hair, ripped her dress, scratched her cheeks. Roots, hidden under the fresh snow, tried to trip her. The smoke followed her. The chanting followed her. She could hear the warlocks' hounds now, made of shadow, howling. Through ash and snow. Her thin nightdress tore to her knees. Her feet, bare and soft and never having known shoes in winter, split open on the frozen ground. Every step left a small, red print in the white. Blood on the snow. A perfect trail for them to follow. Her lungs burned. Her throat was raw from breathing cold air and smoke. Her legs shook. But the Moonstone in her fist would not let her stop. Every time her knees wanted to give out, it pulsed harder, hotter, sending a jolt of heat up her arm, as if whispering: Not yet. Not yet. He is waiting. Who was waiting? The wolves? Dead wolves? By dawn, she was alone. The howls had stopped. Or maybe she was too far to hear them anymore. Or maybe the snowstorm that had started at midnight had buried the sound. She had reached the edge of the map. The place where even hunters would not go. The Forest of the Moon Pack. The trees here were different. They were ancient, their trunks wider than four men, their bark black as charcoal. Their branches were so thick they blocked even the red moonlight. No birds sang here. No snow fell here. It was silent in a way that was not natural. Every child in the Keeper village knew the story before they could even speak. Wolves do not take humans. Wolves do not make oaths anymore. Wolves are dead. The last Alpha broke his oath and left us all to die on the riverbank. If you go into their forest, you will never come back. It was forbidden. On pain of exile, no Keeper was allowed to enter. The Moon Pack had abandoned them a hundred years ago, after the last Great War between warlocks and wolves. But Eira had nowhere else to go. She collapsed at the edge of a frozen river that cut through the forest. The ice was black and thick, three feet deep, reflecting the bleeding moon like a dark mirror. Her body finally gave up. She curled on her side, snow sticking to her bloody feet, to her hair, to her lashes, which were frozen together. The Moonstone dimmed in her palm, its light flickering like a dying candle, as if it was tired too. The sky above grew darker, even though the sun should have been rising. The red crack on the moon grew wider. A piece of it, small as dust, seemed to fall. I'm sorry, Mama, she thought, her mind going fuzzy from cold. I failed. I didn't make it to them. That was when she smelled him. Pine. Blood. Snow. And something ancient, something like old stone and winter storms and fur. It was not a human smell. It was not a warlock smell. It was the smell of the stories. The hairs on the back of her neck rose, even though she was too tired to move, too cold to shiver anymore. A shadow detached itself from between the trees. It did not walk. It glided. Silent. Too tall to be a man, at least six and a half feet. Too still to be an animal. Eira's breath stopped. Her heart, which had been slow, started to hammer against her ribs. Eyes like molten gold opened in the shadow. And they were looking straight at her.