Arielle's POV
Lucien knew the name.
Not personally — the Architect had been active centuries ago, before any living pack member's time. But the Nightshade library had records that most pack archives didn't, and Lucien, who had been collecting those records for the eleven years of his Alpha tenure, had encountered the name in contexts that other pack leaders had long stopped looking at.
The Architect was not a person.
It had been, once. A blood magic practitioner of extraordinary ability who had, at some point in the centuries before recorded pack history, undergone something that removed them from the category of person and placed them in the category of force. Something between the Shadow Queen's kind of existence and something older and more architectural, as the name suggested.
It
