Chapter 6
615 Words
The throne room of the Silver Keep was quiet for once—no nobles, no courtiers, no applause.
Only King Marius Silvers, son of the Wolfen Throne, sat hunched at the massive obsidian desk in the adjacent records chamber, firelight casting sharp gold across the scars on his knuckles and the tension in his jaw.
He flipped another sealed page open with a sharp flick of his wrist.
“Seventy-three Mate-less transferred to Camp Delta under rehabilitation order 19-RK.”
“Rehabilitated: none.”
“Deceased: forty-one. Transferred to other holdings: twenty-nine. Status of remaining: unknown.”
Marius leaned back in his chair, teeth clenched.
Lies.
His father had said the camps were retraining facilities. A mercy. A use for the Mate-less that would give them purpose, shelter, even honor if they survived long enough to rank.
But these documents—buried beneath five layers of bureaucracy—spoke of blood and vanishing lives. Wolves marked not by failure, but by a decision. A symbol.
A brand.
---
Marius rose, shoving the scrolls aside and turning to his steward, an aging she-wolf named Lady Yvena, who had served both him and his father.
“Tell me about the Blood-Seals.”
She paled, wringing her hands. “My King… those marks are no longer—”
“Tell me the truth, Yvena. You were there when they first branded the Mate-less, weren’t you?”
A pause.
Then: “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“And?”
“The seals weren’t made to protect them. They were… deterrents. The old king feared the Mate-less. Feared their unpredictability, their wild instincts, their refusal to fall in line with fate.”
Marius’ eyes narrowed. “So he punished them for not having a destined bond?”
Yvena hesitated. “He punished them for threatening the Matchmaker’s order. For making others question if fate was… absolute.”
---
A heavy silence stretched.
Marius turned back toward the records, flipping to another file labeled: ‘Project Echo’.
Inside: maps of the war camps. Blueprints. Brand schematics. And a sigil—a broken thread coiled around a wolf’s eye.
The Eyes of the Crown.
A secret initiative that used select branded wolves as scouts and weapons. Some had failed. Others had disappeared into the system.
And some, it seemed, had never been recorded at all.
---
Marius stared at the brand sketch again. He’d seen it before—on the wrist of a dead wolf, one who had tried to assassinate him in his early reign. He remembered the way the brand glowed. The way the attacker moved—faster, stronger, more unhinged than any soldier should have been.
He had assumed it was poison. Or madness.
But now, he saw the truth.
The seal wasn’t just meant to suppress power.
It was meant to bind it. Redirect it.
To twist raw instinct into a weapon for someone else’s will.
---
“My father created an army,” Marius murmured, fury and disbelief twisting in his chest.
Yvena nodded. “He called them disposable. But the soldiers who survived? They didn’t forget.”
“And the Matchmaker? Where was she in all this?”
“She obeyed the king. But she was never loyal to him.”
---
Marius turned toward the high windows of the chamber.
Somewhere, beyond the walls of his golden palace, wolves lived in cages. Trained, branded, broken. Some likely still believed the king had done it to protect them.
But that king was dead.
And Marius was not his father.
He would find those wolves. Learn what had truly been done. And tear down the lies stone by stone—starting with whoever still profited from their pain.
- Writer
