The secondary archive gave him twelve more hours before it locked him out.
He used every minute.
What he found — assembled across redacted documents, missing expedition logs, and three Moon Council correspondence chains with entire sections removed — was not a complete picture. It was more like a photograph with most of its subjects burned away, leaving only the edges, the background details, the things the editors hadn’t thought important enough to erase.
Three centuries ago, the Moon Goddess had created what the Council called the Unification System — a prophecy framework designed to stabilize werewolf society through the existence of a single destined Luna. One vessel. One anchor. One point of convergence around which all pack authority would ultimately organize.
It had worked, for
