**Chapter 3: The Hollow Fang**
760 Words
The morning after the Blood Moon broke across Blackwood Forest, the world felt... quieter.
But not with peace.
It was the hush that came after a scream—the stillness left behind when something had been torn loose from the earth.
Selene stood at the edge of the burial grounds, watching as the pack laid their fallen to rest beneath stones etched with the old names. Smoke drifted up in soft trails, offerings to the ancestors. The mourning howls had ended hours ago, but their echoes lingered.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t speak.
Her silence had always been unnatural.
Now, it was feared.
Even among her kin, eyes turned when she passed. Some with reverence. Others, with wariness. A few with open distrust. She’d saved them—and yet, something about her power felt too close to the stories they were taught to fear.
Caelum kept her close.
He said little, but she could feel his mind working—always watching, measuring. As Alpha, he could not afford blind trust. Not even for his daughter.
Not even for the Moonline.
---
Later that night, a howl summoned the elders to council. They met in the roots of the Heart Tree—a living monolith older than even the oldest wolf.
Selene was not invited.
But she went anyway.
Hidden in the upper branches, wrapped in cloak and shadow, she listened.
Voices clashed beneath her.
“—She’s a child!”
“She’s a weapon. The Nightborn said as much.”
“Or a beacon. If she awakened during the Blood Moon, others will come. They’ll sense it.”
“We should send her away. Hide her.”
“We should train her.”
“Train her? With what? She has no howl. No shift. No bond to the pack.”
“She has *power*. That’s more than most of us can say.”
Then, a new voice cut through the murmur.
“She should go to the Hollow Fang.”
Selene’s breath caught.
The Hollow Fang.
A name spoken in stories and warnings. A rogue order of outcast wolves—exiled, feared, and forgotten. Warriors who had turned from the Moon’s path, choosing survival over tradition. They were said to live in the northern wilds, past the frost line, where even the stars hid from the wind.
Elder Marrow spoke again. “They remember the old ways. The deep ways. Before the howl. Before the shift. If anyone can teach her what she is… it’s them.”
“No,” Caelum said, his voice a low growl. “I won’t send my daughter into exile.”
“She is *already* on that path,” Marrow replied. “The Nightborn won’t stop hunting her. And neither will the rest of the world. Not when they see what she’s becoming.”
A long pause.
Then: “Let her choose.”
---
Selene sat beneath the Heart Tree long after the council dispersed. Marrow found her there, again.
“You heard?” he asked.
She nodded.
“And?”
She looked up at the sky. The Blood Moon was gone—but something darker lingered on the wind.
“I saw one of them in my dream,” she whispered. “Not a Nightborn. Something else. Tall. Pale. It wore bone like a crown.”
Marrow’s expression darkened.
“That,” he said softly, “was a Warden of the Broken Court.”
She shivered. “What do they want with me?”
“They want to finish what they started,” he said. “Long ago, they hunted the Moonline to extinction. Your birth... was a mistake they intend to correct.”
He handed her a small scroll. “This map will take you to the Hollow Fang. If you choose to go.”
Selene unrolled it. The ink shimmered faintly, etched in a language older than even runes.
She didn’t need time to decide.
“I’ll go,” she said. “But not to hide.”
Marrow smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes.
“No,” he agreed. “You’ll go to become something they’re not ready for.”
---
**Three Nights Later**
Selene slipped from Blackwood beneath a new moon, wrapped in fur and silence.
The map burned in her pocket.
Her path led north—through haunted riverlands, over the frostbitten crags, and into a place where no howls had echoed for a hundred years.
She didn’t look back.
She couldn’t.
Because ahead of her, in the cold, the Hollow Fang waited.
And they did not welcome visitors.
- Writer
