Chapter One: Veluna’s Witness
650 Words
POV: Veluna Priest
I have buried alphas before.
Stone remembers their weight. The moons remember their names. This is not new to me.
This burial was wrong from the first breath.
The hall was prepared precisely as doctrine demanded. Black banners, iron braziers, blue-white flame fed by pressure valves that hissed like restrained beasts. Veluna stood full and unblinking beyond the high windows, her light spilling cleanly across the bier.
Too clean.
Alpha Gregarious Moonblood lay before us, arranged with reverence and precision. His hands folded. His shoulders squared. His face peaceful in the way only the dead achieve when the struggle ends too neatly.
I stepped forward and felt it at once.
The moon’s light clung to him.
Not the gentle farewell glow that follows a life well ended. This was sharper. Colder. A residue that hummed against my bones like a note held too long. Veluna does not linger without reason.
I began the rite anyway. Duty is not permission to hesitate.
My voice carried through the hall, steady, practiced, colder than usual. I heard it myself and did not correct it.
“By Veluna who remembers, and by Kaelun who endures, let what was given return, and let what was taken remain.
Blood to earth, that the land may keep him.
Breath to sky, that the winds may carry him.
Name to memory.”
The words settled into the stone. The ritual closed.
It should have ended there.
The crowd stirred, sound returning in cautious fragments. I felt the release ripple outward as it always does. Grief loosening its grip. The dead stepping back from the living.
Except one presence did not recede.
Awen Moonblood stood where protocol demanded. Four feet from her father’s head. Black silk draped her like a held breath, hand-stitched, weighted, disciplined. Her power, once a tide that bent the air around her, was bound tight within her skin.
Contained.
That frightened me more than if she had let it roar.
Veluna’s light brushed her shoulders and flared, answering something deep beneath her ribs. She did not look at the body. She did not look at me. She looked through the hall as though counting futures.
I have served the moon my entire life. I know the difference between grief and restraint.
This was restraint.
As the mourners began to move, I felt another shift. Crude. Hungry. Wrong in a different way.
Travis.
He did not approach the bier. He did not bow his head. He stepped forward as though the space had already been cleared for him, voice rising too quickly, too confidently, breaking the sanctity of the moment like a boot through thin ice.
“Awen, my dear.”
The words tasted foul.
I turned before my mind caught up, fury tightening my spine. False claims are not uncommon after an alpha’s death. But never here. Never now. Never before the moon had finished listening.
He spoke of blessing. Of permission. Of inheritance spoken in shadows. The crowd reacted as I expected. Gasps. Whispers. Elders stiffening like drawn blades.
Awen’s eyes widened. Just slightly. Enough to tell me this was the first she had heard of it.
That settled it.
Before Travis could finish shaping his lie into something dangerous, Elder Raith stepped forward, voice sharp with age and authority.
“You have no right,” he said, “to place a claim upon the Alpha’s daughter.”
Travis leaned closer, growl low, entitlement bare. I saw Raith flinch. I saw fear ripple outward.
And beneath it all, I felt Veluna stir.
Not in anger.
In warning.
I marked that moment into memory. The lingering light. The unclosed silence. The queen who had not yet been crowned standing perfectly still while men argued over what they believed was theirs.
The ritual was finished.
The reckoning was not.
Veluna remembers.
And she does not forget when something is taken before its time.
- Writer
