I may sound polite, but I make sure my voice is clear. She growls a bit, but soon, the snow under Selena and Nora begins moving. They get in a defensive position, but I can see them being pushed away, gently blown back into the real world. They disappear slowly, as if an eerie blizzard has taken over the spot where they were standing, and the last thing I see are two pairs of glowing eyes, one blue and the other golden.
I wait until they are fully gone, and I look inside for them... My inner wolf easily reaches out to those soulmates of ours. I smile, reassured by the relief they are both feeling right now. They definitely got back to their mates. A knot comes back to my throat, and my heart suddenly feels a lot heavier, just as I am reminded I lost mine. I take a deep breath, but a couple of tears still come out. Liam... I'll end this for you, babe.
"...It's just the two of us now," I tell Luna.
“Indeed... The crazy ones.”
"The werewolf witches," I chuckle. "You must have seen many of our kind in here."
I look around in this strangely vivid memory frozen in time. Luna slowly moves, but stays at a reasonable distance from me. I can feel her suspicion, her doubts. It's strange. Now I can... feel her, a bit. It's not as crystal clear as when I try to communicate with my pack, but there's definitely something familiar about it. She has a heart like Nora or Selena's. Something that shines brightly, vividly, but with a heaviness to it. The heaviness of her past.
“There weren't that many,” she retorts in a cold tone. “Not even ten... Our kind is too rare, and the curse took care of those who did live.”
"Like Clarissa and little Mara. But I was created by the same Dark Magic, so it couldn't kill me, right? The curse tried to get into my mind, but I was different from them all."
“Of course you are. You were created by Dark Magic, yet also imbued with Light Magic by your link to the Royals. There's something special about your existence... and your bond too.”
Again, that knot that chokes me up. I take a deep breath, trying to control it.
Destiny or the Moon Goddess probably didn't pair all three of us with the Black Brothers by some haphazard mistake... No, it feels like something bigger was at stake, like the wheels of fate making sure every piece fell into the right spot. I take another deep breath and turn to the grave. ...I still see Liam's name, and it's painful as hell.
"...Tell me what happened, Luna."
She finally moves. Her paws silently dive into the snow as she walks up to the grave. She suddenly rubs her head against it, in a very canine-like way. I hear a faint whimper.
“I missed him so much... I would have given almost anything to bring him back. Perhaps a part of my wolf self had already known he was gone, but... every day I spent with Luna, I felt him grow a bit further. As if she was telling me.”
"...Did you ever find out how he died?"
“Luna said it was the humans... Perhaps it was also the wolves. By trading half of his wolfhood with the witch, my mate had become a stranger to his own kind. He wanted to become stronger, for the packs, but... he lost them. He lost their trust, and he couldn't get the humans' either. Luna was too different from mankind.”
"They hated witches."
“She hated humans just as much,” scoffed Luna. “She didn't just choose to live alone, she had no choice. She... scared them. She probably would have scared a wolf too if she hadn't been so close to nature itself.”
"But you befriended her."
“She befriended me. Luna wanted a companion, after she had lost my mate, I probably came at the right time... She introduced me to her world, and began thinking that with my blood, as a pure werewolf, and magic, we could do the impossible together…”
"Bring him back."
Luna suddenly growls, and steps away from the stone, almost as if she was wary of it, or... scared.
“She didn't bother to tell me the specifics, she... knew it was something forbidden by the laws of magic. She... didn't know what she was doing.”
"Was the spell too powerful for her?" I ask.
“Oh, no, the spell itself would have worked... if it hadn't included a clueless, eager wolf.”
I frown. Luna is the one who caused the necromancy spell to... fail? I swallow my saliva. I feel like I'm standing in a sacred place hiding some terrible events. Actually, the whole place suddenly looks much more sinister. Luna keeps moving away, and she's now slowly walking toward the house. Once again, the completely still state of our environment is disturbing. The snow under my feet makes no noise, I step on it as if it was stable, thick ground. The trees, wind, and everything around is completely quiet...
Luna stops a few steps away from the house, and I know where we are. This is where the spell happened, right before I got out of that memory. This is where the two Lunas stood, above a magic circle. That thing is still carved in the ground, like a traumatic burn. Luna walks up to that thing, but she's careful not to step inside. She stops just a couple inches away from the border. Now that everything is much clearer and I'm using my own mind and eyes, I observe that thing with a strange feeling. It does feel very ominous...
“When I understood what Luna had tried to do... When I saw the grave, it hit me. On that stone was the name she had given my mate. He was the only male she had ever cared about, her first companion, just like he had been mine. I understood what she was doing, what we... were about to achieve. I'm not sure how long I stayed there, while the truth hit me violently. I just remember running back, and yelling at her to start over. What I didn't know back then was that she had already used too much of her own energy in the first attempt.”
I can imagine.
If Luna was on her own guiding the spell and using the she-wolf as a... battery, it must have required a crazy amount of focus from her. Moreover, she did it using her own life force. She was a good witch, a witch that used only Light Magic, not Dark. Which meant she used her own life force to try and bring him back. I can't even fathom how hard it must have been for her. Not just hard... she had to give up her own life force. How much of one's life was to be given to bring another one back from the dead? That's... frightening.
