The trees fell silent. Then came the first howl.
It wasn’t wolf. It wasn’t anything natural.
The sky opened as Thaloryn’s shadow beasts emerged. Dozens of them, gliding like smoke, eyes gleaming with sickly blue fire. Their limbs bent wrong. Their mouths stretched too wide. Echoes of pain given form.
The clearing pulsed with alarm. The guards shifted mid-step while fur and claws and war-cries beckoned while magic snapped like a whip through the air.
Thaloryn emerged last.
He didn’t walk. He unfolded wreathed in glamour, clad in silver-threaded robes, his hair shimmering like moonlight oil, Thaloryn glided across the battlefield with a slow, deliberate grace. His expression was carved serenity, but his eyes burned. Not hot, but glacial—deadly.
“Lillith,” he greeted, voice the curl of a winter breeze through a cracked window. “So dramatic. Was a letter too civil for you?”
She stepped forward, magic already prickling along her skin. “Cut the theatrics. This ends tonight.”
“Oh,” he said, smile not quite touching his lips. “But we’re just getting started.”
The beasts lunged.
Dominic moved like fire—his shift rolling over him in a blur of tawny gold and muscle. His lion form slammed into one of the shadow-creatures mid-air, teeth ripping through corrupted magic. Hazel shouted a command, and wards burst to life across the field. Shields flared. Spells flew like lightning bolts.
Jace and his pack shifted as well, earth-boiund wolf tangling with shadows and darkness.
But Lillith didn’t flinch. Her bones ached with fatigue, her fingertips buzzed with too much magic, too much adrenaline—but she stepped forward anyway, the sigil pulsing in her grip like a second heartbeat.
Each footfall felt heavier than the last, as if the earth itself resisted her path. The battlefield had gone quiet save for the distant roars of beasts and the whisper of burned leaves skittering across scorched ground. All eyes followed her now—council, allies, monsters alike—as though the air held its breath.
The sigil in her hand burned hotter. Not physically, but soul-deep, like it was pulling threads from inside her ribcage to keep itself lit.
Thaloryn watched her approach, brow raised. He tilted his head with a sneer carved in obsidian. “What is that?” he said, voice silk-wrapped venom. “A trinket? A charm? Or are you going to cry into it and hope I melt?”
She stopped three feet from him. Her heart pounded so loud it muffled the wind. But her voice? Clear. Cold.
“It’s a doorstop,” she snapped. “And you’re standing on the wrong side of it.”
His smile faded.
The sigil flared, reacting to the convergence point underfoot—the ley lines pulsing just beneath the surface. Lillith inhaled, once. Then she screamed—a raw, primal sound torn from somewhere deep—and slammed the sigil into the earth.
The ground didn’t just quake. Itconvulsed.
A shockwave of power erupted outward in concentric circles. Stones lifted, trees bowed away, and a crack ripped through the battlefield like lightning splitting a sky in half. The ley lines roared as if finally freed from a cage.
Magic howled. Not wind. Not weather.Magic.Old, waking,furious.
Runes spilled from the ground in blinding flashes—ancient, burning silver and red and violet. They spiraled toward Thaloryn, seeking him, binding him. The first one lashed around his ankle like a chain. He tried to move.
He couldn’t.
“What have you done?” he hissed, the sneer falling away as panic rose in his voice.
Another rune wrapped around his thigh. Then his torso. The glamour cracked across his skin like shattered porcelain. His true form flickered—too sharp, too inhuman, beauty turned to blade.
“Youdare?—”
“Iseveredyou,” Lillith said, her voice low but thunderous, her hair whipping around her face like a crown of fire. “You and the Moonlit Pact are no longer one. No longer tethered. You’re not its shadow. You’re just another monster who thought chaos made him a king.”
He roared, eyes blazing with pure hatred, but he couldn’t move. Not forward. Not back. The sigil’s power, fueled by her blood and will, held.
