🔹️THORNE
I t his gaze through Nyx’s eyes, holding it for a beat as I let him study for a bit until he was content.
I did not repy the question.
"Well?" He asked and I knew if he was not a bird, he would have raised a brow at .
A smile crept onto my lips as I greeted him.
"Its good to see you too,"
He tilted his head, Nyx conspiritorially quiet. The larger raven turned to her. "And you won’t tell ?"
"You barely hold after six months of dropping from the face of the earth, yet you have the terity to ask for clan gossip."
"You are rubbing off on ," He replied smoothly. He rubbed his head against her feathers.
Nyx let out a soft, trilling sound, leaning into the contact for a heartbeat before she rembered herself and nipped his ear.
"Soft," Vex muttered, pulling away with a ruffle of his feathers. He turned his attention back to , his black eyes sharp enough to pierce bone. "You have a ssage from Thaddeus." Gone was the lightness of his tone. "It’s urgent."
The air grew stale as he offered his foot, where the letter was wrapped around.
I reached out, my fingers steady despite the sudden chill in the air, and unfurled the parchnt from Vex’s leg. The bird didn’t linger; he hopped back to Nyx’s side, his silence more telling than any of his earlier jabber.
I unrolled the scroll.
At first, it looked like a standard reconnaissance report. There was a hand-drawn map of the northern ridges, the lines clean and precise—Rowan’s signature style. My eyes tracked the familiar landmarks: the Jagged Pass, the Weeping Falls, and the edge of the Deadwood. But as my gaze moved toward the center of the map, the ink began to change.
The lines grew jagged, the pressure of the quill so heavy in places that the tip had nearly punctured the paper.
"The Red Mist is breathing, Thorne," the first line read, the handwriting slanted and rushed.
Below it were coordinates—degrees and minutes that tracked the mist’s expansion—but as I followed them, the logic began to fail. Rowan, the most tactical, level-headed man I knew, had started writing in circles. Literally.
14.5 North... it doesn’t stay... it watches... 14.6... no, it’s 14.2... it moved backward but I saw the eyes within it...
My pulse quickened. Rowan had led an expedition months ago specifically to study the Mist, to find a way to navigate it or neutralize the poison that had been choking our lands and isolating the clan.
He had been when with as many amulets as he could carry to find the exact source of the mist.
Instead, the paper beca a frantic ss of ink.
The color isn’t red, Thorne. It’s the color of a scream. I can’t hear the wolves anymore. I only hear the humming. Don’t send more n. If you send them, they will beco the hum. I found the center. 42° N, 19° E... no, don’t go there. It’s a mouth. It’s a mouth and we are the tongue.
The coordinates were crossed out so violently they were a black smudge. At the bottom, a single sentence was scrawled in a shaky hand that broke my heart:
"The moon is a lie."
I stared at the paper, the world around blurring. Rowan was my rock, my Beta, the man who balanced my fire with his ice. Seeing his mind unravel onto parchnt was like watching a mountain crumble.
"Vex," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "Where is he? Where did you leave him?"
Vex didn’t look at . He looked at the horizon, his feathers tight against his body. "He didn’t co back to the camp, Thorne. He told to fly. He said if he didn’t give the letter then, the Mist would eat the words before they could reach you."
I looked back at the map. The coordinates he’d tried to hide—42° N, 19° E—burned into my mind.
It was deep in the mist, deeper than any one had dared to traverse.
"He’s still out there," I growled, the Alpha in surging to the surface, demanding I hunt, demanding I fetch my own.
"He’s not ’out there’ anymore," Vex croaked, his voice heavy with a grief that chilled to the bone. "He’s in it. I told him not to do it."
I stopped, the words were dragged out of my throat, scraping and hoarse. "What are you talking about?!"
But Vex did not lose at , he looked towards oblivion, the resignation clear on his face. Like he had co to terms with sothing I could not yet even comprehend.
"He took off his amulet,"
Air was wrung out of my lungs in a violent twist, like the sky itself had reached down and crushed my ribs.
"He took off his amulet," I repeated, the words hollow, aningless. My mind refused to accept them. "Why would he—"
"To understand it." Vex’s voice was flat, drained of all the earlier mischief. "He said the amulets were keeping the truth from him. That the Mist wasn’t trying to kill us—it was trying to speak. He said if he wanted to hear it properly, he needed to et it on its terms."
"That’s insane," I snarled, my hands crumpling the edges of the parchnt. "Rowan wouldn’t—he’s the most rational wolf I’ve ever—"
"He threw them all away," Vex interrupted, and for the first ti, I heard sothing like fear in the crow’s voice. "Every single amulet. Ripped them off his neck, his wrists, his ankles. Said they were chains. Said they were lies. Then he walked deeper into the Mist without them."
The world tilted.
Rowan. My Beta. The wolf who calculated every risk, who never made a move without three backup plans. That Rowan had stripped himself of protection and walked willingly into the thing that had driven stronger wolves mad within minutes.
"How long?" My voice ca out strangled. "How long was he in there without protection?"
Vex shifted on his talons, uncomfortable. "Long enough to write that." He gestured toward the letter with his beak. "It took him... hours, maybe. I don’t know. Ti doesn’t work right in there. But he was lucid enough at first. Calm, even. Like he’d found so kind of peace."
"Peace," I echoed bitterly.
"He said the voices weren’t screaming anymore. They were singing. He said they knew him. Recognized him." Vex’s eyes finally t mine, and what I saw there chilled more than anything written on that cursed parchnt. "He said they sounded like the Luna."
My jaw clenched so hard I tasted blood.
"And then?" I demanded. "What happened then?"
"Then he started writing faster. More frantic. The singing turned to whispers. The whispers turned to instructions." Vex ruffled his feathers, agitated. "He kept saying the sa thing over and over—’It wants to show . It needs to see.’ And when I tried to pull him back, tried to get him to put the amulets back on, he—"
Vex stopped.
"He what?" I growled.
"He looked at like he didn’t know ," the crow said quietly. "Like I was the stranger. Like I was the nightmare, not the Mist. And then he smiled, Thorne. Smiled. And told to go. Said I didn’t belong there. That only those who were chosen could stay."
The parchnt trembled in my grip.
"The strangest part," Vex continued, his voice barely above a whisper now, "was that we were so close to ho. We’d made it to the edge. Three more miles and we would’ve been clear. But he turned around. Walked back into it. Like sothing was calling him ho, and it wasn’t here."
Silence stretched between us, broken only by the distant sounds of the fortress—wolves training, tal clanging, life continuing as if the world hadn’t just fractured.
"Did you see where he went?" I asked, my voice barely recognizable as my own.
Vex nodded slowly. "He walked toward the center. Toward those coordinates he crossed out. 42° N, 19° E. And the Mist—" The crow paused, as if the words themselves were dangerous. "The Mist parted for him. Like it was welcoming him ho."
I stared at the letter in my hands, at the chaotic scrawl of a brilliant mind unraveling, at the coordinates that had been written and rewritten and finally obliterated in a frenzy of ink.
The moon is a lie.
"How long ago?" I asked.
"Four days," Vex replied. "Maybe five. It’s hard to tell. The Mist—it does sothing to ti. Makes it slippery."
Four days. Five at most.
Rowan had been in the Mist without protection for nearly a week.
No one survived that. No one stayed sane through that.
"He’s gone," I said, the words tasting like ash.
"He’s changed," Vex corrected softly. "There’s a difference."
I looked up sharply. "What does that an?"
The crow exchanged a glance with Nyx, sothing passing between them that I couldn’t read.
"It ans," Vex said carefully, "that when I left him, he wasn’t screaming. He wasn’t afraid. He was... calm. Like he’d finally found sothing he’d been searching for his whole life." The bird’s voice dropped. "And whatever it was, Thorne—it knew his na."
My hands closed into fists, crumpling the letter further.
"We’re going after him," I said.
"Alpha—" Vex started.
"I am going after my fucking brother." I ground out, brooking no room for him to argue.
Reviews
All reviews (0)