🦋ALTHEA
"Thal!" I scread, reaching for him.
He looked up at , his face a mask of agony. His small hands clawed at his throat, and as he opened his mouth to cry out, he didn’t produce a sound. Instead, a plu of that sa solid, oily smoke billowed from his lips, as if the darkness were hollowing him out from the inside. He retched again, his body convulsing as the shadows began to swallow his small fra.
"No!"
I lunged forward, expecting the darkness to burn or bite. But as my fingers touched the bellowing blackness, it didn’t resist. It parted. The shadows recoiled from my touch like a scolded dog, bowing and swirling away from my skin with an almost submissive grace. It was as if the darkness recognized .
From the phantom of a second it has touched , my skin lit up with a wild jolt that I recognized like its wielder.
This was Thorne’s shadow.
The tendrils of darkness that coiled and whipped at his behest.
I snatched Thal up, his small body limp and shivering in my arms. He was still choking, the black smoke pouring from his mouth and nostrils in thick, suffocating clouds.
"Althea..." he wheezed, the word vibrating through the smoke.
Suddenly, the silence of the wing was shattered by a raw, visceral scream of terror.
"NIGHTFALL!" a Gamma roared from the end of the hall, his voice cracking with a panic I had never heard from a North wolf. "Nightfall! Umbra is rising! Evacuate! To the tunnels, now!"
The Gamma didn’t even look at as he sprinted past, his eyes wide and fixed on the darkness behind him. "If the shadows touch you, you’re a corpse! This is the worst that it has ever been."
The Hellhound is out!"
I stood frozen in the middle of the corridor, clutching a choking child to my chest, as the fortress dissolved into chaos. This wasn’t the Allied Packs. This wasn’t my mother.
This was Thorne.
His wolf, Umbra, wasn’t just a spirit anymore—he was a physical plague, an inevitable blackness consuming everything in its path. And for so reason, the darkness was letting through.
"Go to him," Zyra whispered, her voice sharp with a new kind of hunger. "The beast is calling. See what your ’transaction’ has unleashed."
I didn’t have ti to be gentle. A Gamma stumbled past, his face pale with the visceral density of the terror around us. I grabbed his harness, shoving Thal into his arms.
"Take him! Get him to the tunnels!" I commanded.
"No! Althea, no!" Thal shrieked, his voice raw and wet from the smoke he’d been heaving. He reached out, his small fingers catching the hem of Thorne’s oversized tunic. "Don’t go! It’ll eat you! I can’t lose you too—Althy, please!"
He didn’t even see it. In his terror, he didn’t notice that while the shadows were flaying the stone walls and choking the very air, they were dancing around like adoring servants. They avoided my skin as if I were made of holy fire.
"I’ll find you, Thal! Go!" I yelled over the rising roar of the wind that shouldn’t have existed indoors.
The Gamma didn’t wait for a second order; he turned and ran, Thal’s heartbroken cries echoing down the hall until they were swallowed by the stifling vacuum of the dark.
I turned and ran the opposite way.
I was a ghost moving through a massacre. People collided with in the dark—mothers screaming for children, warriors tripping over their own feet as they fled the "Nightfall." I reached out, grabbing a sobbing girl and shoving her toward a retreating elder, my touch montarily clearing a path of light through the oily mist for them to see.
I didn’t need eyes. The mark on my neck was no longer just a hum; it was a screaming compass, vibrating with a subliminal heft that dragged toward the Great Hall.
The massive oak doors didn’t just open; they were flung wide by the shadows themselves, welcoming ho. The mont I stepped inside, the doors slamd shut with a finality that shook the floorboards.
The silence here was absolute. And terrifying.
Then I saw him.
He was no longer the man who had fed soup. He was the nightmare the world told stories about. Umbra had fully erged, but he was mutated—monstrous. The wolf was the size of a war-horse, his fur a churning mass of literal shadows that seed to bleed into the floor. He wasn’t just a beast; he was a spectral mantle draped over the physical world.
His eyes were the only thing that hadn’t changed—amber fire burning against the void. He was standing over the shredded remains of the council table, his breath coming in low, rattling huffs of black smoke.
He sensed . The massive head turned, the neck snapping with a sound like dry wood breaking. Those amber eyes locked onto mine, and the ethereal gravity in the room doubled, forcing to my knees.
I reached out, my fingers straining to bridge the final inch between my skin and his shadow-drenched fur, but the crushing burden in the room was intensifying. The air had turned into sothing thick and crushing, a pressurized void that made my lungs ache and my bones groan.
"Thorne!" I choked out, but the na was swallowed by the roar of the darkness.
He didn’t move. He didn’t snarl. He simply lood over , a god of ash and amber, his gaze fixed on mine with a terrifying, vacant intensity. He wasn’t seeing —he was seeing through , looking at a horizon I couldn’t perceive.
I tried to speak again, to call to the man who had whispered "Thea" against my skin just hours ago, but my voice failed. The heaviness of his power was pinning to the floor.
Then, his maw opened.
It wasn’t a howl that erged. It was a voice—hollow, resonant, and layered with a thousand echoes of death. It didn’t sound like Thorne, but the words were sharp and precise, cutting through the chaos of the Nightfall like a blade.
"42° N, 19° E."
I froze, my hand hovering in the cold air. The coordinates hit like a physical blow, more shocking than the darkness itself.
"The moon is a lie," the beast intoned, the shadows around him whipping into a frenzy at the words.
The room seed to tilt. I knew those numbers. They were burned into my mory, etched there by the hundreds of conversations I’d overheard when Draven beca Alpha, even more when I beca his mistress.
They were the coordinates of the place Draven traveled to before I was frad. The location that still made my soul with fear. The place I barely escaped from. It was the coordinates of the High Alpha’s Labyrinth.
Reviews
All reviews (0)