Chapter 118: The Revelation

Rhydor’s POV

The map was not giving me what I needed. I had been staring at it for hours. Not the roads around Hollowcrown. Not the routes between villages.

The territories. The ones that sat beyond the borders of what I knew well, the lands further east and further north that had always existed at the edges of what Crescent Moon concerned itself with directly.

I was trying to find a man.

Not his face. I had seen what was left of his face and it had told me nothing. A white mask. Grey eyes. White hair falling around the edges of it. Horns that curved back from his forehead like they had always been there and had never been hidden.

A sword that no single person should have been able to carry the way he carried it.

He had walked into my pack house through an attack that had been designed to cover his movement. He had walked through smoke and chaos and warriors and had gone straight for her like he already knew exactly where she was and had been planning this for a long time. And then he had disappeared into a wall of dust like the laws that governed everything else simply did not apply to him.

I had been trying to figure out which territory produced something like that.

The map continued to be a map and nothing more.

A knock at the door.

"Come in."

The servant who entered was one of the younger ones, still carrying that particular careful energy of someone who had not yet decided whether delivering news was better done quickly or slowly. He bowed his head.

"Alpha. The Luna requests your presence in the family chambers." He paused. "She says it is urgent."

I looked at him.

My mother rarely summoned me to the family chambers. She came to my study when she had something to say, or she found me in the corridors, or she appeared in whatever room I happened to be in with the ease of someone who moved through every space in this house as if it had always been hers. She did not summon.

And she did not say urgent.

"Tell her I am coming," I said.

****

My father was already there when I walked in.

That stopped me in the doorway for a moment. Not long. Just the half-second it took to register him standing by the fireplace with his arms at his sides and his jaw set and the particular quality of stillness he had when he was preparing for something.

He and I had not been on good terms since that night. Before that night, actually. The night I had said things in a corridor that I could not take back.

We had been in the same building since then and had managed to exist in separate parts of it with impressive efficiency.

He looked at me when I came in.

I looked at him.

Neither of us said anything.

Then I looked at my mother.

"What is this?" I crossed the room slowly. "What are we doing here?"

"Sit down, Rhydor," she said.

Her voice was the calm version. Not the everyday calm. The deliberate kind that she used when she had already decided how this was going to go and was managing the beginning of it carefully.

I looked at her. Then my father. Then back at her.

I sat.

The room was quiet for a moment. My father moved from the fireplace and sat across from me. My mother stood between us, her hands clasped in front of her, her blue eyes moving between our faces with the expression of someone measuring before they began.

"What is going on?" I asked.

"I have something to tell you," she said. "Both of you. Something I have kept to myself for a very long time."

I frowned. "What kind of secret?"

"The kind that changes certain things," she said simply. "I have been carrying it for reasons that made sense at the time. I still believe they made sense. But what I am feeling from what is coming, what is already moving toward this pack and toward the people in it, I do not want this information arriving as a surprise at the wrong moment. You will need to know it. Both of you."

My father reached over and put his hand on hers.

I watched him do it. The ease of the gesture. The way she looked at him when his hand covered hers, something moving across her face that was grateful and sad at the same time.

"Say whatever you need to say honey," my father said. His voice was low and steady. "I am here. Whatever it is, I know you had a reason for it. I trust that."

She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at me.

"In my family," she began, "we were not born only as wolves." She paused. Organizing something. "We carried wolves, yes. The wolf was real and true and part of us completely. But there was something else alongside it. Something that ran in the blood of my mother’s line and her mother’s line before that, going back further than any record I ever found."

I watched her face.

"We are wolves," she said. "But we are also something else."

I leaned forward slightly. "Mother. We do not have all day."

She looked at me. Her blue eyes steady.

"I am a sorceress," she said.

The room received those words and did nothing useful with them.

I sat there and looked at my mother’s face and waited for the part that made sense to arrive.

But it did not arrive, so I stood up.

"I do not have time for this," I said. "There are things that require my attention. If you called me in here for a prank, it is not the right time for it and it is not particularly amusing."

I turned toward the door.

"Rhydor."

Her voice was different.

I stopped.

Not because she said my name loudly. She did not. Not because there was authority in it, though there was. Because there was something underneath it that I had never heard from her before. Something that did not belong to the version of her I had known my entire life.

I turned back.

Her eyes were glowing.

Not reflecting light. Not catching the firelight from the hearth. Glowing. From inside. Gold bleeding through the blue of them, spreading outward from the center, filling them until the blue was gone and there was nothing but gold looking back at me.

The table moved.

The heavy wooden table in the center of the room, solid and old and weighing more than most people could lift, slid across the floor. No hands on it. No sound of it being pushed. Just movement, smooth and steady, crossing the room and hitting the far wall with a sound that shook the things hanging on that wall and then cracking, splitting, breaking apart into pieces that clattered and settled and went still.

The room went quiet.

Then her hand came up.

The pieces lifted.

Every broken fragment of that table, the large sections and the small ones, and the splinters down to the smallest pieces, lifted from the floor and from the wall and from wherever they had landed and rose into the air. They moved together slowly, finding each other, stacking themselves with the careful deliberate patience of someone doing this with their hands except no hands were touching any of it. They stacked neatly against the wall in the corner, exactly the way you would stack firewood if you had all the time in the world and cared very much about the result.

She lowered her hand.

The room was silent.

I looked at the stacked wood.

I was still looking at it when I became aware that my father was also looking at it and had been looking at it since it stopped moving and had not said anything either.

We stood on either side of the room with our eyes on the same corner and our mouths closed and the only sound was the fire in the hearth continuing to do what fires did without any concern for what had just happened.

"I know this is a great deal to take in," my mother said. Quiet. Steady. The deliberate calm was still in place. "But I needed you to see it rather than hear it."

Neither of us answered her.

We were still looking at the table. The silence stretched. Neither of us moved to break it.

Then...

The knock came from the door.

I did not move. My father did not move. My eyes stayed on the corner where the broken table had arranged itself into something that should not have been possible and was sitting there being possible anyway.

The knock came again.

"Come in," my mother called.

The door opened.

Silas stepped inside. I could tell because I knew his movements.

I felt his eyes on me first, the way he always looked at me first when he entered a room I was in, checking whatever he checked before deciding what to say. I was facing the corner. He followed my gaze to the stacked wood against the wall. A single line appeared between his brows. He did not ask about it.

He looked back at me.

"Alpha." His voice was measured. "Torin is here. Alone."

My head turned.

Slowly. Away from the corner. Away from the broken table. Away from my mother standing in the center of the room with gold still fading from her eyes. Toward Silas standing in the doorway with his steady face and his careful expression.

"What?" My voice came out flat.

Silas held my gaze. He said nothing more. He did not need to.

I looked at him and the thing that was moving through my chest was not the thing I would have expected. It was not relief that Torin was here. It was not anything warm or reassuring.

Torin was supposed to be in Hollowcrown.

Torin was supposed to be with Azura.

If Torin was here, standing in Crescent Moon’s pack house while Azura was supposed to be in his care, then something had gone wrong. Something had happened between then and now that had sent him back without her and without sending word first and without any of the things that should have come before a person simply arrived.

And wherever Azura was right now, she was there without him.

My jaw tightened.

"Where is he?"