Chapter 112: The Curse

Astrid Vale

The clinic door shut behind us, and Maximus led me through a busier stretch of the settlement than I’d seen yet, past stalls and workshops crowded with people going about their day. Children darted past us, chasing each other between the legs of adults who barely glanced up. For a moment, watching all of it, the place almost felt normal. Almost felt like anywhere else.

A father knelt in front of his young son a few feet ahead, adjusting the collar of the boy’s shirt, teasing him about something I couldn’t quite hear.

"You promised me you wouldn’t run ahead again," the man said, and the boy laughed, wriggling out of his father’s grip with the kind of easy joy that made me smile despite everything. It was such a small, ordinary moment. Proof, in a way, that these people weren’t monsters, weren’t villains in some story. Just people, living lives that happened to be built underground.

Then the father’s expression changed.

Not dramatically at first. His hands stilled mid-motion. His breathing shifted, went ragged and uneven in a way that didn’t match anything he’d been doing a second before.

"Dad?" the boy said, his laughter dying instantly.

I thought he was sick. That was my first thought, some sudden illness taking hold of him. Then his eyes changed, something feral bleeding into them, and his teeth began to lengthen in a way that had nothing to do with any shift I’d ever seen at Moonshade.

"Back away," someone said calmly from nearby.

That was what frightened me most. Not the transformation itself, but the calm. Nobody screamed. Nobody looked shocked. People simply started stepping back, clearing space around him with the practiced ease of people who’d done this before, many times, enough that it had stopped being an emergency and become routine.

The father dropped to his knees, his body jerking violently as bones shifted beneath his skin, his hands twisting into something that ended in claws. What emerged wasn’t fully wolf and wasn’t fully human. Something wrong sat in between, hunched and snarling, eyes locked on nothing in particular.

The boy hadn’t moved. He stood frozen exactly where he’d been standing, and I understood, a half second before anyone else reacted, exactly what was about to happen.

I ran.

The creature lunged the same moment I threw myself forward, and the father’s transformed body caught me instead of the boy, but I managed to shove the child out of the reach of those claws before impact. In the tangle of it, teeth caught the boy’s shoulder, tearing through fabric and skin both, and he screamed just as soldiers came pouring in from every direction.

"Help him!" I screamed, still on the ground, my own arm throbbing where I’d hit the stone. "Somebody help him!"

The soldiers didn’t hesitate. They moved with practiced precision, restraining the creature that had been the boy’s father with equipment that looked purpose-built for exactly this, and doctors arrived almost immediately behind them, already working before I’d even caught my breath. One knelt over the injured child. Another checked the restrained father.

Nobody looked surprised. That was the detail that kept catching in my throat. They were fast, efficient, calm in the exact way people are when they’ve rehearsed something a hundred times before.

Maximus appeared moments later, and I turned on him the second I saw him, shaking, furious, terrified all at once.

"What happens to him?" I demanded.

He tried to steady me with a hand on my shoulder. I pulled away.

"What happens to people when they become like that?" I said again, louder this time.

Around us, someone murmured, "The curse is getting worse," and another voice, one of the doctors, agreed quietly without looking up from their work.

Maximus raised his voice, addressing the small crowd that had gathered. "Everyone, remain calm. We’ve contained him. He will be treated." And they listened, dispersing slowly, murmuring among themselves but not arguing, not demanding answers, not asking why this kept happening. Nobody called for the father to be put down. Nobody acted as though anything unusual had occurred at all.

That was when I really began understanding how different their lives were from anything I’d ever known.

"How long has this been happening?" I asked Maximus directly, once the crowd had thinned enough for him to give me his attention.

"Generations," he said. "It’s part of the curse. Not everyone transforms this way. Not everyone loses control. But some of us deteriorate, over time, until control simply isn’t possible anymore."

"Does he recover?"

He hesitated. That hesitation frightened me more than any direct answer could have.

"Sometimes," he said finally.

I looked around at the people still lingering nearby, and none of them seemed comforted by that word. Sometimes. It hung in the air like something they’d all learned to live beside, an uncertainty nobody bothered fighting anymore.

"And it’s getting worse?" I asked. "That’s what they said, isn’t it? The curse is getting worse?"

He didn’t deny it this time. "It’s becoming harder to control," he admitted. "More of our people are affected than in previous generations. We don’t fully understand why."

Something shifted uncomfortably in my chest at that, some connection trying to form that I couldn’t quite finish putting together. I thought of the doctor’s face going pale over my blood sample, the careful way she’d handled the vial afterward, the attendant who’d carried it away like it mattered more than routine testing ever should. I didn’t understand the shape of the connection yet. I just felt it sitting there, uneasy and unresolved.

As the soldiers led the restrained father away and the doctors carried the injured boy toward the clinic, I caught sight of the boy’s mother standing off to the side. She was crying, silently, her hands pressed against her mouth, and around her people simply kept walking, kept moving through their day as though nothing extraordinary had happened at all. Nobody stopped to comfort her. Nobody looked surprised by her grief, or by the cause of it.

They had lived with this for so long, generation after generation, that something which should have terrified all of them had become simply another part of ordinary life. Something to contain, to manage, to walk past without comment.

I stood there in the aftermath, my own arm still aching, and thought about Maximus’s promise that I was safe here.

For the first time since I’d arrived, I wondered whether that word meant the same thing to him that it meant to me at all.