Chapter 110: Memory 2

LYCAON

The sky tore open.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. The actual fabric of the night ripped apart, and through the wound came fire. Hundreds of wings. Hundreds of shadows blotting out the stars. Dragons, more than I had killed, more than I had imagined existed, pouring down like a second night, and they were screaming.

The first wave of fire hit the eastern quarter. I heard the screams he had promised without saying much. I heard timber crack, stone explode and flesh sizzle. My father grabbed my brother Lune by the collar and dragged him toward the temple. My mother stayed on her knees, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking.

Aureon stood in the center of the inferno and watched his children work.

"Stop this!" Selene screamed. "Aureon, please! They are innocent!"

"Are they?" He turned to her. The fire didn’t touch him. It bent around him like water around stone. "What is a god without followers, Selene? What is a pantheon without worship? You built this little civilization. You bred your wolves and taught them to howl at the moon instead of my sun." He gestured at the burning houses. "In my eyes, this is pruning. Gardening if you will. After all, you let the weeds grow too tall."

I ran.

Not away. Toward. I grabbed a spear from the guard station, something crude and iron, and I threw myself at the nearest dragon. The point caught it in the throat. Black blood showered down and the beast crashed into the bakery, crushing the wall, crushing whatever family had been hiding inside.

The war started then. Not with a declaration. With me standing on a dragon’s corpse while the world burned around me.

After that, days turned into weeks and more as we fought. The werewolves rallied, my acolytes, the ones who had followed me because they were tired of being called dogs. We fought in the streets. We fought in the fields. We learned that dragon fire could melt plenty but not quick enough with iron, that their underbellies were soft, that if you got close enough to smell their breath you were already dead.

It went on for longer than either side expected, longer than either species could actually sustain. I remembered watching our numbers dwindle alongside theirs.

It was also then that mother disappeared. Many thought she had fled. I too half thought she had abandoned us to save herself. And I nearly hated her for it. But we had been wrong.

She returned. She had merely gone to rally the other gods, dragging them into a war none of them had wanted any part of, purely to force some resolution before both species bled themselves entirely into extinction.

Aureon hadn’t wanted to stop, not truly. But even he understood the mathematics of an unwinnable, endless slaughter eventually. He offered terms.

"Kneel. Apologize. Admit you were wrong. Admit your people are nothing but beasts who overstepped. Do this, and the fire stops. Do this, and your little mongrels can crawl back to their dens and lick their wounds."

A white flag, waved only if I knelt. Only if I bent my knee before him and his people, admitted openly, publicly, that I’d been wrong to do what I’d done.

My mother had thought that simple enough. A small price, weighed against the alternative.

I looked at the destruction. The village was gone. The forest was charcoal. We had lost two-thirds of our number, and the survivors were shifting uncontrollably, their bodies breaking under the stress of too many transformations in too few days.

And I had this little thing called self respect. Even if my mother did not. I refused.

"I would never," I told her, and I meant every word of it. "It would be a humiliation I will not accept. Not for him. Not for anyone."

That was when she cursed me.

I remembered every word of it, remembered the exact moment her voice dropped, cold enough that the temperature of the entire ruined village seemed to fall alongside it.

"You have humiliated me," she said.

"Mother—"

"Tonight," she cut in, her voice flat as a knife, "I intend to curse you. And your acolytes, since all of you want a new religion so badly." Her eyes found mine. They were empty. They were full. "Have it, then."

She raised one hand. The sky darkened again, but this time it was her darkness. Her cold, as the moon turned over.

"I curse you, Lycaon," she said, "first of my womb, and my greatest pain."

The words hit me like physical blows. I felt them sink into my skin, into my marrow, into the place where my soul lived.

"You will suffer," she continued, and each word was a nail. "You will never reproduce. Your body will forget its true shape. You will shift wrong, painfully, forever. And those who followed you? They will die slow deaths. They will become the opposite of what I made them to be. Beautiful creatures reduced to monsters. And you will watch. You will watch every moment of their degradation until you do what you should have done today."

She stepped closer. Her breath was winter wind.

"Bend the knee," she whispered. "Apologize to Aureon and his people. Break the curse."

"No," I said.

She closed her eyes. "Then suffer."

The curse settled over me like a blanket made of thorns.

And I hated her. I hated her so much I could taste it, copper and acid on my tongue.

But I also understood something she didn’t. Something she was too old, too divine, too certain of her own righteousness to see.

She had given me exactly what I needed.

***

I opened my eyes.

Mother had thought I would break. She had thought her curse was a punishment, a leash, a way to force my obedience through suffering. She had underestimated my pride. She had underestimated how much I hated Aureon, how much I hated her for making me choose between my dignity and people’s lives.

For centuries I had played this game. I had watched generations of Lycans scramble after false cures, chasing legends I planted myself.

I spread these lies like seeds in fertile soil, and they grew into forests of obsession.

Edelina had been the most entertaining. She really believed that crown would save her. That placing her son on a werewolf throne would somehow undo centuries of divine punishment. It was almost embarrassing, how easily she’d swallowed it.

I didn’t care, truthfully, what happened to the Lycans anymore. Not really.

This had never been about saving them. It was simply a game now, a question of who could hold out longest against a mother who refused to admit she’d been wrong to punish me so absolutely.

My mind drifted, unbidden, toward the girl. The one who’d been dream walking beside me, uninvited, stumbling into corners of my own memory she had no business seeing.

If she was truly mine, my daughter, born from whatever loophole my mother had eventually carved into her own curse out of some misplaced hope, I intended to find out exactly why the gods had allowed such a thing to happen in the first place. Why they’d permitted me to procreate at all, after everything.

I’d lied to Edelina, of course, when she’d asked whether I held any connection to the healer currently causing such a stir in the werewolf court. It amused me, the idea of toying with the girl properly now, seeing what she was actually made of.

That was when I heard it. A voice, soft and furious, cutting directly through my thoughts like it had every right to be there.

Come to me, you fucking bastard.