Chapter 9 - The Specter of the Past
The figure did not run as the Silvercrest vanguard approached. Instead, they slowly lowered their hood, revealing the gaunt, sharply angular face of an elderly man with pale, milky eyes and a jagged ritual scar running down his cheek.
Kieran instantly stepped in front of Alora, his hands shifting into razor-sharp claws, a low, murderous growl rumbling deep in his chest. "Identify yourself, trespasser. You stand on Silvercrest ground."
The old man let out a dry, rattling laugh that sounded like ice cracking over a deep lake. "Silvercrest? This land doesn't belong to the whelps of the southern valleys. This is the blood-soaked soil of the Northern Wildlands, and I have waited three hundred years for the rightful heir to step back into the trap."
Alora stepped past Kieran, her movements calm, deliberate, and radiating an overwhelming celestial aura. She looked down at the stranger, recognizing the subtle, dark magical residue clinging to his clothes. "You’re one of the executioners. One of the councilmen who survived the Purge."
"I am Keeper Vane," the old man sneered, his pale eyes locking onto the glowing crescent-and-star birthmark visible beneath Alora’s collarbone. "And I was the one who failed to finish the job when your mother hid you in the snow. I knew a spark of that cursed bloodline survived when the Sacred Luna Throne lit up like a beacon for a servant girl."
Vane raised a bony hand, and the air around them distorted violently.
From the dark, frozen treeline behind him, massive shadows began to detach themselves from the pines. Enormous, twisted direwolves with eyes glowing an unnatural, toxic emerald green stepped forward, drooling dark venom onto the snow. They weren't normal pack wolves; they were grotesque, corrupted abominations warped by centuries of forbidden dark magic.
"Let’s see if your little celestial parlor tricks can save you from an army of things that cannot die," Vane hissed, dropping his hand.
The corrupted beasts charged with terrifying, unnatural speed, howling into the freezing night.
Kieran and the Silvercrest warriors roared, transforming instantly and leaping forward to meet the onslaught. But even as the battle lines clashed in a flurry of blood and flying snow, Alora didn't blink. She closed her eyes, reached deep inside her soul, and let the full, unbridled majesty of the moon-blessed bloodline flood her entire being.
May you like
When she opened her eyes, they burned like twin stars.
"You hunted my family in the dark for three hundred years," Alora’s voice echoed across the frozen valley with the force of an avalanche. "Your time is over."
