Silvermoon burned on the night of the red moon.
The forests that once sang with howls of pride and kinship now howled with terror. Fire leapt from tree to tree, turning the sacred pines into pillars of flame. Smoke rolled across the valley like a living thing, swallowing the stars. Beneath that choking veil, warriors fought and died on soil slick with blood and ash.
Connall Stonepelt was sixteen—barely old enough to lead a hunt, far too young to lead a dying kingdom. He stood beside his father on the last rise above the city, watching the enemy banners advance through the burning trees. The crest on those banners—a snarling wolf's head ringed in crimson—glared back like a wound that would never close.
"Remember this," his father said, voice steady even as firelight painted his silver fur scarlet. "We are the moon's chosen. Even when the pack falls, the blood remembers the call."
A howl answered from the valley below—low, cruel, triumphant. The Bloodfang Alpha had come.
The clash that followed was not a battle. It was an execution. Silvermoon's warriors were outnumbered ten to one. The air split with snarls, the crack of bone, the whine of arrows. Connall fought until his claws were slick and his breath came ragged. For every foe that fell, two more took its place.
When the gates broke, his father turned to him once more. "Run, Connall. The blood must survive."
He hesitated only once—long enough to see the old Alpha fall beneath a wall of red-furred bodies—before the world exploded in fire and screams.
He ran through corridors of flame, through the sacred grove where the moonstones cracked and bled light. Behind him, Silvermoon's heart was torn out root by root. He reached the cliffs above the river and leapt, the plunge scouring away everything but pain and cold and the echo of his father's final command.
Run. Live. Remember.
He woke hours later on a sandbar, half-drowned, the full moon staring down like an indifferent god. That was the night the prince of Silvermoon died and the ghost of the wilderness was born.
The years that followed blurred into hunger and frost. Connall learned to hunt alone, to speak only to the wind and the dead. Every scar became a lesson, every heartbeat a promise whispered to the ashes of his people.
Someday, he would return. Someday, the Bloodfang name would drown in its own blood.
But the Goddess was not done twisting fate.
On the tenth anniversary of Silvermoon's fall, the priests of the Bloodfangs gathered in their crimson hall. They raised chalices of stolen silver and chanted to the Mating Moon, calling down the old magic—an ancient rite that once bound lovers, now perverted into a weapon. The spell was meant to seal their dominion: to make every wolf of rival blood kneel under the power of desire turned to chain.
The moon listened.
It always listens.
The light that fell that night was wrong—too red, too alive. It crawled across the wilderness, seeking the last of Silvermoon's blood. It found a lone wolf by a frozen stream, his eyes closed in the restless peace of sleep.
The light touched him, and his body convulsed. Far away, another cry answered—a she-wolf marked by the same scarlet glow. Two souls, enemies by blood and vow, were bound by a curse older than mercy.
Neither knew the other's name. Neither could escape what had been written in that stolen light.
Years later, under another blood-red sky, the ghost of the wilderness would feel the same heat burn through his chest again—the moment fate set its teeth back into him.
And when the moon rose over the pines once more, Connall Stonepelt would no longer be alone.
The ghost woke beneath the crimson moon, and the hunt began anew…
→ Continue to Chapter 1: The Ghost of the Wilderness