The temple bells woke him before dawn.
Darian's eyes snapped open to darkness, his wolf-senses already cataloging the sounds around him—the rustle of bodies rising from pallets, the whispered complaints of those not yet ready to face another day, the distant clang of bronze that echoed through the dormitory hall like the heartbeat of some great sleeping beast.
"Morning ceremony," Nefara's voice came from somewhere to his left, thick with sleep. "You'll want to move quickly. The priests don't appreciate tardiness."
He was on his feet before she finished speaking, muscle memory from years of pre-dawn chores taking over where conscious thought had not yet engaged. Around him, dozens of young practitioners were doing the same—pulling on simple robes, splashing water on faces from communal basins, forming into rough lines that would march through the grey morning streets toward the Temple of the Serpent.
The temple rose against the ash-sky like a frozen wave, its white stone walls carved with countless coiling serpents that seemed to writhe in the flickering torchlight. Darian had seen it from a distance yesterday, but up close, it was something else entirely. The scale of it overwhelmed his village-trained mind—a single building larger than all of Varketh combined, its spires reaching toward the heavens as if trying to pierce the grey veil that had covered the world for three millennia.
They filed inside through doors tall enough to admit giants.
The interior was dim and cool, lit by hanging braziers that cast dancing shadows across walls painted with scenes he could barely comprehend. Great serpents battling armies. Serpent-kings receiving tribute from kneeling masses. The First Serpent—largest of all, a creature of legend that had supposedly given birth to the entire bloodline—coiled around the world itself, its scales forming the mountains and its body forming the rivers.
Incense hung thick in the air, sweet and cloying, and beneath it Darian's enhanced nose caught other scents: old blood, older stone, and something else—something that made his wolf-blood stir uneasily, recognizing a predator's den.
The ceremony itself was brief but intense.
Priests in scaled robes chanted prayers in the old tongue—words Darian could not understand but felt resonating in his bones. The gathered practitioners knelt on cold stone, heads bowed, as blessings were spoken over them. At the altar, a massive statue of a hooded cobra regarded them with ruby eyes that seemed almost alive.
When it was over, Darian filed out with the others, his knees aching and his mind swimming with impressions he could not fully process.
"That was…" he started.
"Strange?" Korvan fell into step beside him, the bear-blooded boy's bulk comforting in its solidity. "You get used to it. The serpent priests love their ceremony. Wolf temple is more direct, or so I've heard—blood offerings and howling at the moon."
"You've never been there?"
"Different bloodline, different temple. We attend as guests here because the Serpent Hall houses us, but my real training will be at the Bear Sanctum on the western hill." Korvan shrugged his massive shoulders. "You'll find the Wolf Fang school somewhere in the northern quarter. But first, you need to register."
Registration. Right. The letter from Seruvan still sat in his pack, unopened and waiting.
—————
The offshoot school was nothing like the grand temple.
Tucked away in a narrow street behind a tanner's workshop, it was a collection of low stone buildings surrounding a dusty training yard. The smell hit Darian first—leather and sweat and horse dung, overlaid with the iron tang of old blood that spoke of countless training sessions conducted within these walls.
A wooden sign above the gate proclaimed this to be the Fang of the Lesser Moon, an auxiliary training facility for those of wolf blood who lacked the connections or resources to train at the main temple.
For those with thin blood, Darian translated silently. For those like me.
He found the administration building—a generous term for what was essentially a large room with a desk—and presented himself to the woman behind it. She was perhaps fifty winters old, grey-haired and stern-faced, with two faded tattoos visible on her forearms: a wolf's paw and a crescent moon.
"Name?"
"Darian. Of Varketh, in the grey mountains."
"Bloodline?"
"Wolf. First tattoo, awakened a few days ago."
The woman—she had not offered her name—looked him over with the practiced eye of someone who had evaluated countless young hopefuls. Whatever she saw did not impress her.
"Letter of introduction?"
Darian produced the sealed envelope Seruvan had given him. The woman took it, glanced at the wax seal bearing Seruvan's personal mark, and set it aside unopened.
"You'll work the stables," she said, already reaching for a ledger. "Morning feeding before dawn prayers, midday feeding after the second bell. Evenings are your own for training and study. Meals are provided in the common hall—miss them and you go hungry. Training sessions are held in the eastern yard, scroll study in the western building. Questions?"
Darian stared at the unopened letter. "You didn't read—"
"I don't need to." The woman's voice held no cruelty, only the flat certainty of long experience. "Seruvan of Clan Ashreth sends one or two pups every year. They all get the same treatment. Doesn't matter what he writes—could be glowing praise, could be dire warnings—the result is the same. You work, you train, you prove yourself or you don't. The letter might matter if you reach the third tattoo. Until then, you're just another thin-blooded hopeful with dreams too big for your station."
She stamped something in her ledger and handed him a wooden token marked with a sleeping wolf.
"Stables are behind the eastern building. Master Voreth will show you your duties. Welcome to the Fang of the Lesser Moon. Try not to die."
—————
The horses did not care about his bloodline.
This, Darian discovered, was oddly comforting. The eight beasts stabled in the school's modest barn were working animals—sturdy, patient creatures used for pulling carts and carrying supplies—and they judged him solely on the quality of his care. Fresh hay, clean water, gentle hands when brushing their coats. These things mattered to them. The thinness of his wolf blood did not.
Master Voreth, a three-tattooed man of few words and many scars, watched Darian work through the first morning feeding and offered a single grunt of approval before disappearing to other duties. It was, Darian suspected, the highest praise he was likely to receive.
The physical labor was familiar—not so different from tending his father's goats, though the scale was larger and the expectations higher. By the time the second bell rang for midday feeding, his arms ached and his clothes were stained with sweat and horse hair. But his mind was already turning to the evening ahead.
Training. Study. The path forward.
The scroll room was smaller than he had hoped, its shelves holding perhaps fifty texts on subjects ranging from basic meditation techniques to advanced transformation theory. Most were written in the formal script of the empire—similar enough to the mountain dialect Darian knew that he could recognize individual words, but different enough that full comprehension eluded him.
He spent his first evening struggling through a primer on blood refinement, sounding out words like a child learning to read for the first time. The humiliation burned, but he forced himself to continue. He had not traveled ten days to fail because of language.
By the third evening, he had developed a system: read slowly, mark unfamiliar words, ask Nefara or Korvan for translations when he returned to the dormitory. Both seemed amused by his dedication but helped willingly enough. They were also navigating unfamiliar waters, after all. Thin-blooded practitioners from small villages, dreaming of heights that their ancestors had never reached.
The training itself was both easier and harder than he had expected.
Easier, because his awakening had opened doors within himself that he had not known existed. When he sat in meditation, focusing on his first tattoo, he could feel the wolf-blood responding—a warm pulse of power that flowed through his veins like liquid fire. The connection was there, waiting to be refined, and each session strengthened it slightly.
Harder, because refinement was slow, grueling work. Two hours of meditation each evening left him drained and hollow, his mind aching from the sustained concentration required. Progress was measured in the smallest of increments—a slightly faster transformation of his nails, a marginally sharper sense of smell, a fractional increase in the duration he could maintain his enhanced state.
At this rate, he calculated, the second tattoo was years away.
Walk the tight path, Seruvan had said. Wait.
But waiting was hard when hunger gnawed at your belly and ambition burned in your heart.
—————
He met Rasheth on the fifth day.
The older wolf-blood found him in the training yard, struggling through a meditation exercise that involved maintaining partial transformation while moving through a series of combat forms. Darian's claws kept retracting at the wrong moments, his concentration fracturing every time he tried to combine physical movement with internal focus.
"You're fighting yourself," Rasheth said.
Darian's claws retracted fully as he lost focus, and he turned to face the speaker. Rasheth was perhaps twenty winters old, lean and sharp-featured, with two tattoos visible on his neck—a fang and a running wolf. Second level. Two years ahead on the path.
"What do you mean?"
"You're treating the transformation and the movement as separate things." Rasheth moved into the yard, his own claws extending with casual ease. "Watch."
He flowed through the same combat forms Darian had been attempting, but where Darian had moved in jerks and starts, Rasheth moved like water—his claws extending and retracting in perfect rhythm with his strikes and blocks, as if the transformation itself was part of the technique rather than an addition to it.
"The forms were designed for beast-blood," Rasheth explained, barely winded. "The transformation isn't separate from the movement—it is the movement. You're not maintaining claws while you fight. You're letting the fight call forth the claws."
It was such a simple insight. Such an obvious thing, once someone pointed it out.
"Why are you helping me?" Darian asked. "We've never spoken before."
Rasheth shrugged. "You're wolf-blood. I'm wolf-blood. In this place, that matters more than you might think." He gestured at the training yard, at the various students practicing in their own spaces. "Serpent-blooded help serpent-blooded. Bear-blooded help bear-blooded. If we thin-blooded don't look out for each other, no one else will."
Over the following days, Rasheth shared other shortcuts—small techniques and insights that were never written in the scrolls but were passed down through informal networks of practitioners who lacked the resources of the great clans. How to position the body during meditation to improve blood flow. Which foods enhanced the connection to beast-blood and which dampened it. The best times of day for different types of training.
None of it was secret knowledge. None of it was forbidden. It was simply the accumulated wisdom of those who had walked the path before, freely shared among those who followed.
Darian memorized everything, grateful beyond words for the kindness of a stranger who had chosen to see kinship rather than competition.
—————
The bruised faces appeared on the seventh day.
Darian noticed them at the evening meal—two young men he had seen in the dormitory, now sporting split lips and blackened eyes that spoke of recent violence. They sat apart from the others, eating quickly and avoiding eye contact.
"What happened to them?" he asked Nefara quietly.
She glanced at the injured pair and quickly looked away. "Arena. Don't ask."
But Darian did ask—later, carefully, through the informal network of wolf-blooded practitioners that Rasheth had introduced him to. The answers came in fragments, whispered in corners and alleyways.
Beneath the holy city, there was another city.
Underground fighting pits where practitioners tested themselves against each other for coin and glory. Gambling dens where fortunes changed hands on the outcome of a single match. A shadow economy that existed parallel to the legitimate temples and schools, feeding on the desperation of those who needed money faster than the official paths could provide.
The two young men had fought. They had lost. They were lucky to have survived.
"It's disgusting," Darian said to Rasheth that night, unable to keep the anger from his voice. "They're turning awakened practitioners into entertainment. Into animals."
Rasheth's expression was unreadable. "Some would say we already are animals. That's the point of the Beast Path, isn't it?"
"That's not—" Darian stopped, frustrated by his inability to articulate what he meant. "It's exploitation. The strong profiting from the desperate."
"Yes." Rasheth's voice held no judgment, only weary acceptance. "And it's been happening for centuries. The temples know. The authorities know. Everyone knows. But the arena serves a purpose—it gives the desperate a chance at quick coin, and it gives the wealthy entertainment. As long as participation is voluntary, as long as the fighters consent…" He shrugged. "The powerful have always found ways to make the powerless fight for their amusement. At least here, the fighters get paid."
Darian wanted to argue. Wanted to rage against the injustice of it. But Seruvan's words echoed in his mind: Power rules. Those who have it use it. Those who lack it serve or die.
He was beginning to understand what the old man had meant.
—————
The letter from home arrived at the end of the second week.
His mother's handwriting, careful and precise—she was one of the few women in Varketh who could write, having learned from her own mother who had served briefly in a merchant's household. The news was simple: the family was well, the goats were healthy, his father's anger had faded to something like grudging acceptance.
But between the lines, Darian read what was not written. The winter stores were low. The trading season had been poor. Every coin mattered.
He had been sending nothing home. Had been keeping every copper for himself, for food and supplies and the small expenses that accumulated in city life. Shame burned in his chest like acid.
He needed more work.
The next morning, after the stable duties were complete, Darian walked through the streets of Mithrakesh with new purpose. His eyes scanned storefronts and market stalls, searching for opportunities. His ears listened for mentions of help needed. His nose—
His nose caught something interesting.
The shop was small and unremarkable, tucked between a textile merchant and a coppersmith. No sign hung above its door, and the single window was shuttered against prying eyes. But the smells that leaked from within were extraordinary—a symphony of scents that Darian's wolf-blood parsed automatically into components: dried herbs, mineral salts, fermented compounds, and beneath it all, the unmistakable musk of refined beast-blood essence.
A drug shop. Or rather, an apothecary that dealt in substances both legal and otherwise.
Darian hesitated at the threshold. His village sensibilities recoiled from what such a place might represent—addiction, exploitation, the weaknesses of the flesh made profitable. But his pragmatic mind recognized opportunity. A shop dealing in scents would need someone who could smell.
He pushed open the door.
The interior was dim and crowded, shelves lining every wall and covering every surface with jars, bottles, and pouches of countless substances. Behind a counter sat an elderly man with the subtle scaling of serpent blood along his forearms—one tattoo only, faded with age, but his eyes were sharp and measuring.
"Lost, boy?"
"Looking for work." Darian kept his voice steady. "I have skills that might be useful to an establishment like yours."
"Oh?" The old man's smile held amusement but no warmth. "And what skills would those be?"
Darian closed his eyes and breathed deeply. The scents of the shop flooded his awareness—overwhelming at first, but then separating into distinct threads as his wolf-blood processed the information.
"The jar on the second shelf, third from the left—it's been contaminated with moisture. The seal is compromised." He pointed without looking. "The pouch near your elbow contains moonpetal extract cut with common sweetroot—about sixty percent pure, not the eighty percent your label claims. And somewhere in the back room, you have a supply of beast-blood essence that's beginning to spoil. Three days, maybe four, before it becomes worthless."
He opened his eyes.
The old man was staring at him with an expression that had shifted from amusement to calculating interest.
"Wolf-blood. First tattoo, but strong senses." He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "How did you know about the essence?"
"The smell of decay is distinctive. Once beast-blood begins to break down, it produces a specific compound that my nose recognizes."
"Hmm." The old man rose from his stool, moving with the careful grace of the elderly. He retrieved the jar Darian had mentioned, examined its seal, and grunted. "You're right about this one. I hadn't noticed."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's a maybe." The old man set down the jar and fixed Darian with a penetrating stare. "I can use a nose like yours for two hours daily. Inventory verification, detecting contamination before it becomes a problem. The pay is minimal—enough for simple meals, no more. And you will ask no questions about what comes through this shop or who buys it."
Darian thought of his mother's letter. Of the winter stores running low. Of the tight path he had to walk.
"I accept."
"Hmm." The old man extended a scaled hand. "I am Sethkhan. You will address me as Master. Be here at the fourth bell each afternoon, and do not be late. Lateness will not be tolerated."
They shook hands, and Darian felt something settle into place—another piece of his new life finding its position.
—————
That night, lying on his pallet in the dormitory hall, Darian took stock of his situation.
His days were full now—stable work in the mornings and midday, training and study in the early evening, the apothecary in the late afternoon. He fell into bed exhausted each night and rose exhausted each morning. The pace was brutal, unsustainable in the long term.
But it was progress.
Each day, his connection to his wolf-blood grew stronger. Each day, his understanding of the formal script improved. Each day, the coins in his pouch increased—slowly, painfully slowly, but increasing nonetheless. Soon he would be able to send something home. Soon he would be able to ease his mother's worries.
The arena existed. The powerful exploited the weak. The system was designed to keep thin-blooded practitioners like him in their place, forever struggling, forever grateful for the scraps that fell from noble tables.
But within that system, there were paths forward. Narrow paths, tight paths, paths that required every ounce of cunning and endurance he possessed. He would walk them. He would climb.
And someday—someday—he would stand tall enough to change things.
Until then, he would work. He would learn. He would survive.
Darian closed his eyes, feeling the wolf-blood pulse through his veins, and let exhaustion carry him down into dreamless sleep.