The moon had turned to bone.
Across the dead expanse of the Black Vale, it hung low and swollen, its light a sickly white that did not warm the earth.
The wind hissed through the hollow spires of fallen temples, carrying the scent of iron, ash, and something older, something that remembered teeth and screaming.
Beneath that ghostly sky moved a shadow, vast and slow, breathing steam into the night.
Jrogathrax stirred from the ruins of a forgotten citadel.
The air trembled as his lungs drew their first full breath in a century.
Chains still clung to his limbs, relics of the hunter‐priests of old.
their silver long tarnished, their enchantments faded to whispers.
With one pull, he shattered them, and the echo ran down the mountains like thunder.
He rose to his full height, half man and half nightmare, his body a tapestry of old wounds and newer scars.
His fur was the color of storm clouds, his claws glinting faintly with the sheen of cursed metal.
In his eyes burned two coals of unnatural hunger.
They remembered the night his kind was betrayed, when the magisters of Ardent Keep opened the gates of dawn and poured liquid sun upon the packs.
The rivers boiled with fur and blood.
Now only one remained.
Jrogathrax.
The last Moonbane.
He prowled the vale, each step shaking the frost from the grass.
Once, the mountains had sung with wolves. Now, the silence felt like mockery.
He could still smell the scent of men, faint, disciplined, armored. Hunters again.
Always hunters.
But this time the world had grown weaker, and he had grown hungrier.
Far below, nestled among twisted oaks, flickered the lights of a settlement,
A cluster of wooden halls ringed by crude machines that sputtered blue flame.
The humans called it Varth Hollow, built upon the bones of the temple that once imprisoned him.
How sweetly their ignorance reeked.
He crouched upon a crag, his claws digging furrows into the stone.
His hearing caught the steady hum of the settlement's defenses:
rune cannons whining with restrained power, crossbows cocked, steel hearts thudding in nervous rhythm.
They did not yet know the moon had turned its face toward them.
For a moment, the beast closed his eyes.
Memories.... broken, as they flickered like embers.
He saw a face: terrified , trembling, whispering his name as she died in his arms.
Not prey. Nor an enemy but something he had once sworn to protect.
The memory was a blade, twisting deep.
The hunger answered.
His spine cracked as he leaned forward, muscles rippling under coarse fur.
The mana in the air itself seemed to recoil from him.
Then, with a sound like thunder swallowed by the sea, Jrogathrax leapt from the cliff.
He fell through the night like a meteor of flesh and hate.
When he landed among the outer walls of Varth Hollow, the ground exploded into shards of stone and embers.
Screams followed. Alarms howled.
The moonlight caught his shape, he was too large, too wrong to the human eye,
as men poured from their barracks with swords drawn and hearts full of foolish courage.
The first to reach him swung a blade etched in holy runes.
It met Jrogathrax's arm with a flash of silver fire then it snapped like brittle glass.
The werewolf's answering strike tore through armor and bone alike.
Blood sprayed across the cobbles, steaming in the chill air.
The scent drove him into a feral frenzy.
He moved through the defenders like a storm of claws and sinew.
Steel rang, flesh split, magic torches died.
When a rune cannon fired, its bolt tore into his chest violently splitting meat and revealing his ribs, a wound that should have ended him.
Instead, it only enraged the beast further.
He crushed the cannon and the men who manned it beneath his weight, his roar echoing off the hollow moon like a curse.
By the time the church bell began to toll, the outer defenses were gone.
The streets burned with oil and blood.
The survivors fled toward the citadel at the town's heart, dragging the wounded and praying to gods that no longer care about their slaves.
Jrogathrax stood amidst the ruin, panting, steaming.
For the first time in an age, he felt alive and utterly empty.
He raised his head toward the moon, its pale face now half-shrouded in smoke, and howled.
A sound so vast and mournful that even the machines fell silent. It was the cry of extinction, of hunger unending.
And somewhere beyond the mountains, something old listens....
End of the chapter