The screaming woke me before dawn.
I was still for a moment, listening to the sounds rising from the execution grounds below my window.
Three voices, then silence, then the low grief of families watching men they loved swing from the gallows. I did not go to the window. I already knew what was down there.
I had signed the orders myself the night before, reviewed each name twice, and felt nothing particular about any of them. Loyalty tests had a way of ending at the gallows when people answered wrong, or when they hesitated long enough that the hesitation became its own answer.
Three advisors. Malthorn, Bessel, the younger one whose name I had already stopped remembering. They failed their tests about the prophecy, either by knowing too much or saying too little. In my empire, both were equal crimes.
I sat up, pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist and stared at what had appeared there overnight. A small black mark, no larger than a coin, sitting directly beneath the skin where the blood moved closest to the surface.
It had not been there when I went to sleep. It appeared the same night the runes glowed in the foundations, the same night everything shifted slightly to the left of what I could explain.
I pulled my sleeve down over it. Whatever it meant, I would not be learning it from anyone else's mouth first.
"Send for Mireth," I told the guard at my door.
She arrived within minutes, which told me she had been awake. Mireth was always awake when there was something worth knowing.
She stepped inside and stopped when she saw my expression. She closed the door behind her without being told.
"You saw the mark," she said.
"Sit down."
She sat across from me at the small table near the fire, setting a leather case on the surface between us. She had already brought documents. I looked at the case and understood she had expected this meeting before I called it.
That was the thing about Mireth. She was always one step ahead of the conversation, which was useful, except on the days it felt like being studied by something that had not decided yet whether I was valuable or expendable.
"How long have you known?" I asked.
"Since the runes glowed." She unfastened the case and spread several pages across the table, old texts, symbols I did not recognise, dense columns of translation notes written in her narrow handwriting.
"The mark is a signature from the ritual, confirmation that the blood rune anchor has taken hold. It means the magic is already working through you."
"Working how?"
"Slowly. The runes are reading you, recording your will. If you are the one who completes the ritual, your intent becomes the frame through which the magic operates."
She traced her finger along one of the pages without touching it. "The old texts call it the King's Mark. It appeared on the first Lycan rulers who bound themselves to empire-wide blood ceremonies."
I looked at the covered wrist. "It appeared without my consent."
"The runes do not ask for consent. They identify candidates." She met my eyes with the flat honesty she reserved for information she knew I would not like.
"The mark is not the problem. The problem is the scale of what the texts require."
She turned three pages over to reveal a diagram, a circle built of smaller circles, each one marked with numbers. The numbers were large.
"Fifteen thousand," she said. "At minimum. That is the sacrifice count the ritual requires to work across the full empire. Anything less and the magic fragments.
It reaches some territories, misses others, creates uneven transformation that would be more dangerous than no transformation at all."
I said nothing. I looked at the diagram.
"Where do we begin?" I asked.
She did not blink. This was why I kept her close, she did not waste time being horrified by questions that needed answering.
"The weak packs in the east. Small, scattered, poorly defended, with enough Lycans in each location to make collection efficient.
They already resent the empire. Rounding them up under the cover of a loyalty census would raise less suspicion than moving against stronger territories."
"And if they resist?" I asked.
"Then they confirm the reason for the census." She said it without irony. "Either way, it moves us forward."
I pulled the list she had brought toward me. It was already compiled. She had worked through the night on this. I picked up a pen and began adding names from memory, packs I had monitored for months, bloodlines that bent too easily in the wind, communities that whispered about the prophecy with something closer to hope than fear.
I wrote steadily. The fire crackled. Outside, the families on the execution grounds had gone quiet.
I was halfway through the third page of names when the door burst open without a knock. One of Thorne's perimeter guards, still wearing mud from the outer walls, skidded two steps into the room before catching himself.
"Forgive the intrusion, my king." He was breathing hard, eyes wide but disciplined. "Commander Blackclaw sent me directly.
A resurrected Alpha was sighted near the keep walls last night. Multiple witnesses on the north watch, it came within fifty feet of the outer gate before pulling back into the treeline."
The pen stopped moving in my hand.
"One of them?" Mireth said, her voice quiet.
"Yes. The movement pattern matched. No hesitation at the perimeter torches, no reaction to the guard challenge. It just stood there for several minutes, then turned and walked back into the dark."
I set down the pen. "It was not lost," I said. "It was looking."
The guard nodded slowly. "Commander Blackclaw believes so as well."
I looked at Mireth. She was already gathering the pages from the table, stacking them back into the leather case with precise movements.
"Tonight," I said. "The first test ritual runs tonight. Pick seven from the dungeons, traitors with no pending intelligence value." I stood, pulling my sleeve down again over the wrist mark.
"Use the lower chamber where the stone is old enough to hold the rune work. I want to know if the method functions before I commit to the eastern operation."
She nodded once. "I will have everything prepared by nightfall."