At midnight, the drums of Eclipse Hollow fell silent.
Not because there was no call to battle.
But because the wolves no longer needed to be summoned.
They were already waiting.
Beneath the twin moons—one pale, one bloodied—the Hollow gathered.
Sea wolves wrapped in saltweave armor.
Moonborn carrying crescent-forged blades.
Nomads with sandfire torches.
Even the broken packs who once served Myra now stood in the circle, heads bowed, claws clean.
They had all come.
Not for peace.
But for reckoning.
Caelina stood at the front, silent in her newly forged armor.
Her pauldrons shimmered with coralsteel.
Her left blade pulsed with stormlight.
And her right hand held nothing—empty by choice.
A message.
"The hand that shapes peace must never forget how it bled to get there."
Elara approached her slowly.
"You're ready," she said.
Caelina didn't answer.
"Even if I fall," Elara continued, "know that I chose this path because you made it mean something again."
Caelina turned, touched her face gently.
"You're not falling, Elara. You're rising with me."
Then they embraced, long and wordless.
It was not a goodbye.
It was a binding.
Behind them, Zela let out a shrill whistle.
The signal.
The march had begun.
They moved through the valley like a shadow made flesh.
No song. No howl.
Only the steady cadence of resolve.
Caelina rode her steed—Moonshard, the obsidian-coated mare that once belonged to Lycaena, her mother.
Elara stalked beside her, half-shifted, teeth bared.
And behind them came the warlines:
The Tideborn, wielding liquid glass spears.The Hollowborn, armed with moon-marked shields.The Silent Fangs, assassins trained under Myra but reclaimed by Caelina.
The further east they marched, the stranger the land became.
Trees were blackened.
Rivers hissed with heat.
And strange runes glowed in the soil—burning prayers scrawled by the Pureborn to weaken the ground.
At the hill of Thorns, the sky darkened unnaturally.
Caelina raised her fist. They halted.
She sniffed the wind.
It carried something wrong.
Rot… and salt.
"They're ahead," she whispered. "But they're not waiting."
Suddenly—
Arrows whistled from the sky.
Not normal arrows—obsidian-tipped fire bolts, glowing with cursed runes.
The Hollow shield wall rose just in time.
Explosions rained down, lighting the hills in molten arcs.
Zela shouted, "AMBUSH!"
From the right, the first wave of ember-wolves charged—beasts crafted in Miren's Deep Forges. Their fur smoked. Their eyes glowed with emptiness.
And they felt no pain.
Caelina didn't flinch.
She turned to Elara.
"This isn't the battle. This is the trial."
Elara nodded grimly.
"Then let's pass it."
What followed was war in silence.
No war cry.
No chants.
Just the clash of steel, the hiss of fire, the screams of the wounded.
Caelina fought like a myth come to life.
Each strike a memory.
Each parry a prayer.
Each death a debt to history.
Elara tore through flame-beasts with the precision of vengeance.
Zela lit the sky with green fire, calling down a hail of broken stars.
But they were being pushed back.
For every ember-wolf they slew, two more rose.
Then—
A horn blew in the distance.
But it wasn't from the Hollow.
It was low.
Bone-deep.
Familiar.
Caelina spun.
From the east came a rider—cloaked in ash, eyes hidden beneath a weathered hood.
They rode a giant sandhound whose paws scorched the ground.
And as they neared—
The rider dropped the hood.
Elara gasped.
Zela's torch flickered.
Caelina whispered:
"Tavian."
The brother she had buried.
The traitor she had mourned.
The child of two queens.
Alive.
And leading a rebel company of fireborn exiles once thought dead.
Tavian pulled up beside her.
His eyes—half golden, half silver—met hers.
"You left the door open," he said with a crooked smile. "Figured I'd walk back through."
Caelina didn't smile.
"Why now?"
"Because the fire she wields was once mine to carry. And I'm done watching her burn the world in my name."
He turned to the battlefield.
"Give me the left flank. We'll push them into the chokehold."
Caelina nodded once.
And Tavian rode into fire, screaming a war cry not heard since the Burning of Velmoor.
Behind her, Zela whispered:
"This war has teeth now."
Caelina stared at the rising flame.
"No.
It has its shadow back.
And now it remembers."