The Paths We Choose (The Crossroads #1)

Chapter 1

In the Beginning…

There are a dozen ways to tell this story, depending on who you ask.

Some say it begins with the Sun God shaping the first Humans out of ambition and curiosity.

They were clever, resilient, capable of love in a way that was almost divine.

But they were also greedy and short-sighted, prone to hurting each other in the pursuit of more—more power, more pleasure, more control.

War followed. Then sickness, and then the slow, creeping damage of a world pushed too far.

Natural disasters, famine, and death swept across time, and when the Earth began to falter under the weight of it all, the Sun God—fickle as ever—lost interest. He abandoned the world and the Humans on it to their chosen path of destruction.

But the Moon Goddess had always been watching.

Where the Sun burned hot and fast, They were patient, devoted to the quiet, enduring beauty of the Earth, even when its inhabitants forgot how to see it. So They chose to intervene, not by erasing what had been made, but by balancing it.

They created something new: creatures shaped in the image of the wolves who sang to Them at night. Creatures bound not just by instinct, but by connection. By family. By the understanding that survival was never meant to be a solitary act.

They created their beloved Weres.

Stronger than Humans. Faster, harder to kill, and slower to fade. But fewer, by design. Balance, after all, was a delicate thing.

They were divided into three: alpha, beta, and omega. Not just roles, but reflections of need—strength in different forms. Manifestations of a system meant to hold itself together, even when the world around it did not.

And above all, they were meant to live in packs, not out of convenience, but necessity. Because love—messy, complicated, sometimes unbearable love—was the thing most likely to keep them from becoming what Humans had become.

For a time, it worked.

The Weres lived quietly alongside Humanity, hidden in plain sight. They built their own laws. Their own alliances. Their own fragile peace. They protected themselves, and in doing so, protected the balance the Goddess had fought to restore.

But the Goddess did not create only bodies. They created something deeper: a current that runs through everything living. A place where soul meets power. The core of life itself.

The Plain.

In the beginning, all creatures could feel it. They could reach for it, even if they didn’t understand what they were touching. It was instinct. Something quiet and constant beneath the noise of the world.

But time changes everything, even the things that were meant to last.

The closer Weres lived to Humans, the more they began to mirror them.

Packs grew smaller. Old traditions were set aside.

The connection to the Earth, to each other, and to The Plain faded into something thinner and easier to ignore.

They relied instead on what they already were: strength, speed, instinct.

Humans did the opposite.

Or rather, a rare few of them did.

For most Humans, The Plain faded into myth, then superstition, then nothing at all. They lived and died without ever knowing power lived inside them, threaded through the soul and the fragile shape of past, present, and future.

But across the last thousand years, a rare few Humans still felt it.

They were born with the ability to touch what most of the world had forgotten existed.

They learned to gather power from The Plain.

To shape it. To name its dangers. To train their souls not to be consumed by what they could hold.

Over time, what had once been instinct became discipline.

They called it Magic.

Like the Weres, magic users survived in the spaces between the mundane and the impossible, powerful enough to change the world and careful enough to let most people believe the world was ordinary.

Fate has been slowly and patiently working to restore what was lost. The way all old powers move. But balance is not restored in a single generation, and the world has never been content to wait quietly while power rearranges itself.

Now, the old ways are stirring. Bonds are pulling tighter. Forgotten instincts are waking in blood, bone, and soul. And in the hidden spaces between magic and Were society, other forces are moving too—forces that would rather seize the future than let Fate shape it.

Which brings us here.

To a world where Fate still exists—but doesn’t always behave.

Where bonds can save you—or ruin you.

Where power comes at a cost, whether you understand it or not.

And where every choice, no matter how small, can change the course of the world.

Welcome to the crossroads.