Chapter Seventeen
Wolves must always travel in packs. If one of them is pushed out of the pack, it is their end. Death would be a better punishment than being exiled. Many choose the blade than to be left alone.
Tabitha Wysteria
Bryn was exhausted by the time he, Caldwell and the commander’s men reached the outskirts of the wolverian castle.
Horror struck at once. Flames clawed at the sky, smoke smothering the world until there was nothing but fire and ruin.
In that moment, Bryn knew, truly knew, that whatever awaited him within those walls would be monstrous.
And yet hope, that strange and treacherous creature, still slipped its fingers around his heart.
Even when the mind understands the truth, hope insists on blinding us.
The instant Bryn’s boots struck the castle’s stone floor, his world splintered.
His eyes widened at the sight of servants butchered where they had fallen, their blood staining halls that had once known warmth and laughter.
Entire rooms lay in ruins, and whole levels had been burnt by smoke.
Caldwell barked orders, sharp and urgent, but Bryn no longer heard them. He heard nothing at all.
The pain became unbearable, crushing his chest until he could scarcely breathe.
He fled the castle, stumbling into the fields beyond, where snow lay thick and untouched.
For a fleeting moment, he considered sinking into it, letting the cold creep into his bones and allowing the forest spirits to claim him.
But he could not. Not yet. Not until he found his family.
Perhaps the witches had taken them. Prisoners. The thought felt wrong even as it formed. Witches did not keep captives. They killed without pause.
‘Search,’ Bryn whispered, pressing objects that had belonged to the royal family against the giant wolf’s nose. ‘Search, boy.’
The great beast stiffened, scent caught, and then surged forward through the snow. It did not travel far before stopping.
Bryn’s heart stuttered as he followed.
Dread coiled tight around his heart.
From such a distance he could not see clearly, yet something foul seeped into his bones all the same. An instinctive horror that slid through his veins and settled there, unwelcome and certain.
It took an eternity to reach whatever the wolf had found. Not because it lay far away, but because his legs had turned to stone beneath him. The snow here was thick and treacherous, dragging at every step. His heart thundered so violently he was certain it might force its way up his throat.
At first, his mind refused to understand what lay before him. The sight was too grotesque, too cruel to be real. No, this had to be some twisted illusion, a nightmare conjured by his own terror before he had even arrived. It could not be real. It could not.
But it was.
His two younger sisters lay before him.
One of them had been mauled by some beast beyond imagining—her face utterly gone, torn away and shattered beyond recognition.
The other knelt nearby, her body still upright, her ribcage split open and laid bare.
Her face remained intact, and the agony frozen there was so raw, so unbearable, that Bryn doubled over and retched what little remained in his stomach.
Gwyneira had been only fifteen winters old, far too young to meet such a savage end. And her twin, Gwyneth, now faceless and ruined, had suffered the same fate.
Bryn fell to his knees in the blood-stained snow and bowed his head, praying, begging, that their souls had found the afterlife gently. That somewhere beyond this ruined world, they were at peace.
His body went rigid when he saw the king lying not far away, his neck broken and twisted at an unnatural angle.
King Fannar had already been ill—his lungs slowly crystallising, his time measured now in months rather than years.
Yet the sight of him like this, so small and fragile in death, shattered Bryn all the same.
His entire family was gone.
Erased.
In a single, merciless heartbeat.
Bryn collapsed onto the frozen ground, curling in on himself, knees drawn tight to his chest as tears streamed freely down his face.
He did not care who saw him. He did not care about anything at all.
He prayed desperately to be taken too. What meaning could life hold when everything that had anchored him to it had been torn away?
Why should he remain in a world where his sisters would never again pester him, never grow into women, never marry or cradle children of their own?
He had wanted to watch them live. He had wanted to see his father age gently and die when it was his time.
But none of that would ever come to pass.
They would be in Nilfheim now, in the Underworld, waiting for him.
And one day…
One day, he would find them again.
‘Eirwen…’
Bryn’s eyes widened as the realisation struck that his youngest sibling was nowhere to be seen. Little Eirwen was gone. Could it be that his brother had escaped? That somehow, against all reason, he had survived?
Bryn sat upright and turned slowly, scanning the emptiness around him.
Once, this vast quiet had brought him peace.
Now it crushed him. The open land pressed in from all sides, tightening like invisible chains around his chest. The silence whispered to him, cruel and insistent, reminding him of just how utterly alone he was.
And he hated it.
How strange that something which had once comforted him now filled him with dread.
How desperately he wished he could erase it.
Sitting there alone, on the cold ground, felt no longer like a blessing but a curse.
The castle had always been alive with noise—servants moving, voices echoing, laughter and arguments weaving together.
Bryn had rarely known stillness. When he craved it, he would slip away with his wolf to hunt or wander, exploring new stretches of land.
Sometimes Eirwen would follow, bright-eyed and eager, but more often than not, Bryn would invent some excuse to leave his little brother behind, just to steal a few precious hours for himself.
Now his heart splintered at the thought that the silence he had once longed for would be his constant companion.
His new reality.
His only one.
Bryn had been so lost to his thoughts that he never heard them approach.
By the time sound reached him, they were already standing mere feet away.
He lifted his head slowly, his face stiff with frozen tears.
Caldwell did not look at him at all. His gaze was fixed instead on the bodies of the princesses, lingering there a heartbeat too long before sliding to the fallen king.
‘King Fannar is dead,’ Caldwell muttered.
Bryn wanted desperately to believe that the tone carried shock, grief, even sorrow for the loss of their ruler.
But Bryn was not a fool. He had always known what stirred beneath Caldwell’s surface.
The hunger. The ambition. The quiet patience of a man who had long coveted the throne but required time to reach for it.
And Caldwell had taken that time, year after year, driving men through storms, forging loyalty through hardship, reshaping belief until they followed him without question.
Turning them.
When Caldwell finally turned upon Bryn, his men standing in tight formation behind him, something cold slid down Bryn’s spine. These were not the faces of soldiers who had just lost their king.
No.
They looked like a pack.
Wolves, poised and waiting.
Bryn’s breath caught the instant he noticed the axe in Caldwell’s hand.