Chained to the Wolf King (The Yzefrxyl #1)

Chapter 1

Elsa

Cold.

Sharp, relentless, bone-deep cold seeped through Elsa’s flight suit and settled into her marrow. Her lashes fluttered—sticky with frost—and the world came into focus in disjointed, swaying fragments.

The ground moved beneath her. No. She was moving.

Her body jolted with every heavy step, and a dull, throbbing ache pulsed through her side where something—someone—had her slung over their shoulder like cargo.

Thick fur brushed against her bare arms, coarse and warm against her frozen skin.

Heat radiated from the creature’s massive frame, a stark contrast to the brutal chill gnawing at every exposed inch of her.

She winced as the shoulder dug into her bruised ribs. Each stride sent pain lancing through her torso, sharp and clarifying.

Her head lolled to the side. The sky stretched above, vast and alien. Those stars—that wasn’t her sky. None of those constellations existed on any celestial map she’d ever charted. No Orion. No Polaris. No familiar anchor points.

Just cold, distant light scattered across an indifferent void.

The metallic tang of smoke hung in the frozen air.

In the distance, she could see a crater—a smoldering wound in the snow-drenched earth.

The wreckage of her escape vessel lay like a broken egg, its hull cracked wide, a chunk of its side split open and curled back.

Twisted metal caught the faint silver glow of an unfamiliar moon.

Embers flickered orange against the white landscape, eating away at the last remnants of her life.

Her humanity.

Everything she’d been before this moment.

Her breath came in ragged gasps, clouding in the frozen air. “Let me go.” The words scraped raw from her throat, barely escaping her lips before the howling wind swallowed them whole.

The creature didn’t slow. Didn’t acknowledge her at all. Its breathing was deep and steady—a rumbling rhythm that vibrated through her chest where she pressed against its back. Thick muscle shifted beneath the fur with every powerful stride, carrying her as if she weighed nothing.

Jagged shadows of trees loomed on either side, their skeletal branches tipped with frost. The forest pressed close, dark and endless, swallowing what little light the moon offered.

Snow crunched beneath massive feet—not human feet, something heavier, something with claws that bit into the frozen ground.

A howl split the night.

Low. Guttural. It rolled through the trees like thunder, and Elsa’s pulse slammed against her ribs.

More howls answered. Closer. A chorus of voices that weren’t quite animal, weren’t quite human. The sound scraped against something primal in her brain—the ancient part that remembered what it meant to be prey.

Her head snapped toward the noise. Dark shapes materialized from the shadows.

Hulking figures with broad shoulders and thick fur, running on two legs with a speed that defied their size.

Their eyes cut through the haze—bright, luminous, glowing with an inner light that tracked her as they fell into formation alongside her captor.

A pack.

They carried others. She caught glimpses through the blur of motion and snowfall—limp forms draped over massive shoulders. The white of a wedding gown. The dark fabric of a chef’s uniform. More survivors from the escape vessel, slung like prizes across the backs of monsters.

A growl erupted from the creature carrying her, chest vibrating against her hip. The sound was answered by a bark from somewhere to the left, then another from behind. Communication. They were talking.

Elsa’s fingers twitched against the thick fur, searching for purchase, for leverage—anything. Her muscles refused to obey. Whatever strength she’d had before the crash had drained away, leaving her hollow and heavy all at once.

She could only hang there, helpless, as the cold bit at her exposed skin and the creature’s warmth seeped into her like a twisted lifeline.

The musky scent of earth and frost filled her lungs with every breath. Alien. Wrong. The rhythmic thud of its footsteps vibrated through her bones, a drumbeat marking her descent into nightmare.

Think. Think.

The crash. The alarms screaming through the Stardancer’s corridors.

The captain’s voice over the intercom—Abandon ship!

—right before the world became noise and fire and pressure that tried to crush her chest flat.

Then the escape vessel. The other survivors.

The launch that felt more like being shot from a cannon than any controlled evacuation.

And then—

Impact. The crater behind her. Snow and metal and the acrid smell of burning circuitry.

Now this.

She twisted weakly, her stomach churning from the swaying motion and the smoke and the fear coiling tight in her gut. The creature’s grip tightened—not painfully, but firm. A warning. Stop moving.

The pack surged faster.

Another howl, sharp and commanding, cut through the storm.

The creatures responded as one, their pace increasing until the trees blurred into dark streaks against white.

Wind whipped against Elsa’s face, stealing the breath from her lungs, freezing the tears she hadn’t realized were tracking down her cheeks.

The distant wreck grew smaller. The crater that held the twisted remains of her escape vessel—her one link to the Stardancer, to Earth, to everything she knew—shrank until it was just a dark smudge against the endless white.

Then it was gone.

Swallowed by the storm. By the forest. By the growing distance between her and any hope of rescue.

Not rescue.

The thought crystallized, sharp as ice. The way they’d emerged from the darkness. The way they’d scooped up survivors without hesitation, without communication, without any attempt to help the wounded or put out the fires. The efficiency of it. The practice.

This wasn’t a rescue.

This was a capture.

A kidnapping by monsters that shouldn’t exist—and yet here they were, tangible, undeniable, their fur brushing against her frozen skin, their growls rumbling through her chest.

Elsa squeezed her eyes shut. Wake up. This has to be a nightmare. Some VR simulation gone wrong. A head injury from the crash.

But the cold was too real. The pain too sharp. The fear too immediate.

When she opened her eyes again, one of the pack members had fallen back, running parallel to her captor.

This one was smaller—if anything that massive could be called small—with fur that caught the moonlight in shades of gray and brown.

It glanced at her with eyes that glowed amber, and something in its expression shifted.

Recognition? Curiosity?

It didn’t matter.

A bark from ahead, and the creature faced forward again, dismissing her as easily as one might dismiss an insect.

Cargo. That’s what she was to them. Nothing more than cargo.

The thought should have terrified her. It did terrify her. But beneath the fear, something else stirred—a cold, quiet anger that settled in her chest like a stone.

I’m not cargo.

She’d survived the crash. She’d survived whatever had happened on the Stardancer before that—the chaos, the evacuation, the captain’s disastrous decision to push beyond the sol system against every warning she’d given him.

She’d survived being locked out of the bridge, stripped of her position, forced to play civilian while idiots destroyed everything she’d charted.

She could survive this too.

If she just—

A flash of blue light erupted from somewhere to her left.

Elsa’s breath caught. One of the creatures had vanished. Not fallen behind. Not ducked into the trees. Simply gone. In its place, a shimmer of blue energy faded into the night air like dying embers.

What—

Another flash. Another creature disappeared.

Then another. And another.

The pack was vanishing one by one, winking out of existence with each pulse of blue light. The energy seemed to originate from their wrists—from dark bands she’d noticed but hadn’t processed, each one set with a glowing blue gem that pulsed like a heartbeat.

Technology. They have technology.

The realization hit her like a physical blow. These weren’t mindless beasts. They weren’t animals acting on instinct. They were organized. Equipped. Advanced.

Which meant this was planned. All of it.

Another flash, closer now. The amber-eyed creature vanished, taking one of the survivors with it. The blue light left spots dancing across Elsa’s vision.

Where are they going? Where are they taking us?

The pack thinned. Eight became six. Six became four. The forest around them grew darker, the trees pressing closer, the snow falling harder. Each flash of blue took another monster, another captive, until only three remained—her captor and two others flanking them.

A howl broke through the storm, different from the others. Higher. More musical. It reminded Elsa of something—a sound she’d heard in old documentaries about Earth’s wilderness. Wolves calling to the moon.

But this wasn’t Earth. And that wasn’t a normal moon hanging in that alien sky.

Her captor’s chest expanded with a deep breath. The creature’s head tilted back, and for a moment, she caught a glimpse of its profile—elongated muzzle, pointed ears laid flat against the wind, teeth that caught the faint light.

Wolf. The word surfaced through her confusion. They look like wolves. Standing upright. Evolved. Wrong.

The creature looked down at her.

Cyan blue eyes met hers—bright and piercing and far too intelligent. There was nothing animal in that gaze. Nothing mindless. Whatever this thing was, it knew exactly what it was doing. It studied her the way she might study a particularly interesting star chart.

Cold assessment. Calculation.

Then its lips pulled back from its teeth in something that might have been a smile.

“Sleep,” it said.

The word hit her like a command. Deep. Resonant. Impossible to ignore. It shouldn’t have worked—she should have fought it, should have screamed, should have done something—but the sound seemed to bypass her brain entirely, sinking straight into her bones.

No. No, I need to stay awake. I need to—

A tingling sensation rushed over her, starting at her extremities and rolling inward. It soothed the chill that had enveloped her, eased the pain in her ribs, softened the sharp edges of her terror.

Blue light flared.

The forest vanished.

The cold vanished.

Everything vanished—replaced by a warmth that felt wrong, artificial, like being wrapped in something that wasn’t meant for human skin.

Elsa’s last coherent thought, before the darkness swallowed her whole, was a question.

Where are they taking me?

But there was no one left to answer. Only the dark. Only the artificial warmth. Only the fading echo of that single word, still reverberating through her consciousness like a funeral bell.

Sleep.

She surfaced once, briefly.

Flashes of light and shadow. Voices that weren’t quite voices—growls and barks layered with sounds her brain struggled to categorize. Movement. Being carried again, but differently now. Horizontal instead of slung over a shoulder. Something firm beneath her back.

Cold air on her face, then warmth. The smell of stone and metal and something else—something organic, like wet fur and ozone.

A shape loomed above her. Dark against darker. Eyes that glowed.

Words she couldn’t understand. Sounds that might have been her name, filtered through a language that scraped against her ears like gravel.

Then nothing.

The darkness pulled her back under, and Elsa went willingly this time. Fighting seemed pointless. Staying conscious meant facing whatever new nightmare awaited her.

Better to sink. Better to disappear into the void where there were no monsters, no alien stars, no frozen wastelands.

Better to forget, even for a moment, that she was utterly and completely alone.

The next time consciousness found her, it came with sound.

A low hum, steady and mechanical, vibrated through whatever surface she lay on. Voices—real voices this time, though still wrong, still other—murmured somewhere beyond the darkness behind her eyelids.

Elsa didn’t open her eyes. Not yet.

She listened instead. Catalogued.

Two voices. Maybe three. The words were indistinct, but the tones registered—command and deference. A question asked. An answer given.

Footsteps. Heavy. Clawed.

Then silence.

The hum continued. Beneath it, she could hear her own heartbeat, too fast, too loud in her ears.

I’m alive.

The thought should have brought relief. Instead, it brought only a cold kind of clarity.

I’m alive, and I’m their prisoner.

Her fingers twitched against smooth, warm fabric. Not the frozen ground. Not the creature’s fur. Something else. Something that felt designed. Intentional.

A bed?

The absurdity of it almost made her laugh. She’d expected chains. Cages. The kind of brutality that matched the violence of being snatched from a crash site by monsters in a snowstorm.

Not bedding.

She filed the observation away. Added it to the small collection of data points her cartographer’s brain insisted on gathering despite the terror. They have technology. Language. Organization. Beds.

They’re not mindless.

Whether that made them more dangerous or less, she couldn’t yet decide.

Elsa drew a slow breath. Opened her eyes.

Light. Soft, blue-tinged light that pulsed gently from runes or circuitry embedded in curved walls. The surface above her was smooth, translucent—a dome of some kind, encasing her in a space barely larger than a coffin.

Her heart stuttered.

A coffin. They put me in a coffin.

Panic clawed at her throat, but she swallowed it down. Shoved it into the same dark corner where she’d learned to put all the things she couldn’t afford to feel. Not now. Not when every second counted.

Her fingers pressed against the dome’s interior. Cool. Solid. Real.

Not a coffin. Something else. Something designed to hold.

To heal?

To contain.

The distinction mattered less than the reality: she was trapped, surrounded by monsters, on a planet that shouldn’t exist under stars she didn’t recognize.

And no one—not a single soul in all the vast, cold universe—knew where she was.