Ralphina

Ralphina knew the prophecy was wrong before the High Wicca finished speaking it.

The moon elders stood in a ring within the Halicium, their faces silvered by a basin set into the floor. Ralphina had carried no weapon into the rite. No mother carried one when the future was about to speak of her child, though she had come to believe a blade might be more honest than hope.

The water clouded. One by one, five lights appeared on its surface.

“Five shall enter,” said the High Wicca. “Four shall leave the dark. One shall return bearing what was lost. And with that one, an ancient hunger will wake.”

The elders murmured. Ralphina heard only the absence inside the words. Nothing was said of Faelan.

“Ask again,” she said.

The High Wicca’s old gaze did not leave the basin. “Prophecy does not improve under interrogation.”

“It improves when a coward stops speaking in riddles.”

The basin cracked with a small, sharp sound. The lights vanished. Ralphina left before the elders could decide whether her anger was blasphemy or grief.

Aatu waited in the corridor outside, leaning against a carved wolf as if his body had simply chosen an inconvenient moment to weaken. His fur had thinned around his eyes. His pride had not.

“You heard it,” Ralphina said.

“I heard an old woman enjoy a performance.”

“Do not insult me with that.”

He began walking towards the palace. She followed him beneath the stone wolves, where the mountain wind made the carved mouths seem to breathe.

“You told the Betas the Baroug was lost,” she said. “You did not tell them you touched it in the Vale. You did not tell them Faelan was there.”

Aatu stopped.

For seventeen years Ralphina had rehearsed this moment. She had imagined rage, grief, forgiveness. What arrived instead was exhaustion, clean and cold as the snow outside.

“The Vale offered a choice,” Aatu said. “The staff, or the boy.”

“And you chose Faelan.”

“I chose a promise.”

At last, he told her enough. The thing beneath the pool had not released their son. It had bound him to the Baroug as a living ward. The staff could not leave the Vale without the child, and the child could not leave without waking what their ancestor Lycaeon had sworn to contain.

“You left him there,” Ralphina said.

“I left him alive.”

“You left me with a grave that had no body.”

Aatu’s face folded, briefly, around a pain she almost recognised. “If I had brought him home, the door would have opened.”

“Perhaps it should have. At least then we would have faced it together.”

Before he could answer, the dawn bell sounded.

The five Betas assembled beneath the gate. Rafe carried maps he knew would fail. Ulbrecht had books no one had asked him to bring. Lycurgus sharpened his claws against a stone. Rannulf smiled at the snow. Fenrisúlfr watched Aatu as though measuring a coffin.

Ralphina stepped before them.

“The Vale is not a prize,” she said. “It will ask each of you for the story you tell yourself about why you deserve power. Do not answer too quickly.”

Fenrisúlfr bowed. “And if we return with the staff?”

Ralphina looked to the eastern ridge, where the sun turned the snow the colour of old blood.

“Then none of us will remain the same.”

After the Betas crossed the gate, she went alone to the chamber where Faelan had been born. Beneath the floorboards lay a cedar box Aatu had believed hidden. Inside were a broken moon-token, a single gold hair, and a note in his hand.

If the boy returns, do not let him take my throne.

Ralphina read it twice. Then she understood that her mate had not sent five wolves to find a successor.

He had sent them to bring his son home.