Angela's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Angela woke on cold moss with no memory of falling asleep, and seven moons hung over her like watching eyes. She sat up fast. This was not her apartment. This was not Earth. The trees glowed faint blue, and her pink hair caught the strange light and shimmered back at her. Her only anchor was a single thing clutched in her fist: a torn page from her sketchbook, creased and dirty. She had drawn roses on it last week, home, safe. Now she had no idea how to get back. Something breathed behind her. She turned. A massive wolf stepped from the mist, its silver fur striped with glowing runes, obsidian horns curving from its skull. Its pink eyes locked on her. Angela scrambled up and ran. Roots tore at her bare feet. The creature paced her easily, herding her, unhurried. She tripped into a clearing and froze. A broken stone archway stood there, covered in carved symbols she somehow almost understood. The portal was shattered, dead. No way through. The hound lunged. A shape moved faster. He came between them without a sound, over seven feet of pale skin and silver-white hair, two black horns rising from his temples. The wolf dropped flat and whined. The tall man did not look at it. He looked at her, and his eyes were the same impossible pink as hers caught the moonlight. Thin black markings slid beneath his skin like shadows. "You should not exist," he said. His voice was low and wrong and beautiful. Angela backed into the cold stone. "Please. I don't know how I got here." He stepped closer. Up close he smelled like frost and smoke. She saw the fractures of pink light flicker inside his horns, then fade. He reached out. She should have run. She didn't. His fingers closed around her wrist. The touch hit her like a struck bell. Heat poured up her arm and into her chest. She gasped. The markings on his skin flared bright white, racing toward the hand that held her. He staggered. For one instant she felt something that was not hers: an old, buried hunger waking up inside him, and a single word pressing out of it. Mine. He let go as if she had burned him. They stood staring, both breathing hard. "What did you do," he whispered. It was not a question. His voice shook. In thousands of years, Angela understood somehow, nothing had ever made this creature afraid. The broken archway behind her pulsed once. A thread of silver light lifted from the dead stone, thin as spun silk, and drifted between them. It touched his chest. It touched hers. Then it sank into them both and vanished. The Moon King looked at the fading light, then at Angela, and his pale eyes filled with something close to dread. "You are bound to me now," he said. "And I cannot undo it."