Selene Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Selene Nightshade held her father's crest to the firelight and could not read a word of it. The iron disk hung heavy in her palm, black as her breastplate, stamped with lines that curled like old roots. Her father had pressed it into her hand before he died. He'd said it named her house, the last of a warrior bloodline everyone else had forgotten. But the script was a dead warrior tongue, and Selene knew only the shape of it, not the meaning. For three years she had carried the truth of who she was locked inside a coin she couldn't read. That night the trail led her to an old cabin at the edge of the mist. Moss clung to its shingles. A gray wolf sat in the doorway, still as a carved thing, watching her approach. Selene stopped with one hand on her sword. The wolf did not growl. It only turned its head toward the door, as if it already knew why she came. An old man stepped out. His beard was white, his robe blue and gray, patterned with faded knotwork. He leaned on a rough staff and studied her the way a scholar studies a page. Villagers had whispered his name in the last town. Aldric Wolfsbane, the historian who kept the wolves and the old records both. "You carry something you don't understand," he said. Not a question. Selene held out the crest. "Read it. Please." He took it with two fingers, careful, almost reverent. He tilted it under the light spilling from the window. His mouth tightened. For a long moment he said nothing, and the wolf rose to its feet behind him. "I hoped I'd never see this mark again," Aldric said. He traced the curling lines. "Your house had a name. It means those who guard the deep gate. They were sworn to hold something back. Something the rest of us chose to forget." "Hold back what?" Selene asked. He looked past her, toward a towering vine that climbed into the dark beyond the cabin. Its thick stem twisted upward, heart-shaped leaves black in the night, tendrils curling far above the treetops. Selene had passed it on the trail and thought it only a strange plant. "That grew from nothing three winters ago," Aldric said. "The same season your father died. Your crest doesn't only name your blood, girl. It names a duty. And the thing your ancestors buried is climbing back into the world." He pressed the crest into her hand and closed her fingers over it. His grip was cold. "Now you can read it," he said. "I'm sorry." Selene stared at the vine climbing into the mist. She had wanted a name. She had gotten a debt. Whatever her house had chained beneath the roots of that stalk, it was coming loose, and she was the last one sworn to stop it.