The council fire burned low, casting long, flickering shadows across the totem circle. Smoke curled lazily into the twilight sky, carrying with it the scent of pine resin and bitterroot. Jackie stood with his arms crossed tightly over his chest, the scab on his forearm still raw where Kaden's blade had scraped flesh earlier that day. The ache wasn't from the wound.
It was from what he'd seen in their eyes.
Not fear. Not awe. Something worse.
Uncertainty.
The gathered elders sat in a half-circle on carved stone thrones, each draped in hide mantles decorated with tooth and fang charms, feathers dyed in ochre and bloodroot. Chief Naru, oldest of the blooded wolves, leaned forward, one hand resting on the antler crown carved into his staff.
"Kaden Firehand. Jackie Stoneborn." His voice was gravel soaked in fire smoke.
Neither boy looked at the other.
"Kaden," Naru said. "You struck first, and struck without discipline. The circle is sacred. To bait a match into personal quarrel shames the rite."
Kaden flinched. His shoulder was still wrapped in a poultice of green moss and pine pitch. The injury had stopped bleeding but not stinging.
Jackie braced for his own scolding. He'd fought without thinking. Acted not out of principle but panic. The image of Kaden's twisted face as the sword connected haunted him.
But Naru's eyes turned on him with something more complicated than reproach.
"Jackie. You defended yourself well. You did not provoke, but you did strike true. Blood was spilled—but not out of malice."
The murmurs around the circle slowed. A few nodded. One or two remained stone-faced.
"But," the chief went on, "you must understand: strength without control is a torch in dry grass. It burns what it does not see."
Jackie bowed his head. "Yes, Chief."
"We will not name a victor," Naru declared. "For there was no war, only warning."
Kaden looked up, jaw clenched, but said nothing.
Naru raised his staff and tapped it once on the firestone. "The council is ended. Let none speak further of blame. Let the blood spilled today be remembered, but not repeated."
One by one, the elders left the circle, their staffs tapping softly as they retreated into the deep-shadowed huts.
Only Rahu lingered behind, his pale eyes unreadable in the gloom.
---
Night fell like a woolen shroud, thick with silence.
Jackie lay on his back in the training hut, staring at the lattice roof above. Crickets chirped in the brush outside. From the ceremonial pit, the low drone of night-chanting floated on the wind—warrior apprentices giving thanks to their ancestral beasts.
But Jackie's mind was elsewhere.
Kaden was right, he thought. That strike... I didn't plan it. I didn't calculate. I just wanted it to be over.
He turned over, restless. His wrist still itched—where the glowing mark had appeared for a breath, where that sudden warmth had surged through him. It hadn't felt like magic. It had felt... like instinct. Ancient and bone-deep.
He rubbed at the skin. It felt hot again.
A knock sounded at the hutflap. Rahu stepped inside, carrying a clay cup.
"Drink," he said. "And come."
Jackie hesitated. "Where?"
"The moon is high. The blood remembers best under her gaze."
---
They sat by the cliffside hearth, where the wind carried the howl of distant wolves and the rustle of the canopy far below. Rahu stirred the embers, dropped crushed greenroot into the flames. A sweet, bitter smoke rose, clinging to Jackie's skin.
"Drink," the shaman repeated, handing him the tea.
It smelled like char and crushed pine. Jackie winced at the taste—earthy, sharp, and oddly metallic.
Almost immediately, his pulse slowed. His vision blurred, then sharpened, then blurred again. The stars above swam like fireflies in water.
"Close your eyes," Rahu said, "and listen to the breath of the blood."
---
In the dark, Jackie fell.
No—he drifted. Through layers of shadow and memory, through soil and sinew and fire.
He stood in a vast forest under a blood-red moon. Around him, shadows moved—silent, watching.
A wolf stepped forward—towering, spectral, eyes aglow like twin suns. It lowered its head.
But it was not alone.
Other beasts emerged from the dark. A scaled serpent with antlers and stormlight eyes. A lion of obsidian stone, its mane rippling with fire. An eagle with wings like jagged crystal.
All of them shimmered, flickered—and merged. Not into each other, but into him. He saw his own reflection rippling in a black pool at their feet: his face... then overlaid with theirs. Horns. Fangs. Feathers. Flame.
Then nothing but darkness—and the beat of a pulse that wasn't his.
The blood remembers.
---
Jackie gasped as his eyes flew open.
The fire had gone out. Only moonlight rimmed the stones now.
Rahu sat unmoving, as if he'd been waiting for hours.
Jackie's breath came fast, his fingers twitching. "I saw them. Spirit-beasts. All... watching me."
Rahu nodded. "They do more than watch. They live in you. In all of us. But yours... are older than most."
Jackie blinked. "Older?"
Rahu touched Jackie's wrist, where the glow had once flickered. "The Heartstone responds to old blood. Yours stirred it."
Jackie stared at the faint mark, now nothing more than a pink smudge. "But what does that mean?"
"It means," Rahu said quietly, "your ancestors were not merely of this tribe. They were of the First Hunt. The ones who walked the wild before the clans split."
He paused. "Some say those bloodlines vanished. Others say they hid—until the time came to awaken."
Jackie's pulse thundered. "And now?"
"Now," Rahu said, "the whispers begin."
---
And whispers had begun.
In the morning, Jackie heard them.
As he washed his face at the river, two young hunters paused mid-step, whispering as they glanced his way.
By the training field, Yara caught his eye and nodded—less playful now, more... respectful.
Even Taavo, when Jackie resumed his drills, corrected him with less gruffness, more thought.
But Kaden only watched from a distance. Silent. Brooding.
Jackie carried the weight of it all like a hidden scar. The vision still echoed in his bones, as if those ancient beasts had left clawmarks across his soul.
---
That night, he stood again by the cliff's edge, watching the stars.
"Jackie," a voice said behind him.
It was Yara.
She stepped beside him, her hair braided with twilight-hued feathers, a mark of her training as a beast-talker.
"You've changed," she said.
He didn't answer.
"Not just stronger. Different."
"I don't know what I am," he admitted.
She smiled faintly. "Neither did the first wolf. Until it howled."
Then she leaned closer, whispering: "They say the seers dreamt of a storm with a face. A blood-marked one leading it."
Jackie turned to her, startled. "What?"
"Ask Rahu," she said. "Ask him what it means when the moon burns red and the beasts walk again."
Then she left, disappearing into the dark like mist.
---
In the deep woods, miles from the village, something stirred beneath the guardian trees.
A shape cloaked in bone-charms and shadows touched the burned stump of a great pine.
Whispers hissed around it, words older than language.
"They've awakened... too soon."
And from its skeletal fingers, black smoke rose—forming the shape of a wolf with no eyes.
End of Chapter 6