Oshael was not built.
It was birthed—hewn from the womb of forgotten moons, from bone and howl, shaped by the screams of prophets who burned their tongues to speak forbidden truths.
And now, Jonas walked its abandoned streets.
The gates had vanished the moment they stepped through, sealing the five of them inside the last remnants of the Whisperfang legacy. Not with a sound. Not with light. Just... gone.
A hush blanketed everything.
Even their own footsteps felt like trespasses.
The city had not decayed. It had paused, locked in time and memory, as if the very stone was ashamed to remember its purpose.
The roads were paved with blackened quartz that flickered with internal starlight. Towering structures lined the edges like watchful gods—shrines, citadels, and moon temples woven with ancient silver vines that still pulsed faintly with energy.
Each corner of Oshael whispered of perfection.
And yet, it was hollow.
No people.
No beasts.
No wind.
Just silence and old breath clinging to the walls.
Jonas ran his fingers along a marble pillar carved with the faces of wolves mid-transformation. "It's like they never meant for anyone to return," he murmured.
Elric looked up at the looming towers. "Maybe they didn't."
Elias stopped beside a fountain long dried, its center carved into the face of a weeping matron holding a crescent moon. "Oshael was the spiritual crown of our kind. The place where Wolf and Moon once shared a covenant."
Elena's voice was low. "And now it's a graveyard with too many secrets."
Jonas said nothing. But the mark on his chest—the Hollowbrand—burned hotter with every step he took.
They crossed an ancient moonbridge that twisted like bone under tension. Its railings were etched with a repeating phrase in a forgotten script.
Jonas paused, squinting.
He didn't need translation.
The words hummed through his blood.
> "Balance in the Bone. Order in the Blood. Memory in the Mark."
He shivered.
The further they traveled, the more Oshael revealed not destruction but deliberate erasure.
Temples whose altars had been uncarved.
Statues beheaded.
Murals scraped clean by claws.
As if the city had turned on itself.
Elric found a wall covered in sigils partially burned through. "Why erase their own history?"
Elias answered with a whisper.
"Because truth became poison."
They reached the inner sanctum just before nightfall—though in Oshael, the sky never truly shifted. Three moons rotated above the city, locked in perfect formation, unmoving. The same moons from the Pact. The same ones that once governed werewolf transformation.
And below those moons stood the Hall of the Moonbinders.
Its doors were carved from pale blackstone, each one etched with a different wolf in mid-howl, stars in its eyes. As Jonas approached, they opened soundlessly—not from magic.
From recognition.
Inside, a vast circular chamber yawned open.
And seated in eternal vigil were twelve desiccated corpses in ceremonial robes.
The High Moonbinders.
Guardians of the bloodline.
Every corpse was wrapped in silver cords and moon-ink tattoos that had not faded despite centuries of death.
In the center of the room stood an obelisk. It pulsed gently, like a heart.
Jonas took one step in.
The obelisk exploded with light.
And the memory began.
The chamber around them transformed.
Not metaphorically.
Not mystically.
Literally.
They were pulled backward into a preserved moment from the past—vibrant, full, agonizingly alive.
The hall teemed with Moonbinders in fierce debate.
A war council. But not just any.
> "The Hollow Gate stirs. His Majesty speaks to the voices beneath."
> "It was never meant to be opened! The bloodline swore to guard it!"
> "He believes power will bring order to the clans."
> "He believes fear will bring obedience."
Jonas's hands trembled.
He turned—and saw a figure walking into the chamber, alone, cloaked in moonsteel, the Hollowbrand already pulsing over his chest.
> His ancestor.
Not a warrior.
Not a king.
But a prophet.
> "If we do not bend the Hollow to our will," the figure said, "then we will be consumed by it. The old gods do not protect us — they abandon us."
> "I will not let our kind go extinct."
The Moonbinders turned away from him in unison.
One slammed a silver staff to the ground.
> "Then Oshael closes. We seal the truth. We erase your name. Let no child carry it again."
The memory shattered.
They stood once more in the hollow, lifeless hall.
Elena's voice was thick with disbelief. "They erased him. Cut his name out of history."
Jonas looked down at his trembling hands.
"No… They tried to cut me out."
They exited the hall in silence.
The air outside had changed.
Cooler. Still.
Heavier.
And on the horizon, a flickering dome of red began to rise—not a sun, not a moon, but a burning eclipse.
Jonas fell to one knee.
The mark over his chest seared like fire.
"Something's wrong," he gasped.
Elias stared at the red moon. "That's not a celestial body."
"Then what is it?" Elric asked.
Elias's voice broke.
"A gate."
They ran.
Followed the path the Moonbinders once walked when they sealed Oshael—to the Cavern of Origin, a sanctum beneath the city where bloodline memories were stored like flame in bone.
They descended spiraling stairs lit by flickering ghostlight until the walls began to change—from marble to raw bone.
Elena gagged. "This isn't stone."
"No," Elias said. "It's a werewolf skull."
Thousands of them.
Stacked.
Polished.
Blessed.
Or cursed.
At the bottom, they found a chamber with no door, only a mirror of dark water stretching from wall to wall.
Above it, ancient glyphs circled slowly in the air.
Jonas's mark hummed again.
He stepped forward.
The water rippled.
And then spoke.
Not in words.
Not in voices.
But in memory.
He fell through.
The others could only watch.
Inside the water's memory, Jonas stood on a battlefield of ash.
His ancestors were dead around him—slaughtered.
A king in silver robes stood facing the Hollow Gate, tears streaming down his face.
Behind him, his child screamed.
Not a cry of fear.
A cry of rejection.
"No more," the child said. "No more lies. No more crowns. No more war."
And the gate opened anyway.
Jonas snapped out of the vision, eyes wild.
"It was never about the Hollow."
"What was it about then?" Elena asked.
He turned to face them all.
"It was about control. The Whisperfangs tried to chain the Hollow... and instead, chained us."
The chamber above them shook.
Screams echoed through the bones.
The ground trembled.
They ran outside.
Above the temple, where the fake sky had once held unmoving moons, now spun a spiral of shadows—and from it descended something monstrous.
Nobody.
No face.
Just a shape.
A howl.
A hunger.
The Hollow King had opened his eye.
And Oshael began to burn.