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Chapter Four: Liora The Banished
Liora Vale
The fourth night came colder than the rest.
Frost kissed the edges of fallen leaves, and the wind cut sharp, laced with the taste of coming snow.
I didn't light a fire.
The cold no longer bothered me. The hunger in my belly no longer growled, it had grown quiet, familiar. A companion. A reminder.
Not of weakness.
Of will.
I moved like smoke through the forest. I no longer masked my scent. No longer cared who tracked me.
But still... no one came.
And yet something called to me.
It threaded through the branches above, coiled in the roots below, whispered in the hush between each footstep. It ached behind my ribs like memory. Like fate.
It was in the wind. In the bones of the trees.
In the way the moon shifted slightly toward an unfamiliar piece of sky... as if it had turned its silver eye to me.
So I followed it.
The path twisted in ways I didn't remember, leading me deeper, farther. To a place no pack dared claim. A place no map marked.
The air thickened. Even the owls held their breath.
Then I saw a glade.
Bent trees surrounded it like they had flinched backward from some great force. Moss blanketed the ground like offerings, but no scent lingered. No animal. No footstep. Not even decay.
Sacred... or cursed.
That's where I found him.
The Elder.
He sat on a stone that hadn't been warm in centuries, draped in a cloak of crow feathers and smoke gray fur. His beard was coarse as bark. His eyes were cataract pale, unmoving...yet somehow, they saw.
Not just me, but through me. Around me. Beyond me.
"You came," he said.
I froze. I hadn't made a sound.
"Do I know you?" I asked, sharper than I meant to.
"No," he replied. "But I knew you'd come. They always do, the ones who walk away full of fire."
I stepped forward, slow, cautious. My wolf stirred under my skin, silent but alert.
"Who are you?"
"A keeper. A witness."
He drummed his fingers once on the stone. "You can call me Marlek. It's all that's left of me anyway."
"I didn't come for riddles."
"Didn't you?" His head tilted like a raven's. "Then why did your wolf lead you here?"
I paused. Breath caught in my throat.
My wolf had been restless. Not mournful. Not grieving. Just... searching.
Nights when sleep wouldn't come, she paced inside me, silent and wild.
Howling without sound. Waiting without reason.
"What do you want from me?"
"Nothing," he said. "But you want something from me."
He pulled a wooden bowl from his cloak. Inside was ash, shavings of root, something dark and glistening beneath moonlight.
"You want to make him pay."
My jaw clenched.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"Oh, I do."
His voice was old thunder.
"I know revenge when it walks in with blood on its breath."
He looked at me like a storm. Not afraid. But measuring.
"You're not the first. You won't be the last."
I stepped forward, hungry.
"Then help me. If you've helped the others, help me."
"I never said I helped them," he replied. "I said I saw them."
"I don't need a witness," I growled. "I need power."
Silence fell.
The kind of silence that thickens the air. That waits for something to break.
"Power always has a cost," he finally said.
"I've already paid."
He rose, slow and creaking, like old bark.
"No. You've only made a down payment."
Then he turned and walked into the trees, vanishing like mist unraveling.
And I followed.
We came to a circle of stones, half sunken into dirt and time. At the center was a stump, carved with runes older than any name still spoken. The moonlight here didn't fall straight, it bent, curled, warped.
"Sit."
I hesitated. "What is this?"
"A choice," Marlek said.
"This is where you stop being a wronged girl... and become something else. Something older. Something feared."
"I'm already feared."
"Not by the one who cast you out."
His words struck like a blade.
I sat.
The Elder knelt. He lit the bowl. Smoke curled upward, thick and strange. Sweet. Bitter.
It smelled like forgotten prayers and old wounds.
"Breathe."
I did.
The smoke coiled into me, down my throat, deep into my lungs...
And my wolf leaned into it.
Then it hit me.
Visions.
Like lightning to the soul.
Gonzalo's face.
His betrayal.
His blood on my hands.
But also...
A crown made of bone.
A child's scream in the distance.
The moon, shattered and bleeding silver.
I gasped. Pulled back.
"What was that?" I choked out.
"Possibility," Marlek answered. "One of many. But it waits for you. Hungers for you."
"I don't want dreams. I want strength."
He nodded. Drew a dagger from his belt, black as obsidian, slick with oil, shining with something... unnatural.
"Then take it. Blood answers blood. If you want the old strength, you must bind yourself to it."
I stared at the blade.
"What do I give?"
He looked at me. And this time, there was something behind his eyes.
Not power, not madness.
Sorrow and warning.
"Whatever part of you still hopes."
I took the dagger.
My hand did not tremble.
I dragged it across my palm.
Pain bloomed, bright and distant.
I let the blood fall onto the stump.
The earth shifted beneath me.
The moss recoiled.
The runes flared.
And something ancient stirred beneath the stones.
It wasn't good.
It wasn't evil.
It was raw.
Unshaped.
Infinite.
And it knew my name.
The Elder smiled with joy.
"It's begun." He said.
I rose.
My palm already healed. But in its place there was a mark.
A pale crescent moon etched into my skin.
Like the sky had branded me.
I looked toward the trees, where vengeance waited like a beast in chains.
"I'll make him bleed," I whispered.
Marlek turned away, already fading into the dark.
"No," he said.
"You'll make him beg first."
I stayed in the circle long after he vanished.
The wind no longer called me Liora the banished.
Now it whispered Liora the becoming.