Chapter 2 The Lunar Ruin

• Three weeks passed before anyone in the pack saw Gideon's face again, and when Corwin finally found him, he almost wished he hadn't.
• The Alpha had holed up in the ruins deep within the northern boundary, a crumbling stone structure older than the pack itself, half swallowed by roots and moss, the kind of place mothers used to frighten pups into obedience. Nobody trained there.
• Nobody prayed there. The elders called it cursed and left it alone, and for good reason, because the old magic that lived in those stones answered only to grief strong enough to bend the moon.
• Gideon had not eaten. He had not slept, not really, only collapsed occasionally from exhaustion before jerking awake within the hour, certain he had heard Thalia's voice calling from somewhere just out of reach.
• His clothes hung loose on a frame that had once carried the weight of an entire territory with ease. His eyes had sunk into hollows that made him look decades older.
• "You look like something already dead," Corwin said from the entrance, careful not to step past the threshold.
• "Good," Gideon answered without turning. "Feels about right."
• The ruin itself seemed to have grown darker since Corwin's last visit weeks earlier, the moss thicker across the fallen stones, the air heavier in a way that made even his lungs work harder to draw breath. Whatever Gideon had disturbed in here, it had noticed him back.
• Spread across the cracked floor of the ruin were pages torn from books nobody in the pack had ever admitted to owning, texts passed down in whispers rather than ink, warnings disguised as stories.
• Gideon had spent every waking hour translating fragments of a language that predated the current pack bloodlines by centuries, a language tied to the earliest lunar covenant, back when the goddess still walked among wolves instead of merely watching from above.
• "You found something," Corwin said. It wasn't a question. He could smell it on the air, something sharp and metallic, like ozone before a lightning strike.
• "I found everything." For the first time in weeks, something close to life flickered behind Gideon's eyes, though it was not a comforting sort of light. "There's a rift, Corwin. A place where time folds back on itself. The old wolves called it the Severance, because it can only be opened by something already severed."
• "By a broken bond," Corwin said slowly, understanding dawning with dread.
• "By exactly that."
• Corwin crossed the threshold despite every instinct telling him not to. "Gideon, listen to yourself. You're talking about tearing open the fabric of time. That isn't grief anymore, that's madness."
• "Call it whatever you want." Gideon rose from where he had been crouched over the pages, and the ruin seemed to lean toward him, stones humming faintly beneath his boots. "I call it a second chance."
• "There's always a price for magic like this. You know that better than anyone."
• Corwin had watched Gideon negotiate treaties with rival Alphas who wanted nothing more than an excuse for war, had watched him talk down wolves half mad with bloodlust using nothing but the steady, immovable calm that made him such an effective leader.
• He had never imagined a day when that same calm would be turned toward something this reckless, aimed at the fabric of the world itself rather than the far smaller matter of two packs and a disputed border.
• "I already paid it." Gideon's voice cracked, just once, the only sign of the man buried somewhere beneath the fury. "I paid it the moment she stopped breathing in my arms. Whatever the ritual demands now is just interest on a debt I already owe."
• Corwin studied his Alpha, searching for some trace of reason he could appeal to, and found none. "What exactly does it require?"
• "Sacrifice." Gideon's gaze drifted to the largest slab of stone at the center of the ruin, etched with symbols that pulsed faintly silver in the low light. "My standing. My memories, some of them, maybe all of them eventually. My future here, with the pack. The old texts call it unbinding. You give up your place in this timeline to earn passage into another."
• Corwin thought of the pack waiting beyond the tree line, of the elders who would need someone to steady them when their Alpha simply vanished from the world he was sworn to protect.
• He thought of his own children, still small, who called Gideon uncle and would grow up asking why he never came home. None of it, he suspected, would matter to the man kneeling in front of him now.
• "You'd lose everything you are."
• The words tasted useless even as he spoke them, but he offered them anyway, because a friend owed another friend at least the attempt, even when the outcome already felt written.
• "I already lost the only thing that mattered." Gideon knelt before the slab, pressing his palm flat against the cold stone. "This isn't a sacrifice, Corwin. This is the only thing that makes sense anymore."
• Corwin's throat worked around words that refused to come. He had followed this man since they were pups tumbling over each other in the grass, had watched him grow into an Alpha respected across three territories, and he had never once seen him look so certain and so lost at the same time.
• "If you do this," Corwin finally managed, "there may be no version of you that comes back. Not the man I know."
• He said it as a warning, but some part of him already understood it was closer to a farewell, the kind spoken to a friend standing at the edge of a cliff who has already decided to jump regardless of what anyone says to stop him.
• Gideon's fingers traced the etched symbols, and beneath his touch, the ancient stone began to glow, faint at first, then brighter, casting long shadows that stretched and twisted against the ruin's broken walls.
• "Then I hope whoever comes back is stronger than I am," Gideon murmured. "Because the man you know couldn't save her."
• The glow beneath his palm surged suddenly, violently, and the wind outside the ruin picked up into a howl that had nothing to do with wolves. Corwin staggered backward as the symbols on the floor blazed to life in a spiral pattern, racing outward from the center stone.
• "Gideon!" he shouted over the roaring wind. "This isn't ready, you haven't finished the ritual, you don't know what happens if you're only halfway through the binding!"
• But Gideon was no longer listening. His eyes had rolled back, gold light pouring from beneath his lids, and the last thing Corwin saw before he was thrown backward through the ruin's entrance was his Alpha's mouth opening in a silent, agonized scream as the moonlight above them bent, warped, and folded in on itself like paper crushed in a fist.
• Corwin landed hard against the wet grass outside, the wind knocked entirely from his lungs, and for a long moment all he could do was lie there staring up at a sky that no longer seemed to know what shape it wanted to hold.
• When he finally forced himself upright, the ruin behind him stood dark and silent, as though nothing at all had happened within its walls. No light. No sound. No sign of the man who had walked inside it only minutes before.
• He called Gideon's name until his throat went raw, and the forest gave him nothing back but the ordinary hush of leaves settling after a storm that had already passed.
• Whatever the ritual had done, it had done it completely, and Corwin was left standing alone at the edge of a mystery no elder in the pack would be able to explain, wondering if he had just watched his closest friend disappear from the world entirely, or simply from this particular version of it.