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Draken extended his hand across the table. Arken clasped it.

The deal was sealed.

Now, they only had to wait.

Chapter 10

Seren

The village of theMarauqwas silent, except for the soft crackling of dying embers and the distant howls of scavenger beasts circling the ruined land.

The smell of smoke and death hung heavy in the air.

The battle had ended. The cannibalistic tribe, once a plague upon the lands, was no more.

The wolves had torn through them like a storm, relentless and unforgiving. Every warrior that opposed them had been cut down, their blood soaking into the dirt. The ones who had surrendered, trembling and pleading, were spared—but only under the condition of a binding curse.

One of the Coven's elders, a woman with silvered hair and hollow eyes, had woven the curse upon them, her voice a whisper of power in the wind.

“You, who have feasted on the flesh of others, hear me. You are bound to the law of your victims. Should you ever raise hand or tooth to consume another human being, may your own flesh decay from your bones. May the earth refuse your remains, the sky reject your breath, and may death take you slowly, without mercy."

The cursed ones had wept, some in rage, some in relief. They had been forced to turn away from the lands they had defiled, forever wandering, forever marked by the darkness of what they had done.

But even with them gone, there was no cleansing the past.

The village they left behind was a graveyard of horrors.

The wolves moved slowly, deliberately, their eyes sweeping over what remained.

Even though the fires had consumed most of the structures, the bones remained.

Too many bones.

Some were scattered in half-burned cooking pits, others piled in heaps, a grotesque testament to theMarauq's ways.

The stench of roasted flesh still lingered, though whether it belonged to animals or humans, none of the wolves wanted to consider it too closely.

Draken exhaled, slow and controlled, his azure eyes scanning the devastation. "They truly believed consuming magic would make them stronger."

Vir, walking beside him, nodded grimly. "They were not entirely wrong."

They had fought men and women who moved faster than their size should allow, whose wounds closed too quickly, and whose eyes burned with something unnatural.

But in the end, it did not save them.

TheMarauqwere gone, their line erased from the earth, but the ghosts of what they had done clung to this place.

Vir nudged something half-buried in the ash with his boot. He bent down and lifted a human skull, small, child-sized, the bone clean and fragile in his hands. He exhaled sharply and set it back down gently, brushing soot from his fingers.

Raik, usually the first to make some dry remark, was silent. His eyes darkened as they moved deeper into the village.

Tattered huts, their roofs made of woven leaves and dried reeds, were now nothing but skeletal remains, the wooden poles that once supported them charred and collapsing.

More bones lined the ground, some broken and gnawed on as if discarded after a meal.

A dried-out hand, still wrapped in leather bracelets, clutched at the dirt beside a half-eaten femur.

The wolves had known what theMarauqwere before they razed them to the ground. But walking through the remnants of their world, seeing it laid bare like this, it felt worse.