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Aaron nodded and then turned to the soldiers who remained, giving them quiet, terse orders.

When they were long gone, a curious quiet settled over the cells, and not an entirely peaceful one by the time Finn pulled away.

He wiped his tears and then helped his fathers to their feet, Grey holding onto Rhydian like that would help him retain his lucidity.

And it appeared to work, making me wonder about their relationship.

But they walked out of the cell under their own steam, something that had them looking around in wonder.

“He’s getting restless,” Sylvan said as the earth rumbled underneath us. “You should go.”

“We should have a few hours yet,” Aaron said.

“Fairly sure he operates on his own timetable,” the seer replied through gritted teeth. His hand strayed to the red crystal at his neck. It was pulsing now. “You want a chance to get back home. Go, now.”

“And what about you?” I said.

“This was always the end of the line for me, though I hadn’t seen it that way until now.” Sylvan’s eyes went to Finn’s fathers and held out his arm. “I can take you to the cavern, to Max.”

As we walked up the stairs and back into the kitchen, every single feeling of satisfaction was stripped from me.

I was glad to see the room was empty, that despite the regular rumbles below us, no Volken rampaged around us.

But the empty rooms, the empty city seemed to reflect how I felt inside.

Little Kiralee, those obstinate green eyes staring us down, her will pulsing.

Arelia, Jeananne, even Kerin didn’t deserve this.

Why? my mind cried, over and over. Why did we come all this way? Why didn’t we find a way to save them? Why do we slink back home and lick our wounds?

From death comes regrowth.

It was both the Great Wolf and my Tirian who spoke the words now, and when I looked around, I saw all the guys freezing as they obviously heard the same.

Fuck this! I snapped back. Fuck your sayings and your visions!

Fuck this bullshit quest! The oh so pretty spiritual crap every time we have sex.

Fuck all the Great Wolves, meddling in people’s lives, letting poisonous paranormal wolf Nazis set up shop and leech off the power of one of you for world domination.

Fuck death! Fuck regrowth! Either provide me with a useful fucking solution to all of this, where kids and tired old men aren’t sacrificed to dark gods for no fucking reason other than to soup up the already horrendous Volken, or shut the fuck up.

Very well.

All awareness of the guys, the kitchen, the world dropped away in return for this.

My view of Leifgart expanded exponentially, with a multitude of views of the cavern, the outer ring, the fields, the houses, the kitchens all competing for attention.

I saw Rhydian and Grey reaching Max, their arms going around each other as Max’s eyes grew troubled, Lian looking on in amusement.

I saw them all chained together, the women and children.

I saw their sons and brothers watching from the front rows where they lay on the stone as the women were dragged closer to the Great Wolf.

And then there was the Great Wolf himself, shivering and separating, the Black Wolf sitting and watching as he always had, but not so with Lonan.

The blue eyes, the long black hair was all too familiar, as he stood facing Sylvan, a smirk on his face.

From death comes regrowth , the White Wolf insisted, and then I saw it, what she meant.

It’d sounded like some kind of Hakuna Matata, circle of life bullshit, where the bunny that’s crunched between the wolf’s teeth goes on to fertilise the grass that the other bunnies eat, and maybe on some level it was.

I looked at the Black Wolf, seeing something altogether different to Lonan.

He was death and decay and entropy and endings, but that wasn’t necessarily a sadistic thing.

I looked into the eyes of Lonan, and it was there I could see where it’d come from.

He’d caused thousands upon thousands of deaths indiscriminately, I saw flickers of them all as they passed into him, strengthening him, shoring up the wounded animal that had limped through the portal in the ruins. Until now.

I remembered Branwen standing beside the first Tirian women, the ones that created Sanctuary.

From the little I saw of her, I hadn’t felt she was especially altruistic, so why had she done this?

And then I saw how it was all going to work.

The Black Wolf I’d seen so often raced along the landscape, his paws effortlessly swallowing the ground as he strode forward, going on and on, until he leapt.

The world exploded when he bit the black sun, and then there he was.

He’d used all that newly regained power to punch a hole through the dimensions, landing on the gate that kept the portal secure and crushing it with little effort.

Same with cars and buildings, the mess was smashed under one paw, then another, as people still screamed, trying to get out.

The asphalt buckled under his feet as he faced down Kelly and Ophelia, pausing only for a second as they conjured balls of light before he swallowed them down.

Because with each of his conquests, he took their power as well as their lives, stripping the White Wolf of hers.

This was the wolf that ate the world, and he consumed all I’d come to love, only coming to a stop when the tiniest pile of rubble remained.

Then he summoned it, the portal to Wolflantis, and leaped through.

Striding across the shattered stones and leaping over damaged buildings, he moved across the desolate landscape until he came to her.

Trapped inside what had been the most elaborate of buildings, there she lay, broken, battered and half mad from the isolation—Branwen.

The world was shaking by the time reality returned, the lot of us just staring at the stone bricks that made up the walls of the kitchen for some time, not even having the wit to hang on to the table as the vibrations shook through us.

Until Brandon’s hand shot out to take mine.

“We’re the death. We’re the regrowth,” he said, shaking his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying, let alone convince me of it. “That’s what this whole thing has been, why we’re here. We’re the White Wolf’s pack.”

I wanted to deny it, Slade and Jack too by the looks on their faces, their mouths opening to say the words. Then Hawk pointed.

We followed his finger, and there, floating in the centre of the kitchen and illuminating every score or burn on the workbench, was a massive ball of white light. Looking at it seemed to stir it, and it suddenly flared brighter, then rushed into the lot of us.

When I looked at my hands, I could see the bones, the veins, the blood pulsing through them.

I looked like I’d swallowed a nuclear explosion, and I felt like it too.

Every single one of us, my pack or not, was the same.

Our hair lifted, floating airily around our skulls as the power pulsed inside us.

Now it's time , the White Wolf said, and we all heard it. You will be my conduit in this world.

“This way,” I said, and gestured for everyone to follow me, not waiting to see if they did.

I walked out through the servery then shoved the doors to the banquet hall open, every single red crystal pulsing with a dull light as we strode inside.

I pulled out the green one I had in my pocket, a tiny little shard in my hand, so puny compared to the sullen masses here.

Be bigger, I said to it. Be sharp, able to cut through anything.

And it was. I felt a throb of power, a drawing sensation, as if something was pulled out of me and into the stone as it lengthened, but it wasn’t a feeling of loss.

This was the power of life, what the White Wolf represented, if not Branwen.

It bubbled up, easily replenished. It didn’t require the pain and degradation of others to feed it, it just needed someone with the ability to open up to it.

I walked past the rape tables and the smaller crystal clusters, waving a hand as I had in my dream to send the furniture to dust, the crystals growing duller and duller red before fluttering out and becoming green.

The guys were at my back as I crossed the floor, not making a sound, until we came to the great crystal of Lonan.

We all stood around it in a loose ring, the stone wolf humming with power, making that same strange sound as the ones in the ruins as we drew closer.

Sylvan began to sing again, that song from Wolflantis, the same verse over and over, until the sound grew bright and pure, filling every corner of the room.

This is it, love, Brandon said, and when we stepped forward, we did so together, his fingers wrapped around mine as we slammed my crystal into the chest of the wolf.

It shattered like it was made of ice rather than crystal, great chunks falling to the ground and becoming pure white again.

It wasn’t power, but it was a way to augment, channel it.

The guys bent down and plucked the pieces they wanted, tearing the stone apart like it was spun sugar.

They shaped the stones into weapons of their choosing, or in Aaron’s case, augmented existing weapons.

I picked my crystal back up—it was a sword now.

Morgan and his pack’s descent into the cavern was on our mind as we walked down the steps into the depths of Leifgart. Sylvan continued to sing as we went, until we reached the opening of Lonan’s den.

Our vision hadn’t exaggerated anything. The sheer scope of the space was hard to get your head around, which was odd because the hill the Volken had built was big, but not this big.

“So how do we tackle this?” Jack said. “Smashing a crystal wolf ain’t like taking out a wolf god.”

“My brothers.”

Our heads jerked up to see Lian standing just in front of the Great Wolf’s paws, his eyes scanning the crowd with barely contained glee.

“It has been a long time between Great Rites, but I promise you, it will have been worth the wait. We come together at each Rite, lay ourselves at the feet of our Lord, give ourselves unto him, submit to his judgement to see if we are worthy to be agents of his will.” Lian’s smile grew wider.

“During each Rite, we give everything we have built and collected to our Lord. We destroy, debilitate, wreck, and ruin, spreading out as far as we can go throughout the land to assert the Great Wolf’s dominance. ”

A roaring cheer went up through the cavern, the sound reverberating through the whole space, growing louder and louder. Lian waited for the sound to finally die away before continuing.

“Brothers, this Great Rite will be different than any other before it. The destruction that will take place will operate on the grandest of scales. We have been brought low by the machinations of women, bearing daughters where once there were only sons. Men who would join us in our worship of the Great Wolf himself. It is time to take that back. The Great Rite feeds our Lord, who provides for us. This time, we must generate untold levels of destruction to give him the power to get through the witches’ portal and to take back what was ours. ”

Does any despotic regime manage to whip up this kind of hysteria without the uniforms and the fists pumping and the demonisation of one group of society who’s just going about their business, doing their thing?

There’s a terrible power in the symbols and the rah-rah and the ‘us vs them’ dynamic.

Power I was determined to see an end to.

“Watch the wolf. Lonan comes,” Sylvan said.

At the seer’s order, our focus switched to the Black Wolf, and as if on cue, the wolf seemed to…

glitch or shiver, as if reality fragmented for a second, and it wasn’t entirely clear what stood there—a wolf, a man, or a wolf and a man in the same body.

The earth groaned as the two fought for dominance, the Volken dropping to the ground, both because it was the safest place to be and to show respect to their god.

They missed, therefore, the moment he stepped free of his god and stood before the Volken, paying them little mind.

Rather, his eyes were on his hands, flexing them experimentally, then his arms, his chest.

“Lonan was trapped,” Sylvan said, watching his doppelg?nger move through narrowed eyes.

“Hurt mortally by the fall of Eomis. He retreated to this realm, hid out in this cave until the locals started bringing him sacrifices. For the Black Wolf, this would have been enough. That, and the natural cycle of birth and decay. Nothing could harm him, not really. But Lonan…” He watched him move to Lian, then say something only to him that had the man’s face paling.

“Lonan needed more power than what nature could provide. He’d been satisfied with that in the past, but…

He and Branwen learned ways to squeeze yet more power, move beyond that which came naturally to the Great Wolves, and use them more as a receptacle to what they created.

For Branwen, it was sex, abandon, ecstatic orgies, wild bouts of creation—all the things Eomis was known for.

For Lonan, it was the opposite. Branwen’s rise made him weak.

” He turned to look at the lot of us. “This is what he’s been doing the whole time, since the Volken came.

He made us his agents, gave each one of us access to his powers.

In every single one of us, he created a reward system for each act of degradation and pain and suffering.

” His hand went to his own crystal that hung around his neck.

“Made us all power sources for him to draw on.”

Our eyes scanned the crowd below us and caught the many glowing red points of light across the cavern. The men rose, and with them, they held up those knapped crystal spears, red light streaming from each one.

“We’ve got to take out the crystals,” Aaron said.

“We’ve got to starve Lonan. He can’t have the women and kids,” Finn said.

“He can’t have the men either. That’s what he wants, what all of this is about in the end.

They are the final sacrifice, they just don’t know it yet,” Sylvan said, and then he was on his feet.

“I know what I have to do now. She made it seem like…” He sighed, then flicked me that devilish smile of his, that promised equal parts pleasure and pain.

“Rule well, little queen,” he said to me before sketching a bow, and then he jumped off the edge of the ledge we were crouching on.