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What happened next felt more like a dream than reality, but it was one I wanted to wake up from desperately.

I moved differently now, something my guys didn’t notice initially, but when they did, it was too late.

I swung to my feet, sinuous as a snake, and they fell about my feet.

Branwen might have been a past version of me, or both of us different versions of something else, but what she was could do something with energy that I never could.

I’d reached out to the guys, shared energy, but her?

She used it as a leash to lash them to her side, control them so when we moved out of the room, we did so as one.

Crystals started singing as we padded down the hallway, just as they had down the broad streets of Oemis as we walked towards the dais.

There were no other voices to join us here, but they would come, we knew that.

The old woman rose as we passed through the living area, a small child by her side, and for a moment, we considered draining them of power as well, but something…

odd held us off. The power that pulsed from them was attractive, yet it repelled as much as it lured.

It was spiky, harsh, unwilling to be absorbed by us.

We paid that little mind, as there was plenty of time to tackle them once we had completed ascension.

We walked through the main doorways into the ceremonial space and weren’t surprised to find him waiting there.

“Sylvan…” we said, our voice filled with all the longing, need, and calculation that brewed within us.

Hand reared inside the Volken camp, a true son of Lonan, he would be everything the bastard who’d betrayed us wasn’t, a new Lonan for a bright future.

The men that surrounded us, they would be absorbed, used up, and die glad for the privilege.

We had mistaken the violence of the process before, but not now.

We smiled, and he smiled in response, Sylvan, moving closer.

“Sylvan!”

She cried his name as well. Her. Interloper. Our eyes narrowed, a snarl forming on our face as he turned towards her. To placate her, trick her, put her in her place, surely, but what we saw as we drew closer left us cold.

“Arelia, you shouldn’t be here.”

That care and concern, we did not like that at all.

The selfish thrashing thing within us grew hungrier and vicious as we saw him clasp her hands, only soothed when he used them to push her away.

Yessss… A hiss inside our mind as we saw her stumble backwards, a familiar expression on her face—heartbreak, loss, betrayal.

We’d seen it before and quite liked it on others.

We had carefully tended the Black Wolf’s conduit since birth, infiltrating his mind, binding him to us in every way but one.

Our eyes slid sideways as the girl stumbled into the room, the old woman thumping along after her.

Our eyes became slits as the girl faced us down, chin jerked high with an attitude of defiance we knew all too well.

Sylvan’s child.

The moments when he faltered in our grip all concerned them—Kailee and Arelia. They hooked their needy little claws into him and dragged him from the path we had set out. We should’ve made the little bitches vanish years ago, but there would be time for that. All the time in the world.

“Sylvan, my love,” I said breathily, gratified when his head whipped around, those eyes, so like Lonan’s but without the requisite megalomania, meeting ours.

Whatever concerns we held settled as he relinquished his hold on Arelia, stepping away from her and towards us, towards our future. “It’s time.”

“It is.” His voice was deep, resonant, vibrating through our whole body, and then he reached for us, taking our hand. “It’s time for ascension.”

“Yes, Sylvan,” we said, almost in a sob. It felt like we had been waiting for this for so damn long.

Because we had. Dimly, we saw the faint cone of light shielding our original body back in Oemis, the dying glow of energy all that kept the encroaching darkness from swallowing us whole.

Oemis was the realm of the Great Black Wolf now, everything dead or dying, broken and mouldering away.

A realm entirely of death, destruction, and entropy.

We were the only point of light left, that and the black sun that hung in the sky, and we needed to change that.

The others had twittered on about a balance, but what balance was needed but the one between life and death?

Oemis had been a beautiful world, vital and living, and one mistake had changed all of that.

In trying to refocus the world’s energies into us and Lonan, it had stripped everything else out.

He smiled and nodded, knowing exactly what we meant.

Of course he did. We’d raised him on visions of how Oemis was, its beauty and grace, all destroyed, but now was our chance to make it right.

Lonan was dead, gone, obliterated, but Oemis, it could rise again through us.

We watched him climb the steps to the much smaller dais at the shrine, take his place under the Black Wolf sculpture.

The god’s representative in this world and the next, our mate.

We stepped up, feeling the weight of everything that had passed before now.

It had been such a long game, putting all the pieces in place, ones that were thwarted over and over again.

When the matriarchs of Sanctuary banished this body’s line, removing what they saw was a threat to their way of life, not understanding that the Black Wolf and the White were both needed, seeking to protect their petty little town, not realising that paradise was within their reach…

We shook our heads, feeling the rush of energy from the dais when we placed our feet upon it.

“No, Sylvan, no…”

Arelia’s whines were Jaya’s and just as objectionable.

She’d spluttered something just as meaningless when we stripped her of her power, but we were gratified when Sylvan’s eyes refused to look anywhere but at us.

He smiled gently, then placed his hand on the sculpture next to him, we doing the same thing.

The song rose, the old woman holding the child close as it began to surge, crystals firing up all across the ceiling, creating a blinding halo of light.

The mosaic on the floor formed a familiar pattern, of a gate.

We had used them to travel between the worlds, trading and sharing wisdom and knowledge.

Now the light of the crystals was focussed, converging on the central point of the mosaic to conjure this.

A tear in reality, initially of just rippling blue light which quickly resolved itself into something much more terrible.

A black desolate landscape, a grey sky hosting a black sun, and them—the revenants of Oemis.

Black wolves with scarlet eyes, shadowy figures that flickered between reality and ghosts.

They milled uneasily at the edges of the lake that formed a barrier between the remains of our city and us.

But not for long.

Our eyes jerked back to meet Sylvan’s, the look in his eyes a warm balm on our skin, containing all the love and understanding we’d been forced to do without since that day.

We’d lived a haunted existence, using what was left of our power to create the ungrateful bitches of Sanctuary, then been made to lurk in the skulls of our reincarnations, until him.

He saw us, loved us, understood everything we’d tried to do and more besides, dying in the end for us.

We’d thought that was the end of it, that he was a necessary sacrifice for our goals, but…

When he’d come back, when we’d seen him again, we’d gotten that second chance we’d always longed for.

He and I would walk into a renewed Oemis as its king and queen, just as we’d always dreamed.

But first, to regenerate it.

Only we could redirect all that untrammelled energy, pushing it right where it needed to go, back to the central space between the two daises on the ruined plaza.

The crystals lit up as we pushed energy towards them, hungry things at first, sucking all we gave them before starting to sing again.

The sound was horrible initially, taking so much more energy, until they began to ring true, but when they did, light came.

Not just light, birth, life, regeneration, the stones themselves repairing, the sky clearing, the plants sprouting, creating a pathway for her.

In through the portal came the Great White Wolf, shadowy and immaterial, a being of pure energy.

She stalked through the gate, making it widen as she went, following the pathway of creation we had made and bringing so much more.

Finding a foothold back in the world she helped create, she transformed it, sending a massive wave of life and light over everything.

The shadowy black wolves turned and ran and then disappeared, vaporising into nothing.

Death and decay were a part of life, but without life, it was not sustainable.

This place, what Lonan had created, was as much a drain on the Black Wolf as a boon.

In his birthplace, he had nothing to feed on without the living.

“Come, Sylvan,” we said, holding out a hand, the two of us stepping down from the daises together and into our kingdom, breathing in the air that was growing steadily sweeter.

The feel of those stones under our feet, we had felt it so often before in our memories, but it had been so long since it had happened in reality.

The black pall faded away from the sun, casting a gentle warmth over the two of us.