Two days after they’d combed the wreck for answers and walked half the harbor talking to fishermen who wanted to blame anything but their own ignorance, the steward came to fetch them again — not to a shed behind the harbor master’s house this time, but to the keep itself.
Mormont Keep didn’t look like much from the harbor road — a squat grey hall of undressed stone hunched against the wind, more fortress than seat, built by people who’d decided centuries ago that comfort was a southern luxury they could live without.
But it held the high ground over the whole island, and the black bear banner over its gate didn’t need decoration to mean something.
The steward led them through a yard full of practical things — drying racks, a forge going cold for the night, dogs that lifted their heads and went still watching Cael pass without knowing why — and into a hall lit by more torches than furniture.
No tapestries.
No gilt.
A long table, a fire, and at the head of it, a woman who looked like she’d been carved out of the same stone as the walls.
Lady Maege Mormont didn’t rise when they entered.
She looked at each of them in turn, unhurried, the way a woman inspects livestock before deciding whether it’s worth the coin.
“Five of you.” Her voice matched the room — no waste in it.
“My steward tells me you’ve already been crawling over that wreck and talking half my harbor’s ears off.”
“We have, my lady.” Vesper again.
Nobody bothered arguing about it anymore.
“The Vale doesn’t grow hunters who move the way your girl there stands.” Her eyes flicked to Nessa — spear grounded, weight balanced, a stance that had nothing to do with a merchant caravan and everything to do with a life spent expecting trouble from the treeline.
“Or the way your boy watches doors like he is seeing a door for the first time.” That, to Wick, who had the grace to look mildly caught out.
“I don’t much care where people come from, so long as they’re honest about what they’re for.
Are you honest about what you’re for?”
“We’re for whatever pays,” Vesper said.
“Honestly.”
Something that might have been the ghost of approval crossed her face.
“That, I believe.”
She gestured them to the table without offering wine, without offering much of anything, and let them tell it back to her instead — the ripped planks, the wrongness in the smell that only two of them had caught, the perfect circular marks nobody on the island could name.
“Whatever did this,” Cael said, “wasn’t cutting.
It was squeezing.”
She listened without interrupting, the way a woman listens when she’s already decided most of what she hears will change nothing about what she means to do.
“I could send my own men,” she said, once they’d finished.
“I’ve thought about it.
I’ve decided against it.” She said it plainly, no shame in the admission, the way a woman states a fact rather than confesses a weakness.
“Bear Island doesn’t have men to spare chasing shadows in open water on a maybe.
If it’s nothing — bad luck, bad currents, some fool captain who ran his boat onto rocks and won’t own it — I’ve wasted five strangers instead of five of my own.
If it’s something —” She let that sit a moment.
“Then I’d rather learn what it is from people I can afford to lose.”
Nobody flinched at that.
It was, Cael thought, probably meant as a kind of honesty rather than an insult, and after a week of learning to read Bear Island, he was almost getting used to the difference.
“You’ve done clean work here already,” she went on.
“A dog, a den of foxes, an old wolf that had half my fishermen afraid to walk their own nets in daylight.
Small things.
But you finished them, and you didn’t cheat anyone doing it, and on this island that buys more trust than a name ever did.” Her eyes settled on Vesper, then moved, deliberately, to include the rest of them.
“So.
Finish what you started.
If it’s a thing that bleeds, kill it.
If it’s something else, bring me the truth instead, and I’ll decide what’s owed for that.”
“And the pay?” Vesper asked, because someone had to.
She named a sum that made Wick’s eyebrows climb before he caught himself.
“Half now.” A steward at her elbow was already counting coin into a leather purse before she’d finished the sentence, the kind of household that ran on decisions made once and never revisited.
“Half when it’s done, whatever done turns out to mean.
Solve this, and there’ll be more work after it.
Bear Island loses things to the sea and the woods every season, and I’m short of people I trust to go looking.”
The purse landed on the table between them with a weight that felt, to Cael, like something other than coin — the first real foothold this world had offered any of them since the Fist.
“We’ll find your answer,” Cael said.
Lady Mormont studied him a moment longer than the others, the way she had all evening — not suspicious exactly, or not only that, but weighing, the same unhurried arithmetic she’d have run on a horse before buying it.
“See that you do.” She waved a hand, done with them.
“You’ve already seen the wreck.
If you need another look at it, the steward will take you.”
They were dismissed before any of them had quite decided to leave, which seemed to be, Cael was starting to understand, exactly how Lady Mormont preferred to end a conversation. Follow the newest chapters on novelping . com.
They walked back down through the dark in good spirits, for once, the purse riding heavy at Vesper’s belt.
“You really do volunteer yourself every time.”
“It keeps the rest of you from embarrassing yourselves.”
“And I have a trustworthy face.”
“You have a face like a fox,” Wick said.
“Exactly.” Vesper didn’t slow down.
“Trustworthy.”
Even Rolf laughed at that — quiet, but real, the kind of sound none of them would have gotten out of him three weeks ago.
The raven, riding his shoulder in the dark, made a low, disapproving click, as though it had heard the joke before and hadn’t liked it any better the second time.
By the time they reached the cottage, the mood had settled into something Cael hadn’t let himself feel in a long while — not safety, exactly.
He’d stopped trusting that word.
But something close enough to it that he didn’t examine it too hard, for fear of it coming apart the way things tended to when he looked directly at them.
Rolf offered his arm without being asked, the way he had every night for a week now, sitting close to the banked fire while the others settled into whatever passed for sleep in a house that still smelled like someone else’s grief.
“You don’t have to keep doing this,” Cael said, the same thing he said most nights, more out of habit than any real expectation Rolf would stop.
“I know.” Rolf didn’t pull his sleeve back.
“It’s not just for you.”
That was new enough that Cael looked up.
“The raven’s clearer after,” Rolf said, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
“You know that.
I’d rather have that than not, most days.” A small, crooked shrug.
“Doesn’t cost me anything you’re not already giving back.”
Cael didn’t have a good answer for that, so he didn’t try to find one.
He drew the knife, made the same shallow line he’d made a dozen times now, and fed.
The taste of it had stopped being strange somewhere in the past week — not human, not quite anything else either, carrying underneath it that same faint charge he imagined a lightning storm might have if you could drink it, something old sitting just beneath the surface of ordinary blood.
He took what he needed, no more, and pressed his own blood back against the cut before it could do more than sting.
He was reaching for the notification out of habit, the same reflex it had become every night this week, when it opened on something he hadn’t seen before.
[Bloodline Assimilation]
First Men +3%
[Bloodline Assimilation Milestone Reached]
First Men Bloodline — 25% Assimilated
You have awakened a hereditary bloodline trait.
You can choose to convert the awakened Bloodline Trait into a compatible Template Trait?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Available Trait Selection
Bloodline Trait
Natural Resistance to Cold (Passive)
Your body naturally resists cold and frost.
Status: Already possessed through Template.
Selection Disabled.
Template Trait (converted from bloodline trait.)
Winter Alpha (Lv.
1)
The cold awakens ancient instincts buried within your werewolf blood.
While transformed, low temperatures continuously enhance your strength, speed, endurance, and physical size.
The colder the environment, the greater the enhancement.
Current Bonus: +5%
Selection Available.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[Select a Trait?]
He read it twice.
It didn’t get any more sensible the second time.
Cael didn’t even have to think twice before selecting Winter Alpha. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
He still hadn’t triggered the werewolf curse — but it was a good trait, and one that could only get better if he leveled it.
Granting a five percent bonus at level one was already more useful than cold immunity would have been, and cold immunity, whatever else the System was, he already had.
[Winter Alpha (Lv.
1) acquired.]
[Bloodline Assimilation]
Current Progress: First Men – 27%
Experience hadn’t moved.
The milestone had triggered without touching it.
Different systems, then.
Different currencies.
Whatever the bloodline was counting, it had nothing to do with the numbers his kills had been quietly adding up all week.
The First Men Bloodline itself doesn’t have a Winter Alpha in it, he thought.
Which means this isn’t only building toward the Skinchanger trait Rolf carries.
It’s using the bloodline as a key — something to unlock whatever’s already sitting dormant underneath, bloodline trait or not.
There were milestones.
Thresholds.
Twenty-five percent, and the number hadn’t felt random once he’d seen it.
If the pattern held —
Fifty.
Seventy-five.
One hundred.
Four milestones in all, and he’d just spent the first of them.
Three still waited ahead of him, and he had no idea yet what any of them would cost, or grant, or reveal.
He looked down at Rolf, who was watching the fire, unaware, the small cut on his wrist already closed under a thin smear of Cael’s own blood.
“Rolf.”
“Mm?”
Cael opened his mouth, and found he didn’t actually know what he meant to ask.
Has anyone ever told you a story about people who turn into wolves felt too large a question for a fireside, and too strange to ask without an explanation he wasn’t ready to give.
“Nothing,” he said instead.
“Get some sleep.”
Rolf went, unbothered, the raven lifting off his shoulder to settle in the rafters the moment he lay down.
Cael sat alone by the fire a long while after that, turning the notification over in his mind the same careful, patient way Vesper turned a blade edge under his thumb, checking for a flaw he already suspected was there.
Outside the shuttered window, the moon hung two nights short of full over a harbor that had started losing boats to something the sea wouldn’t explain, and Cael sat by a dying fire in a dead man’s house, and told himself there would be time to understand one mystery before the next one arrived.
He was, as it happened, wrong about that.
══════════════════════
STATUS
Template
Klaus Mikaelson
Original Vampire (Active)
Werewolf Gene (Dormant)
Witch Bloodline (Dormant)
Bloodline Assimilation
First Men ……
27%
Bloodline Traits
None.
Template Traits
Winter Alpha (Lv.
1)
Slots
Empty Empty Empty
System Functions
Skill Acquisition Hybrid Creation
══════════════════════