“I didn’t look back… because nothing behind me was mine anymore.”
Lena
I walked behind Riven and didn’t say anything.
He didn’t either.
He just moved steadily, calmly, unhurried, and I followed.
That was the whole arrangement.
No instructions, no small talk, no “are you okay.” I just followed him.
I was fine with that, actually.
I don’t know what I had expected from a werewolf escort.
Something more threatening, maybe.
Something that matched the word “summoned”.
But Riven seemed like a normal man.
He was tall, quiet, carrying himself like someone who had done this job a hundred times and saw no reason to make it dramatic.
The calmness helped me more than I thought it would.
I watched his back as we walked, and slowly, my thoughts started to fade.
I had made my choice.
I had walked out of my house, out of my life, without looking back.
There was nothing left to do now except keep moving forward.
So I did.
The horse was waiting at the end of the street.
I saw it from a distance, and my feet almost stopped on their own.
It was enormous.
Dark brown, almost black, with the kind of size that made the road beneath it look suddenly smaller.
It stood completely still, like it had been there for hours and had no opinion about waiting.
Riven glanced back at me.
“Have you ridden before?”
“Once,” I said.
“At a birthday party when I was nine. It was a very small horse.”
Something shifted in his expression.
It wasn’t quite a smile; it was something just underneath one.
Okay.
So werewolves have a sense of humour.
Good to know.
He helped me up without making a whole thing of it.
Just quiet, practical, efficient and then we were moving.
The city fell away slowly.
First the familiar streets, then the edges of the neighbourhood, then the last landmarks I recognised.
A corner shop I had been to a hundred times.
The park where Tessa and I used to sit on the swings.
The road that led to my school.
Gone.
I didn’t let myself look too long at any of it.
We rode out into the countryside, and I focused on the horse under me, on keeping my balance, on the cold air against my face.
The fields were green at first, and then slowly, gradually, they weren’t.
The green faded, turned pale and then grey.
The temperature dropped by degrees, as if something ahead of us were drawing the warmth out of the air.
The sky changed, too.
This time, heavier and darker at the edges.
Like a sky that had never quite learned how to be daylight.
“What does crossing feel like?” I asked.
I hadn’t meant to say it.
Riven was quiet for a moment.
“Different for everyone,” he said.
Then a pause.
There was no gate, no arch, no door, and no dramatic entrance—just a place where the world looked wrong.
The light hit the air at an angle that didn’t make sense.
The temperature dropped sharply enough that my breath turned to fog.
My eyes couldn’t quite focus on the space ahead, like trying to look at something that refused to stay still.
It hit me like jumping into deep water.
The world pressed in from every direction at once.
A rushing feeling moved through my whole body.
My ears filled with something that sounded like whispering, hundreds of voices just below the level of words.
The light cracked open into a deep, bruised purple and then…
Nothing.
I came back slowly.
I was standing on the ground.
I didn’t remember getting off the horse.
My legs felt strange, like they belonged to someone else.
Riven’s hand was on my elbow, steady and firm.
Easy,” he said quietly.
“Take a breath.”
I breathed.
The air tasted different here.
Cold and dense, like breathing near old stone.
Like a place that had been ancient for so long, it had stopped pretending to be anything else.
I looked up and forgot to breathe again.
Dark towers rose against a sky so deep grey it was almost purple.
Black stone walls, massive and ancient, with torches burning orange along the battlements, even though it was the middle of the day.
Everything was enormous.
Everything was heavy.
The whole kingdom sat there like it had grown out of the earth itself, completely unbothered by the fact that it was terrifying.
Erevon.
This was real.
This was actually, completely, impossibly real.
It started in my chest.
A pull that is low and deep, like a string attached somewhere behind my ribs being tugged in one specific direction.
It wasn’t subtle.
It wasn’t a whisper.
It was a roar, warm and insistent and completely certain of itself.
My body turned before my mind told it to.
And I saw him.
He stood about thirty feet away and was watching me.
I don’t know how to explain what happened in that moment except to say that every part of me went quiet.
The bond.
That thing I had no proper word for, yet recognised him.
In every werewolf story I had ever read under my blanket at sixteen, the king was always perfect.
Tall and beautiful and impossible.
I had never believed it.
I had spent the last four days preparing myself for a man with cold eyes and a cruel face.
Someone older, harder, someone who looked like he had been carrying a curse for long enough that it showed.
That was what I had built in my head to make this manageable—a monster I could understand from a safe distance.
This was not that.
He was tall, like genuinely tall, with broad shoulders and a heavy black coat that made him look like he had been cut out of the shadows and left standing there.
His face was sharp.
He has a strong jaw, high cheekbones, and dark amber eyes that were currently fixed directly on me with an intensity that made my stomach do something I immediately decided not to think about.
He wasn’t old.
He wasn’t even close to old.
He was young. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Young enough that everything I had carefully prepared mentally collapsed instantly.
And the panic that rushed in to replace it was completely a different kind of panic than I had planned for.
He didn’t move, but his jawline tightened.
And I stood there with my old bag on my shoulder, my hair was a mess from the wind, my sneakers dusty from the road, feeling like the most ordinary thing that had ever existed in this extraordinary, terrifying place.
I had used up every piece of bravery I had on the crossing.
I had nothing left.
He started walking toward me, and I felt my heart pounding heavily.
The closer he got, the more I felt it, that pull, that warmth, that completely inconvenient and deeply unfair heat that spread through my chest as it belonged there.
What is happening to me?
He stopped a few feet away.
Close enough that I had to tilt my head back slightly to look at his face properly, he looked down at me.
Neither of us said anything.
The bond hummed between us, warm and steady and completely unconcerned with how terrified I was.
I needed to say something.
I needed to be a person.
A real person with words and thoughts and dignity, not just a girl standing there with her mouth slightly open.
I opened my mouth and said the thing I hadn’t planned for.
“You’re not old,” I said.
There was complete silence.
Did I say that?
Then, behind me, Riven made a sound that was very clearly a cough covering a laugh.
I wanted to dissolve into the ground.
This is certainly embarrassing; this isn’t what I wanted to say.
What happened to “hello” or “your majesty,” like in the movies?
The king didn’t move.
There was no single expression that crossed his face as he looked at me.
His face was completely still.
And I was already building my apology in my head, already bracing for the cold dismissal…
Then something shifted in his eyes.
It was just slightly.
I know the ice didn’t break, but it cracked.
“No,” he said.
His voice was low and quiet, the kind of voice that didn’t need to be loud to fill a space.
“I am not.”
He held my gaze for one more moment.
Then he turned and walked toward the dark towers without another word.
I stood there.
“That,” Riven said quietly at my shoulder, “went better than expected.”
I looked at the king’s back.
At those broad shoulders, at the steady, certain way he moved, like the ground was lucky to have him walking on it.
This was his world.
Every stone, every shadow, every torch burning in the middle of the day.
All of it was his.
And I had just walked into it with a dusty bag… and a sentence about his age.
I gripped my bag strap, took one breath, and followed him into the dark.
I didn’t look back.
There was nothing behind me to look back to anymore.
Lena finally meets the King and…
well, she tells him he’s not old.
Not exactly the “brave heroine” moment she planned, but at least she’s honest!
Question: What would your first words be to a Werewolf King?
Something cool, or would you pull a Lena and say the first thing that popped into your head?
The story is just getting started—don’t forget to add to the collection so you don’t miss the first dinner in Erevon!