The altar burned.There were no flames, but the runes on his skin seared as if hell itself had bitten through his bones.
Luciano Kerens knelt, gasping.Not for faith.For guilt.
"Bring me the wolf," he whispered to the stone. "Or damn me forever."
The wind replied with the stench of sulfur.And behind it… footsteps.The footsteps of his curse.
The moon hung over the forest like a pale, unblinking eye, casting cold light over the stone altar where Luciano remained kneeling. The marks on his flesh pulsed with a familiar fire, a cruel reminder that the pact still held.
The storm had passed, but the darkness in his chest endured—thicker than the winter mist coiling between the trees.The cold gnawed at his skin, but that was nothing.What truly consumed him was the weight of a vow etched into his bones, a curse forged across three generations.
His eyes—dimmed by decades of shadow—scanned the grooves carved into the altar. The weathered stones still exhaled the same sulfurous breath as that night.
A snap of branches shattered the silence.Before he could turn, a voice—coated in old resentment—froze his blood.
"Luciano…"
He turned, slow as one who already knows what waits.
From between the trees, a slender figure stepped forward.Moonlight first touched the claws—curved, lethal, gleaming like obsidian.Then the eyes: golden, burning. The same eyes that haunted Luciano's dreams.
"Sanathiel," he breathed—not as a name, but as a sentence.
The boy emerged fully from the shadows.His breath was the only sound in the forest—ragged, deep, as if the very air scorched his lungs.In his hands, claws tightened with the crack of straining tendons.
"Did you come to pray to your stone god?"Sanathiel's voice was a restrained growl."Or to beg for forgiveness?"
Luciano said nothing.His eyes fell on the silver medallion hanging from the young man's neck—a wolf howling at a full moon.The same one he had given him the night he pulled him from the smoking ruins:
"Pueblo Esperanza."
"You haven't changed," Luciano lied,knowing each word brought them closer to the abyss."You're still the child I rescued from the flames."
A snarl split the air.
Sanathiel stepped forward—and for the first time, Luciano saw the scars: claw marks across his chest, fresh and bleeding.Wounds newer than the ones he himself bore.
"The flames you lit," Sanathiel spat.
He could feel the heat rising in his throat,each word a surge of molten rage.
Zaira.
If she were here, she'd cup his face with those trembling hands—the ones that once healed his broken back—and she'd say what she said long ago, in the root-hidden cabin:
"You're not him, Sanathiel. Don't destroy what's still worth saving."
But Zaira was gone.Only her voice remained, tucked in a frayed corner of memory.A voice of honey… charred by fire.
He didn't save. He punished.
And Sanathiel's hatred ran deeper than prayer.Her words—true as they were—weren't enough to cool his fury.
Not this time.
His white fur erupted—not as a shift, but an explosion.Each strand pierced through skin like a thorn, until only his golden eyes remained,burning with a fury too human to be animal.
The words echoed in Luciano's skull like funeral bells.Sanathiel raised his hands,and between his claws, Luciano saw it—the fire of Pueblo Esperanza.
Thatched roofs consumed by flames.Screaming silhouettes carrying children.And his own younger face watching it all from the hill.
"I'm not your creation," Sanathiel roared.His fur crackled like ice-blades charged with arcane energy."I'm your punishment."
Luciano stumbled back, crashing into the altar.The runes on the stone burned through his robe, branding his spine with the demon's pact.He wanted to scream the truth—that the deal had been to save a seven-year-old boy sobbing among corpses—but the mist pouring from Sanathiel's mouth now reeked of gunpowder and charred flesh.Just like that night.
"Stop!" Luciano's voice cracked as a claw raked his chest,leaving three black wounds that oozed thick and foul.
"You don't know what you're unleashing—"
Sanathiel pinned him to the altar.His golden eyes turned to wells of white fire,and within them, Luciano saw ancient gears turning—The Ritual of the Three Suns.The real reason behind the pact.
"Look," Sanathiel hissed, forcing him to see."You taught me to lie. The demon taught me how to dig them up."
The mist coiled into shapes—Luciano, decades younger, kneeling at the altar,drinking from a chalice filled with liquid shadow…while the lifeless body of young Sanathiel lay at his feet.
"It was the only way to save you!" Luciano cried—but his defense died in a choking gaspas claws closed around his throat.
A sharp whistle split the night.
Noah appeared out of nowhere,his obsidian dagger slicing into Sanathiel's side—the blade crackling as it struck lunar fur.
"How fast is your final act, little brother?"The vampire grinned, fangs slick with tar."The Master wants his tragedy in three parts."
Sanathiel hurled Luciano against a pine.The crack of branches echoed—followed by the clink of the medallion shattering against stone.
For one heartbeat, both stared at it—the silver wolf rolling through the dirty snow.
That was all Noah needed.
His fingers plunged into Sanathiel's wound,pulling out glowing veins that writhed like puppet strings.
"Run, old man," the vampire spat toward Luciano,his bloodshot eyes fixed on every twitch of the white wolf."Your son and I have a scene to rehearse.And this time…there's no happy ending."
As Luciano crawled out of the clearing,his final glimpse was of Sanathiel howling—not at the moon,but at the broken medallion.
The cracks in the silver traced forbidden constellations—the kind only a Kerens could read.
Deep in the forest,something answered his cry.
Something older than any pact.Hungrier than demons.
It roared—a beast becoming man.
"Until the darkness fades," whispered an ancient voice through the trees.
Silence fell like a blade.
And in the shadows,a figure watched.Smiling.
"Let the first act begin."