Alpha to the Moon Goddess

“Where is the Luna?” Eiron bellowed.

Chaos and confusion ensued around him as he and everyone else grappled with trying to understand what was happening. The once peaceful and musical lullaby of the lunar air was saturated by screams, snarls, and wails of madness and pain.

“Where is she?”

The Vampires, wherein once they were docile, calm, and tranquil, screeched instead with agony and insanity, gripping their heads, muscles bulging with the tension pain of a torment tearing beneath their skin and skull. They clawed at their eyes.

Eiron stared at them, horrified, as the Undead immortals he had come to know over the millennia twisted into something unrecognisable.

But the Vampires were not the only ones suffering unexpected torment. Deep within Eiron’s blood, it burned. Every Werewolf of the Moon, of the Circle Pack, were afflicted by the same burn.

Yet for them, it did not mar their judgement nor sanity.

“Alpha!”

Eiron’s keen ears picked up the call.

“Alpha!”

His head whipped to the call, wavy black hair brushing his shoulders as his clear silver eyes landed upon his Gamma, Onna, from across the Opal Courtyard. She grappled with a Vampire attacking her with feral ferocity.

“The High Court!” She grunted, deep voice booming out across the keening screams. “The Highlords took the Luna! Zeth went after them with his unit!”

Tightness clutched Eiron’s chest with disturbed unease. The Highlords were the elite of the elite. They governed the Moon under the Luna’s guidance. They served her the closest. The only other ones who served her as closely with as much loyalty and devotion, were the Circle Pack.

What gave Zeth reason to go after the Highlords? Zeth most certainly had not lost his mind. Therefore what did the alternative mean?

The possibility, the very real possibility, was too frightening to consider.

The Luna was in danger.

“Go!” Onna shouted. “Go, Eiron! We will hold them!”

Onna thought along the same lines as he. The same trepidation, the same fear and unease, the same burn, honed their focus into searing clarity. The Werewolves were bound to him through mind and he was to them. But spiritually, they were ultimately bound to the Moon. To their Luna.

To the Goddess, Nalaf.

Eiron met Onna’s brown eyes across the sea of fighting as the Vampires turned on the Werewolves. The Vampires were all moving in the same direction.

Towards the Celestial Palace.

The Vampires outnumbered the Werewolves catastrophically. Onna’s unit will hold them, for they were strong.

But they will not win, Eiron thought in silence. He knew that, and so did she as they held each other’s gaze for a moment longer. She was a warrior of a woman, older and a member of the Circle longer than Eiron had been alive. She taught him almost all that he knew, and more. As wise as a sage and as steady as a mountain she was, this time, Eiron did not know if he would see the veteran again.

: Go, she spoke to his mind, her deep voice low and steady. Something has gone terribly wrong. Find the Luna and secure her, and then we shall see if we meet again.

Onna gave him a subtle nod, from Gamma to Alpha, but also, from an old friend to another old friend.

Eiron ground his teeth together, but returned the nod.

: Give me as much time as you can manage, and then retreat, he instructed her.

Don’t die. Don’t you dare fucking die, he thought in private.

Even though Onna could not hear the latter thought, she knew him well enough to know it was what would have passed his mind regardless, and she smirked.

It was all that needed to be said.

Eiron turned his attention to the rest of the Werewolves, stretching his mind across them all as the neural network between the Pack opened upon his telepathic command.

: Onna and her unit will buy us time. The rest of you, make for the Celestial Palace. Find the Luna! Defend and protect her at all costs!

: Yes, Alpha!

Ripples of obedience snapped back across the minds to him, and all turned to the Celestial Palace, racing against the Vampires of inhuman speed. Some of the Pack Shifted, favouring and drawing on their superior strength while in Werewolf form to overpower the hidden sheer strength of the Vampires, while others remained in their human forms. Eiron remained in his human form, because right now, he needed greater speed, not strength.

In teams by units by squads, lines of his Pack broke off in structured formation and lingered behind once Eiron passed them, buying him time and advantage to speed on ahead without hindrance. His best flanked him, leaping out in front to clear the path for their Alpha to race on. Snarls, hisses, screams and howls, filled the grand corridors of the Palace.

Eiron steeled his heart as he listened, and brushed over them. Many of these Vampires were his friends. Albeit now, they were mad.

Why? How? What on the Moon happened?

Eiron reached out with his mind and spirit to their Goddess, to Nalaf. His beloved Nalaf. Ever was he drawn to her, in the same way the tides of Earth followed the Moon’s orbit. Always following, always reaching.

He could feel her in the Palace. However, that was where it ended. It was abrupt, as if a great wall separated him from her, a wall of the higher planes which had never existed previously. But now did.

Eiron came to a sudden halt at a set of cross-roads. The crystal chandeliers floated high above, shedding fragments of pale light across the black marble floors and great, white stone pillars like shards of starlight splintering across a still lake of undisturbed, liquid onyx.

The peak of panic to clutch Eiron’s heart was unforeseen, stealing his breath with a paralysis of fear. Not since his youth had he experienced the prickly grip of panic.

Not once had he ever not felt her mind. Never had he been unable to hear her soft and musical voice ever whispering or singing in his mind. The connection between Alpha and Luna was beyond fate and destiny. It was an inevitability.

An inevitability which suddenly had something thrust in the middle, halting the connection.

“Alpha? What is it?” Aral asked, her voice tight, from beside him.

I cannot feel her, Eiron thought, almost speaking his words aloud.

What could he do if he could not hear and feel her? What did that mean, if his telepathic connection to the Luna was blocked? What happened to her? What the fuck was going on in the High Court?

“Stop, and listen,” Nalaf murmured, encompassing her white hands around his head, so her palms pressed against his ears, blocking all sound, except her own voice. “The Werewolf’s mightiest strength, is emotion. But it is also the Werewolf’s greatest weakness. Pause, breathe, and listen, for behind all emotion, all sound, is silence. Beneath the silence, is the Song. The Song of the Gods. There, within the Song, you shall hear me. Follow, and you shall find me.”

Although it was memory, her voice reminded him. It calmed him. It cut through his panic like a silent blade of moonlight.

“Alpha?” Thirlas, from Eiron’s other side, panted, having just twisted the neck of a Vampire and torn her head off. It did not stop the body from moving, as it crawled its way along the floor in the direction of the High Court.

Thirlas finished off the Vampire by drawing his hidden obsidian blade, and stabbed twice, clean and precise, through the centre of the forehead and the heart. The Vampire stilled, the crimson glow of sentience leaving her eyes. Her body cracking, and disintegrated like porcelain.

Aral turned away, pain and grief fracturing her controlled expression. Even someone as hardened as Thirlas was forced to close his eyes, his brow deeply furrowed as the reality truly dawned on them. For the first time in almost four billion years, a Circle Werewolf was forced to draw a Quar blade.

End of time. That was what it translated to.

Eiron held up his palm, indicating those with him be silent for a heartbeat, because a moment is all he needed. He shut his eyes, and delved deep, expanding his ethereal senses beyond his tall and muscled body and the walls of the corridors and sweeping halls. His mind met a great force shield around the High Court, rippling like a veil of water to the third eye sense.

His mind could not penetrate it.

Thus, he turned to the one and only other sense left to him. One which none of his predecessors ever possessed.

The heart.

“Never Imprint upon the Luna. That is the one rule to which every Alpha of the Moon must obey. Indeed she is the Luna to the Alpha, but she is a Luna no Alpha can ever claim, for she is the Moon Goddess. She is untouchable. And it is forbidden.”

It was the first lesson Eiron was taught since he was born.

And it was the only instruction, the only commandment, which he disobeyed.

Eiron sought Nalaf out not with his mind, but with his heart. He followed the string forged and woven of hidden and forbidden fate, through the sea of darkness in his mind where the silence was deepest. He sank through its ocean, floating within its greatest depths beyond all thought and time.

Until the silence was interrupted by an a rip from an unexpected direction. It was the sound of a tear, as a soul was torn from his mind violently.

Zeth was killed.

It was so swift, so unexpected, that Eiron was momentarily stunned by shock. Zeth had been with him since infancy. They grew up together. The tear, was the death of not just his Beta, but of a brother.

The line of the tear lengthened and stretched, and began to vibrate with a deep hum, rising up from within Eiron’s very core with an accompanying, gnawing ache twisting his insides.

Alarmed, he followed the vibration, its oscillation increasing, until he realised the oscillation of the vibration was stark and abrupt sound.

A terrible, horrific, blood-curdling scream.

The darkness transformed into a sea of scarlet. Deep and rich, sweet . . . and metallic.

Eiron was jarred from his trance with a staggered inhalation.

“Alpha?” his following Pack asked with acute concern. More had caught up. Some were wounded. Others were coated in white dust.

Eiron’s heart was racing. His chest was so tight he could barely breathe. Cold sweat broke out across his back instantly. Zeth had just been killed. But the one who screamed . . . was the one who had never raised her voice throughout the entirety of her existence.

The Moon Goddess herself.

Eiron’s head snapped up and to his Pack. Fear, and fierce anger erupted within his chest.

Because Nalaf had been harmed.

Such a sin was unthinkable. Who would dare such a thing? The ramifications were inconceivable, and his realisation, his understanding, deepened his anger to protective fury, converting his fear into blind determination. It brought fire to his silver eyes, setting the irises alight with freezing flames.

“With me! Now!” He barked.

Invoked within his command was the sovereign instruction to obey. Even those of the Pack who no longer possessed the strength to move, were compelled to rise and follow, even if it were into the depths of hell at the core of Earth.

The Werewolves swept through the Palace, across the black marble as if they ran and dashed across water without ever sinking, for they were Celestial, chosen and risen from the Earth by their Luna, to join her within the Celestial Heaven.

: Surround the High Court, Eiron commanded. Be prepared for resistance. If the Highlords possess the same madness as the rest of the Vampires, then they will fight back.

: Yes, Alpha, came the rippled response across their connected minds, splitting off in teams to the four entrances of the High Court. Two were the mains, and two were hidden. Only the High Vampires and the Circle Pack knew of all four.

: Why is this happening? They asked as they all took their places to begin the surround. Their telepathic voices revealed the truth a verbal and audible voice never could. They were scared, and confused. They all were.

: I don’t know, Eiron told them truthfully with firmness. But we will find out. Our priority is securing the Luna. There is no room for failure.

Hardness and determination swept through his Pack as the reminder sank in. They were Circle Werewolves, bound in eternal servitude to the Moon Goddess, for they were her elite, her divine guard.

In their four teams, the Pack approached the four entrances to the High Court, remaining hidden behind the last corner in the long shadows. The colossal doors were shut and sealed by physical lock and heavy sorcery imposed by the High Vampires.

Other Vampires lingered around the entrances, stood over the dead bodies of Zeth’s fallen unit, banging and clawing at the sealed doors until their blade-like nails fell off. Their flesh was torn next, like cloth rubbed constantly until it shredded to pieces, leaving just bone behind, raking through the scratched grooves in the solid ironwood doors.

It was an alien sight. A pitiful sight.

What had rendered such elegant and regal immortals into maddened monsters?

: Alpha, Thirlas murmured in his mind. The burning in our blood is stronger here. Can you feel it?

Eiron glanced at his men and women. Some remained in mortal form, while some were Shifted, towering at ten feet tall while straightened. Their muscles rippled beneath the fur of their humanoid wolf form, claws as strong as daggers at the ready, eyes alight with a crimson glow, coiling like a hidden fire.

All were veterans. Yet even as old and experienced and strong as they were, there was a grimace to them all, a grimace Eiron felt equally, but did not reveal. The strange fire in their blood, in his blood, was more potent here, burning subtly and slowly like a creeping illness.

A creeping poison.

: I feel it, he echoed. The timing of our burning blood and the madness afflicting the Vampires is too similar to be coincidence.

: Did we miss something? Did something happen to the Luna?

It was a dangerous question, one which would have had any Alpha tear his Beta to shreds for merely suggesting it, for any wound to come to the Luna meant the Alpha had failed in his duty to protect her. It was an impossibility.

But given the current circumstances, given Eiron both felt and heard their Goddess’s scream of unsuspecting pain, meant something indeed had bypassed Eiron’s near omniscient sight. A threat had passed by the entire Circle and its Alpha, and somehow struck the very heart of the Moon.

Thirlas was the only individual with the stoic confidence and conviction to voice it, even if it was in private, for he was equally guilty. If the Moon Goddess was harmed, then they had all failed in their duties.

: We’ll find out, Eiron said back, his telepathic voice low, almost a growl.

An unexpected sharp breath from behind drew everyone’s attention with an acuteness as tight as a steel rope pulled taut.

An attack? Eiron thought instantly.

His team spun around. A Vampire was on the ground, his hand snapped around Aral’s ankle. Where had he come from?

The Werewolves crouched immediately, and moved to pounce on him.