The Voice Beneath the Moon
Prologue – The Voice Beneath the Moon
( The Ash and the Wolf , Book Two — by Drowned Abyss)
The child was born during the still hour before dawn, when the moon hung crooked in the sky like a silver wound.
They said she did not cry. Not once.
Her mother, a huntress of the Frostmark clan, whispered that the baby’s eyes had opened too soon — eyes too pale, too knowing. “She sees the other side,” one of the midwives muttered, shivering as the last of the birth candles flickered out. No one spoke again until morning.
But the girl, Liora, grew strong. Her laughter carried through the pine valleys, bright and wild. The mark beneath her left ear — a faint crescent scar — was hidden by her hair. Most days, even her mother forgot it was there.
Until the night of the Bleeding Moon.
The elders had said it was only an eclipse — nothing divine, nothing to fear. The world was healing, they said. The Veil sealed. The gods asleep.
They were wrong.
That night, as the red light spilled across the forest, Liora woke to whispers — not outside, but inside her dreams.
At first it sounded like a river, then like the hum of a thousand heartbeats. When she opened her eyes, her room was filled with light — not moonlight, but something thicker, alive, as if it breathed.
“Liora…”
She froze. The voice was not cruel, nor kind. It was ancient, coiling through her skull like silk.
“They silenced the moon… but not me.”
She tried to speak, but her throat felt full of ash. The walls seemed to waver, the air trembling as if the world itself had inhaled. The voice continued, soft and infinite:
“The wolf and the mortal bound the heavens with love… but love is not balance. Love is hunger. And hunger wakes all things.”
Liora’s mark began to glow — a searing white, spreading down her neck like frost.
Outside, the wind screamed. The trees bent. Wolves howled in the distance — one after another, in unison, until the sound became almost human.
Then, in the center of her room, a shape began to form: a tall figure of light and shadow, neither woman nor beast, its eyes endless and silver.
“Tell them the moon dreams still.”
The light shattered.
By dawn, the eclipse had passed. The mark beneath Liora’s ear was gone. So was her voice.
But in the snow outside her home, the villagers found her drawings — hundreds of them, carved into the frost with trembling fingers. All the same image.
A wolf crowned in shadow.
A woman burning in light.
And above them both — a cracked moon bleeding gold.
