Heart of Scars

The scalpel pressed against my chest when I opened my eyes.

The surgical light was a brutal white spear boring into my pupils. I saw Kael standing beside the table, the silver-gray tip of his wolf tail peeking from beneath his white coat. His fingers trembled—not with guilt, but with excitement.

“Elena, don’t blame me.” His voice was low, the kind used to soothe livestock before the slaughter. “Luna’s heart is rotting from a curse. Only yours can save her.”

I wanted to laugh, but the anesthetic froze my lips into a faint twitch. Five years. Every drop of blood-wine he made me drink, every pulse of the Blood Bond he used to leash me, had led to this moment—to keep my heart beating and fresh, a spare part for someone else.

“Omegas exist to serve Alphas.” Kael leaned down, his wolf eyes reflecting my pallid face. “Consider it an honor.”

The blade pierced skin.

Something inside my ribcage shattered.

Not my heart. A seal.

Scalding golden liquid flooded through the crack, shattering the anesthetic’s hold. I sat up so fast the surgical table crumpled beneath me, alloy struts folding like wet paper. Kael was hurled backward, crashing into the wall with a crisp snap of ribs.

“Impossible!” He coughed blood, clutching his abdomen where the Frost Alpha Core thrashed wildly inside him. “The Blood Bond locked your soul!”

I looked down at my hands. Beneath the skin, my blood was no longer red. It flowed like molten gold. When I lifted my eyes, my pupils had turned pure amber, the vertical slits needle-thin.

“The Blood Bond?” I repeated softly, curling my right hand.

Golden flame ignited in my palm. Within it writhed a dark red blood-worm, shrieking with a voice that scraped the inside of the skull. Kael’s face drained of color—that was his prized soul-shackle, squirming in my grip like a maggot.

“You think you saved me five years ago?” I stood, bare feet pressing into the cooling blood on the floor, each step leaving a burning golden print. “You scavenged what the Empire threw away.”

I closed my fingers.

The worm burst into ash.

Kael screamed. Inside his gut, the Frost Alpha Core he had cultivated for thirty years detonated. He collapsed to his knees, watching his core shatter into icy shards that I ground beneath my heel, melting into a pool of silver water.

“Third-rate mortal class.” I looked down at him as one might regard scrap metal. “And you thought you could touch Origin?”

The operating room doors exploded inward. Three black-robed elders stormed inside, followed by armored royal guards. Seeing Kael broken in a crater, the guard captain roared and raised his runic halberd. “Traitor! How dare you murder the King!”

But the three elders froze.

Their gazes swept past everyone, locking onto the golden wolf-head totem burning between my eyebrows. The eldest elder shook so violently his bone staff clattered to the floor.

“Origin Blood... the Seven Pillars resonate...” he rasped. Then he shoved the guards aside, stumbled to me, and dropped to his knees in the blood, pressing his forehead hard against the floor.

“Sinful descendants of the wolves—welcome back, First Ancestor!”

The other two elders followed, prostrating themselves. The guard captain’s halberd hung frozen in mid-air.

I ripped a clean coat from the rack and threw it over my shoulders, covering the ruined prison uniform. I did not spare Kael a glance as I walked toward the breached wall.

Outside, the seven sacred pillars of the pack lands shot pillars of light into the heavens. But at their apex, the sky itself had split, and a massive golden vertical eye opened within the crack, gazing down with indifferent cruelty.

A voice sounded directly inside my skull:

“My blood. My Container three-two-seven... you have awakened.”

I clenched my fists, the Origin Blood roaring in my palms.

So this was the thing that had chained my bloodline for generations.