~LYRA’S POV~

Eren called the meeting two days after Tyran’s removal, which was long enough that we’d all had time to breathe but short enough that the air in the room hadn’t fully settled.

He’d spread everything across the long table before any of us arrived, maps, texts, what looked like scout reports written in three different hands, and a handful of documents so old the edges had gone brown and soft, the kind of thing that smelled like stone rooms and old temples. I looked at the spread of it when I walked in and understood immediately that he hadn’t put this together in the last two days. He’d been sitting on it for a while.

Ryland came in behind me. Kael was already there, standing at the far end of the table with his arms loose at his sides, looking at the map without touching it. Cade took the wall.

Eren waited until we were all present and then he didn’t clear his throat or call for attention. He just started.

"Her name is Selara," he said.

He let that sit for a moment.

"She was exiled over three centuries ago," he continued, "for defying the Moon Goddess directly, for attempting to claim the Moonborn bloodline’s power for herself. Not ally with it. Claim it. She believed that divine blood could be transferred through a specific ritual, and she was willing to do whatever the ritual required to take it."

He paused.

"The Goddess exiled her. She’s been in the in-between since then, not dead, not fully present in this world. Gathering. Waiting."

He looked at me then.

"She was waiting for a Moonborn to surface," he said. "Now that you’ve shifted, now that your wolf is active and your divine bloodline is no longer suppressed, she knows you exist. The emergence would have been visible to someone looking for it."

The room was quiet.

I looked at the map. Eren had marked it carefully, territories, movement lines, clusters of rogue activity. And gaps. Several places where pack scouts had simply stopped reporting. Not attacked, not confirmed dead. Just gone silent.

"Rogues don’t move like this on their own," Kael said. He was studying the map, his eyes moving across the marked lines with the specific attention of someone reading a military formation.

"This is directed. Someone is giving them a destination and a purpose."

"Her," Eren said. "She’s been building this for a long time. The rogue movement started three years ago, slowly at first, easy to miss as unrelated incidents. It accelerated six months ago. She’s been consolidating."

"How large?" Ryland said.

"We don’t have a full count," Eren said. "But the territories that have gone dark..."

he traced three points on the map

"...suggest she has significant numbers. Enough to coordinate simultaneous movement across multiple fronts."

I looked at the dark points on the map. Looked at the pattern. Looked at the three of them and then back at the page.

"She needs my power to complete hers," I said slowly. It wasn’t a question, just the shape of it arriving.

"How does that even work?" Kael said, frowning.

"A ritual," Ryland said. "Given that she’s a witch."

"A dark witch," Eren said. "That matters for what the ritual involves."

He moved to one of the older texts and turned it so it faced the room.

"The original account is partial, most of what she was attempting was destroyed in the exile. But the fragments describe it as a transference. Not borrowing. Not drawing from. Taking permanently, which means the source has to be..."

"Destroyed," I said.

"Yes." Eren didn’t soften it.

"The ritual requires the Moonborn’s power at full emergence, active, unbound, present in the world. You couldn’t take it from someone suppressed, which is why she waited. She needed you to become what you are before she could take it from you."

I stared at the page.

"The ritual itself," Eren continued, "According to text is described in three stages. The first isolates the target, separates them from their bonds, their anchors.

The second weakens the divine channel between the Moonborn and the Goddess herself. The third is the transfer."

He looked around the table.

"If all three stages complete, the power doesn’t go dormant. It transfers intact. She would carry divine blood that wasn’t hers. She would have what the Goddess originally refused to give her."

"And Lyra?" Ryland said. His voice was very even.

Eren met his eyes. "Gone."

The room absorbed that.

I looked at the map again. At the lines Eren had drawn, the territory going dark, the rogue army building in the quiet spaces between the packs. At the three Alphas standing around this table, Silverclaw, Shadowfang, Moonveil, three territories, three bloodlines, three men who had each found themselves bonded to the same woman through a mechanism none of them had chosen. And a witch three centuries in exile who had been waiting for exactly this configuration to appear.

"So the realisation is," I said, looking at Eren.

He nodded. "She needs you dead first. The ritual ends with it. There’s no version of it where you survive."

"Then we make sure she can’t get close enough," Kael said. His voice was flat and completely certain, the voice he used when a decision had already been made and only the details remained. He crossed his arms.

"That’s the answer."

"It’s part of the answer," Ryland said. He was looking at me in the way he looked at things he was thinking hard about.

I was already looking at the map. At the gaps. At the distances between territories and what those distances meant when someone with an army was trying to move. At the three packs on either side of me and what they represented as a combined force versus what they represented separately.

Selara had waited three centuries. She hadn’t waited that long to move carelessly. She would have a plan for a defensive formation. She would expect us to circle Lyra. She would have planned around it.

Which meant we couldn’t just defend. We had to do something she wasn’t expecting.

"We need to prepare," I said. "All three packs, coordinated. Not defending three separate territories, consolidating into a single position she can’t flank."

I looked at Eren.

"And we need to know the first stage of the ritual. The isolation, if she needs to separate me from my bonds first, that’s where she’ll start. If we understand how she does it, we can protect against it."

Eren looked at me steadily. "I’ll find out."

"And we move fast," Kael said. "Whatever she’s planning, the longer we give her, the more she’s built."

Ryland looked at the map. "How long do we have?"

"I don’t know," Eren said. "But the acceleration started when Lyra shifted. The timeline is hers, not ours."