I woke to the sound of heartbeats. Draven's was the closest: deep, steady, thrumming against the chest my cheek was pressed to.
Ava's was quicker and lighter. Kobe's one was measured and calm. Axel's was thin and slow, an old man's heart doing its stubborn work.
I could hear all of them, individually. From where I lay with my eyes still closed.
"He's waking up," Draven said above me, and I felt the vibration of his voice travel through his ribs and into my skull. "His heartbeat just changed."
"Atlas?" Ava was beside us instantly. "Can you hear me?"
I opened my eyes and the world came rushing in. Everything was sharper.
The pre-dawn light filtering between the monoliths wasn't grey anymore: I could see individual wavelengths in it, silver and violet and blue braided together.
The frost on the stones didn't just glitter; each crystal was a distinct geometry, visible as clearly as if I were holding them an inch from my face.
The snow beneath my body hummed with a pulse, slow and ancient—the heartbeat of the earth itself.
"Talk to me," Draven said, his burned hand cupping my jaw, tilting my face toward his. "How do you feel?"
"I can hear everything," I whispered, overwhelmed. "Your heartbeat, the blood moving through your veins. There's a stream half a mile east—I can hear the water running over the rocks."
I sat up slowly, Draven's arm steadying me, and looked down at my own hands. They were trembling, but it wasn't a weakness.
Energy crackled beneath my skin in silver threads, visible just below the surface, pulsing with every breath.
"Everything feels—amplified, like someone turned up every sense I have until the dial broke."
"Not just your senses," Hyde rumbled inside me, and his voice was no longer the quiet whisper it had been for weeks. It was a full, resonant growl, rich with a power that vibrated through my bones and rattled my teeth.
"I can feel them, Atlas. The wolves who came before us. Their memories are inside me now—centuries of hunts, battles, rituals. I've never been this strong. We've never been this strong."
"Hyde says the ancestral memories are inside him," I told Draven, pressing my palm against my sternum where my wolf's presence burned like a forge. "He's fully awake, and he feels... enormous."
"Your mark hasn't dimmed since the ritual," Axel observed, kneeling stiffly beside us with wonder etched across his weathered features.
"It should have settled by now, returned to its resting luminance. Instead it's burning brighter with each passing hour. This is a permanent awakening, the full power of the silver wolf bloodline, concentrated in the last living vessel."
"Is that dangerous?" Kobe asked from the perimeter, voicing the question I could see written across Draven's face.
"Power of this magnitude is always dangerous," Axel said carefully. "But it is also precisely what the silver wolves were bred to carry. Atlas's bloodline was designed for this—the question is whether his body has had enough time to adapt."
"I feel stronger than I’ve ever felt," I said, flexing my fingers, watching the silver energy pulse beneath my skin. "But it's also... restless. Like it wants to move, and I'm the only thing holding it back."
Draven studied me with an expression caught between awe and worry. His dark eyes tracking the silver light that played beneath my skin, his jaw tight with the effort of processing what I was becoming.
"Can you shift?" he asked quietly.
I closed my eyes and reached for Hyde. He surged forward with an eagerness that stole my breath—a wall of power slamming through me. The shift completed in a single violent heartbeat, faster than it ever had.
I opened my eyes from a vantage point that was wrong. Too high. I looked down at paws the size of dinner plates, silver-white fur crackling with threads of luminous energy.
My reflection caught in the ice coating the nearest monolith: a wolf nearly twice the size I'd been before, fur blazing white, the crescent mark throwing silver light across the frozen valley like a beacon.
"Goddess," Ava breathed, taking an involuntary step backward. "Atlas, you're—"
"Magnificent," Kobe finished, his eyes wide.
Draven didn't speak. He stood motionless, staring up at me, and the conflict in his expression was painfully clear. Pride and… fear.
The fierce love of a man watching the person he'd sworn to protect become something that might not need protecting anymore.
"This is what we are," Hyde whispered, and his voice carried the weight of three hundred years. "This is what they made us to be."
I shifted back. The energy hummed beneath my human skin, restless, wanting release, and I breathed through the discomfort of containing it.
We broke camp within the hour, moving south toward Crimson Fang territory at a pace that would have been punishing three days ago but now felt almost too slow.
My stamina was inexhaustible—
Every step fed by the ancestral power coursing through my veins. Draven kept pace beside me, watchful, his hand occasionally brushing mine as though checking that I was still solid, still real.
It happened in the second hour of the march, moving through a dense stretch of pine forest.
A branch snapped somewhere to our left. My body reacted before my mind did: instinct, ancient and primal, interpreting the sound as a threat and responding with a surge of power that erupted from my core like a detonation.
Shadows and frost exploded outward from my body in a concentric wave.
Pines toppled in a chain reaction, crashing into each other like cannon fire, and when the energy dissipated, I was standing at the center of a freshly created clearing, my hands raised and shaking.
Silence. Total, shocked silence.
"That was a squirrel," Kobe said after a long moment, staring at the destruction. "Atlas, you just leveled forty feet of forest because of a squirrel."
"I didn't mean to—" I stared at my hands, at the silver energy still sparking between my fingers like residual lightning. "The power reacted before I could think."
"This is what Axel warned about," Draven said, his voice steady despite the leveled trees around us.
He stepped through the debris and took my trembling hands in his, pressing them flat against his chest. "The power is raw. It needs training, control, time—things we don't have much of right now."
"I could have killed all of you," I whispered, the horror of it settling through me like ice water. "If you'd been standing closer—"
"But you didn't." Draven's grip tightened. "We'll figure this out, Atlas, together."
I looked past him at the swath of destruction: trees shattered, ice spreading, the earth scarred by what had poured out of me.
The crescent mark burned steady at my brow, and Hyde paced inside my chest with the coiled energy of a predator who'd discovered claws ten times larger than it remembered.
The ancestors hadn't just cured me.
They'd armed me—loaded three centuries of extinct power into a body that had barely learned to carry its own, and pointed me toward a war already at Crimson Fang's gates.