Page 25 of A Kingdom of Wild and Power
So, with reluctant resolve, Bryn mounted the white wolf beside him and followed Caldwell onward.
Straight towards whatever doom awaited him.
In the beginning, when the gods were creating the kingdoms, the goddess Chione created the land of wolves. She fell in love with a man, a mortal man. The gods became infuriated when she fell pregnant with his child. The first half-mortal half-god to exist. The gods turned on each other, those that wished to protect Chione and her unborn child, and those that wished her dead. In the end, the legend says that she was cast into the wolverian lands, made mortal by the angry hands of envious gods. She became the first wolverian queen. However, Chione’s envious twin took the man she loved and transformed him into a wolf. The first giant wolf to exist in these lands. A wolf with the soul of a warrior. Of a mortal man, whose only sin was to love a goddess.
Tabitha Wysteria
Whenever Ylva slept, she dreamt of a place she had never seen, yet it always appeared the same. She travelled through mist and shadow in the form of a wolf, and more often than not she was accompanied by a woman she did not know: tall, pale, crowned with wyverian horns, her hair wild as storm winds. But this time, in this dream, the woman was gone. Now Ylva followed someone else. Someone she recognised from the waking world.
Kage Blackburn.
She had never truly met him, yet she had seen his corpse.
Sowhy was she dreaming of him?
Ylva jolted awake. Arden was crouched beside her, his expression tight with concern. It was difficult not to stare at him. He was too beautiful, and those antlers of his were almost distracting. She wanted to tug them just to make him look directly at her.
‘You were stirring,’ Arden said.
‘I was dreaming.’ Ylva pressed a hand to her brow. ‘I keep having dreams lately.’
Arden frowned. ‘What sort of dreams?’
Ylva shrugged. ‘They’re just dreams.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But I’ve learnt that nothing is ever what it appears to be.’
They had stopped to rest for a few hours. Ylva, Elric, and Nymeria had slept while Arden kept watch. There had been a rather heated debate between Elric and Arden over whether he could be trusted not to vanish while they slept. Apparently, Arden had a habit of disappearing. He had insisted that he would run nowhere now that he had found his wolf. Ylva still wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but had decided not to dwell on it.
‘I saw him,’ Ylva blurted the moment Arden helped her to her feet. She didn’t need the help, yet she found herself letting him do such trivial things anyway. For some absurd reason, she liked the attention.
‘Who?’
‘The man who died,’ she said quietly. ‘The wyverian prince. Kage Blackburn.’
Arden went still, his back tautening, those green eyes narrowing with sudden interest. ‘In your dreams?’
Ylva nodded.
‘What was hedoing?’
She turned away to gather her things, gaze flicking to Elric and Nymeria, who were now waking at the sound of Arden’s voice. ‘It was just a dream,’ she muttered, though her body had grown unexpectedly rigid, as if the words themselves made her uneasy.
‘Are you sure?’
Ylva twisted back sharply. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’
Arden opened his mouth as if to explain, then stopped. He had been doing that a great deal lately, always on the verge of saying something before pulling away, as though there was a truth lodged in his throat that he refused to let out. It infuriated her. She wanted to know what he was hiding, why he acted as if she were fragile porcelain, and why—when he thought she wasn’t looking—she would catch him watching her with sorrow hanging heavy in those green eyes.
‘Nothing, little wolf,’ he said at last. And then he reached out and tucked a strand of her white hair behind her ear with the gentlest brush of his fingers. Ylva sucked in a breath, startled by the tenderness of it. Arden smiled, wholly unapologetic for his boldness.
‘Don’t…’
‘Don’t what?’ he asked, tilting his head with playful curiosity.
Ylva looked away, suddenly flustered beneath the bright green stare fixed upon her, as though he believed she carried the answers to the universe.
Which she most certainly did not.
