My hand touched the moon-core.
The living heart of light.
And everything changed.
Not vision.
Not dream.
Direct knowledge.
Pure understanding flooding into me through contact.
The core itself was warm—impossibly warm—like touching flesh instead of crystal. Its surface rippled with opalescent light, shifting between silver and bone-white, pulsing with a rhythm that matched no heartbeat I'd ever felt. Too fast. Too desperate. The light cast dancing shadows across the chamber walls, making the ancient stone seem to writhe. Veins of luminescence branched through the heart like cracks in ice, each one carrying a different color—blues and golds and deep crimson reds that shouldn't exist together but somehow did.
I saw what the heart was made of.
Not divine energy.
Not Luna's power.
Souls.
Thousands of them.
Tens of thousands.
Every wolf who'd ever failed the trials.
Every wolf who'd been killed.
Every wolf who'd been erased.
