The sky above the hills was the color of hot iron, a bloody rust that foretold the end. The smell of death was no longer new to Draco; he had been smelling it for days, sticky and heavy, soaked into the furs he wore. But today, the smell was different. It was the smell of betrayal.
Hidden in the thicket of brambles on the ridge overlooking the valley, the sixteen-year-old boy watched helplessly. Down in the heart of the valley, King Decebalus was alone.
The king was bleeding. A Roman arrow pierced his left shoulder, and his right leg, deeply cut by a short sword, betrayed him with every step. Yet the giant did not kneel. He used his falchion like a staff, leaving a red trail in the Dacian dust.
— Romans! Decebalus shouted, his voice still echoing the thunder of Gebeleizis. Bring me a leader! Give me a warrior's death, not a hounded one!
The Romans' response was a dry, metallic roar of laughter. The centurion at the front of the phalanx raised a hand covered in a chainmail glove. There were no words for honor in the language of the conquerors, only for efficiency. The hand dropped abruptly.
Hundreds of bowstrings vibrated in unison. A sound like a swarm of steel wasps.
In that second, for Draco, time stopped flowing linearly.
An unnatural silence, like that before an earthquake, fell over the forest. The boy felt a violent burn in the center of his chest, as if a hot coal had been pushed under his skin. Before his eyes, the image of his king covered in a shower of arrows transformed into a golden flash.
He breathed.
Draco's heart stopped beating once more. In his chest, seven different rhythms began to pulse in a wild, polyphonic way. A raw force, old as the mountains, flooded his veins.
Feel.
Reality snapped. The colorful world disappeared, replaced by a vision of gray and silver, where the only living things were the heat sources. He could see the blood flow through the Roman centurion's neck hundreds of meters away. He could hear the archers' muscles tense for the second volley.
Transform.
The pain came like a wave of ice. His fingers lengthened with the dry sounds of bones breaking and recalibrating. His nails thickened, turning black, curved, and sharp as bone daggers. His ears sharpened toward his head, catching the rustle of every leaf in the forest.
Draco tried to scream in terror, but no name came from his throat, but a guttural growl that sent birds fleeing from the trees. He was no longer a mere child scout. He felt an inhuman power within him, something savage struggling to emerge, a mass of muscle tearing at his linen tunic.
The arrows that had struck Burebista now seemed stuck in amber in the thick air. Draco rose to his feet, but he was no longer straight as a man. He stood hunched over, his center of gravity low, ready to leap.
His eyes, now electric yellow, fixed on the backs of the first row of Romans.
"FOR THE KING!" he tried to scream, but the voice was a mixture of human voices and wolf howls.
The ground exploded beneath his feet as he plunged down the slope. He wasn't running, he was flying over the boulders, a gray shadow that tore apart the very barrier between the human and spirit worlds. When the first Roman turned, startled by the crashing sound, all he saw was a pair of golden eyes and the glint of claws that belonged to no creature known to Rome.
The Dacian magic had awakened, it was hungry, and only Roman blood could appease it.
The first Roman didn't even have time to raise his shield. Draco fell on him like a bolt of flesh and fur. The boy's claws, long and hard as the blade of a falcon, pierced the bronze of his armor as if it were parchment. It wasn't a fight, it was a disintegration.
Draco couldn't see any more people. He could see only trails of blood and pulsating vital points.
He moved at a speed that defied the human eye. The panicked Roman archers tried to turn their bows toward the shadow that was creeping between them, but Draco was already there. With a strength seven times greater than a man's, he grabbed the skull of a legionnaire and crushed it against a boulder with a dry sound, like burnt clay.
He could taste the iron in the air. Every sword stroke that touched him left only a scratch that instantly closed, smoking under the influence of magic. The Romans began to scream: "Lupus! Monstrum!" Their iron discipline, which had conquered the world, melted in the face of an atavistic terror. Draco tore out a Roman banner and tore it in two with his teeth, growling a sound that no longer had anything human in it.
In less than a minute, the circle of steel around the king had been shattered. The survivors were fleeing into the forest, leaving behind a carpet of red cloaks and torn bodies.
The massacre had been short and silent, a storm of claws that had left behind only the smell of iron and death. Draco stood in the middle of the clearing, his chest heaving violently. He felt as if his veins were filled with lava. He was no longer the frail child hiding in the shadows; he felt that, if he wanted to, he could tear an oak tree by the roots or carry a full-grown bison on his shoulders to the highest peak of Bucegi.
But all that immense strength could not stop the flow of his king's blood.
Decebal lay propped against a silver birch trunk. Roman arrows had pierced his armor, and the wound in his leg was deep, revealing the whiteness of the bone. The king's gaze, which had once frozen the legions of Rome, was now blurred by the threshold of the afterlife.
"Your Majesty... I will carry you." I will take you to the mountains, where no Roman sandals will ever tread! Draco shouted, his voice still a mixture of man and beast.
He bent to lift Decebalus with frightening ease, as if the king's massive body were made of goose down. But the king's hand, cold and rough, was placed on his chest, just above his heart that beat like a war drum.
"Enough, wolf cub," Decebalus whispered, his voice a proud growl. A king does not run to be saved like a baby. A king returns to the earth to become a root.
The king turned his gaze to the edge of the forest, where the shadows seemed to ripple.
"She found you… Go with her. Learn to master what the gods have given you without asking." Rome thinks she has defeated a man... but she will discover that she has awakened a curse.
Decebalus dropped his head to his chest, and his last breath was a sigh of release. At that moment, the magic in Draco let out a silent howl.
"Do not defile his passage with your anger, young man," a feminine voice rang out, cold and melodious as the water of a mountain spring.
Draco turned suddenly, claws instinctively emerging from the pads of his fingers. Out of the mist that rose from the damp earth stepped a woman. She wore a long white linen dress, cinched at the waist with a silver belt carved with the phases of the moon. A deerskin draped over her shoulders, and her face was painted with fine, blue lines representing the constellation of the Huntress.
She was a High Priestess of Bendis.
"Who are you?" Draco growled, his yellow eyes scanning the woman's every move.
— I am Aethel, keeper of herbs and the secrets of the moon, she replied, stepping fearlessly towards him. Lower your claws, Draco. The power you feel now is like a river swollen by the rains; if you do not learn to dig its bed, it will drown you.
She moved closer and touched his forehead with her cold fingers. Instantly, the fire in Draco's veins died, leaving behind an exhaustion so great that the boy collapsed to his knees.
— The king... is dead, he muttered, looking at Decebal.
— The king has moved into the story, Aethel said, looking sadly at the lifeless body. But you... you are the bridge between us and the gods who have been silent for too long. Gebeleizis sent the thunder, but Bendis must heal your spirit, or you will become nothing more than a beast that tears in the night.
She took a small silver dagger from her belt and pointed to the horizon, where the first stars were beginning to appear.
Come, wolf cub, we must reach the fortress in the heart of the mountains where you will learn to control your beast.