“We know these mountains belong to the elves,” I said lightly. “Perhaps that is why we keep our distance.”
He chuckled, a low, rolling sound. “The mountains belong to no one,lilla.” His tone shifted, grave now. “And they are ill, gravely so. Kael tells me you have seen something.”
“I…” The word caught in my throat. “I think the source lies at the summit. Something happened up there, and this blight is the echo of it.”
I remembered my vision—the tower, the wizards, the screams. Something terrible had taken root above, and I needed to know what.
Arvyn’s gaze darkened. “I sent pathfinders to the summit,” he said quietly, “and none returned. Taken by the blight, as Vallûne was.Vila i frid. May our brothers and sisters rest among the spirits.”
He carried his sorrow with the composure of the ageless, his grief worn like a mantle of honor. I wondered how many centuries he had borne such loss.
“You are welcome to stay in Stenhalla tonight,” he continued. “It is a blessing to have Kael among us again, especially now. You may rest and gather strength here.”
“Thank you,” I said softly, then hesitated. “Do you know Kael well?”
A smile touched his face, warm and paternal. “Ah,lilla, that is a tale best told beside the fire. Come, sit.”
I shook my head, guilt pricking me. “No, please. You must have a hundred matters on your mind. I don’t wish to intrude.”
He waved the concern away with an easy flick of his hand. “Stories are part of grieving. Sitwith me.”
He led me to a firepit where rough-hewn logs served as seats. A few elven children played nearby, their laughter faint against the murmur of the cave. They called out “Hövding!” as they passed, bowing before darting away again.
For a fleeting moment, I wondered if they were orphans.
“Their parents are gone,” Arvyn said, as though reading my thoughts. “They are all that remains of their generation.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. It was all I could find to say.
Arvyn sat down with a groan. He must have been very old. Elves like him could live for half a millennium, if the spirit willed it. I lowered myself beside him and gazed into the fire in silence.
“Kael was much younger than they were when I found him,” he began. He lifted a hand, measuring roughly at his chest. “Three decades ago. He was as big as three apples.”
“Youfoundhim?”
“Well,” Arvyn said, the corners of his mouth curving faintly, “it was a…varghona. A wolf-mother, who came to me one night when the clouds were thick and the rain fell heavy. The beast led me to her den, where she had tried to care for him as best she could. But Kael was no wolf, only a small, human infant with hay for hair, white and frail as snow.
“I do not know how long she had watched over him, but he was starved, crying like a thirsty pup. He needed a mother who could feed and hold him. Mauriel—may she rest with the spirits—offered herself. She called himForlorenkel, the abandoned boy, and the name remained. Mauriel raised him with love, and her daughter Naila cherished him as a brother.”
I listened to his tales, still as a deer at the water’s edge. Firelight wove through the lines of Arvyn’s face, deepening its shadows, softening the weight of his words. Kael, raised in the wilderness by a wolf who could no longer keep him. Somehow, it made perfect sense. Of course he had been shaped by something untamed. He carried the wilderness in his every breath.
That the she-wolf had turned to the wood elves for help,entrusting her foundling to their care, spoke of a bond deeper than I had ever imagined. There was beauty in it, savage and sacred, that a creature of fang and forest had chosen him, had loved him enough to seek help beyond her kind. Such love did not belong to this world. It was raw, ancient, the kind that left marks no magic could ever erase.
Arvyn’s features darkened. “But as Kael grew, something within him stirred—the curse of the wilds, a power none could master. We tried to shield him, to teach him restraint, but we were not skilled in such arts. The magi of your academy felt his power. They came searching. A man named Henrich arrived in Vallûne one spring, when Kael had begun to hunt alone. He offered to guide him. For years he returned, taking the boy to the lake, where it was safe to release the storm. But when that storm grew too fierce for these mountains, Henrich took him away, to the city of men.”
His voice fell low, roughened by memory and regret. I could hear the bond behind it, the affection for the wild, fair child he had helped raise, and the pain of having to let him go. Perhaps he blamed himself, as the she-wolf must have, for not being enough to keep him safe from himself.
I swallowed hard. That same ache that always came with Kael’s name stirred again in my chest. Everyone who had loved him had, in the end, let him go, because they had no choice. And maybe that was why he had built his walls so high, why even his gentleness felt like the edge of a blade.
He had learned long before I ever met him that loving him was impossible, because it meant either dying for him, or leaving him behind.
“Where do you think he comes from?” I asked, unable to stop myself from wondering who—or what—Kael had been before the wolf’s den.
Arvyn exhaled deeply. “That,lilla, is this century’s greatest mystery. The months before the wolf-mother found me, a treacherous storm ravaged these mountains. Fenrir’s roar rolled from cliffto valley. Perhaps he had been gifted to the wolf-mother by Fenrir himself.”
Fenrir. The elven wolf-god of storm and ruin.
“But we will never know where the truth lies,” Arvyn finished, his voice dropping to a hush.
