Naomi’s face sobered, and she pulled the phone out of her leather crossbody satchel. “I never met my niece, Dorcas, but after seeing this, I looked her up on my holophone. Found a picture of her, and look what happens when I put an emerald-green filter on top….”
Naomi held her phone face up between them so they could both see the projection.
Sadie gasped. Dorcas… the little girl she’d met fourteen years ago, the one who’d told Sadie to call her Dorie, stared back at her from the projection.
And she looked exactly like the Wolf Queen of the Gods depicted on the wall.
There was no doubt about it then.
And there wasno doubt about it six years later when Sadie insisted the Tiger Cleric escort her and Naomi back into the Sanctuary Temple’s most sacred room.
Naomi was steadier now. The wildness in her eyes had calcified into something harder and more certain.
A hush fell over all three shifters as they looked up at the chiseled portrait of the she-wolf Sadie had pushed into the ThreeGods Lake, as commanded by the instructions carved into this very wall several millennia ago. In English.
This had been the first clue, which had led Sadie to the second in the caverns beneath the fortress.
Since the Mountain Prince was no longer living there, the Shadow King, who tended to obsess over all things involving the gods, had decided to conduct a thorough excavation of the caverns beneath the fortress. They’d found a few god tech items and lots of unidentifiable remains that had degraded into dust through the millennia. But in one room, they found an artifact that sealed Sadie’s suspicion Dorie was the she-wolf etched into the emerald wall.
A bronze key, still intact, with a message in Wölfennite carved into its shaft:finnt mei tür.
An artifact.
However, the directions chiseled on the emerald wall had been clear.Tell her nothing of her fate.
And for weeks, Sadie had told herself to just obey those instructions to the letter. She packed the god tech bag, preparing everything Dorie might need without telling her why.
The prophecy had been right about everything else. She shouldn’t chance ruining whatever repair it was talking about with an artifact that wasn’t mentioned on a wall.
A artifact that a Wölfennite had left behind. For herself?
At the last minute, standing over the god tech bag with the key in her hand, she decided she just couldn’t send Dorie into the past with nothing.
Sadie had slipped the key into the bag she’d packed for Dorie and sealed it shut before she could change her mind.
She could only hope it helped Dorie… wherever she was in time.
“It’s her. It’s definitely her,” Sadie whispered now, looking at the portrait for the first time since meeting the adult version of the Wolf Queen of the Gods in person.
Relief filled her heart, edging out a tiny portion of her worry.
Naomi took her hand. “You did the right thing, Sades. I believe in the prophecy. I believe this will repair the broken circle once and for all.”
Whatever that meant.
Sadie nodded anyway, tears welling in her eyes. “For the three gods,” she whispered.
“For the three gods,” the Tiger Cleric and Naomi repeated after her.
Above them, the chiseled portrait of a happy, smiling Dorie continued to beam down.
Dorie 1000
The Royal Huntmaster’sinspection was, as always, an exercise in contempt.
He demanded to see for himself every claim Fenrir Prime had made in his last report. The same report Fenrir Prime had sent one thousand times. Seemingly only so the Royal Huntmaster could dismiss whatever they showed him with steaming scoffs and clicks of disbelief.
“It would seem we have no need to fear the cessation of the hunt,” the Huntmaster declared after his thorough investigation of the half sphere where the she-wolves were housed. “If the males cannot be trusted to interact with the she-wolves without tearing them apart, then how will they manage this civilization the Royal Geneticist claims they will be capable of in the future?”
