Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 94: The Silverhand

~EREN’S POV~

I had been in the archive for six hours before I found it.

The document wasn’t catalogued under the Huntsmen, or the Silverhand, or any of the variant names that appeared in the records I’d been working through. It was filed under sister accounts in a section of the Moonveil deep archive that had been sealed sixty years ago under the authority of an elder I’d known as a child, a woman who had died when I was eleven and who I was only now beginning to understand had understood more about the intersection of the human and wolf worlds than she had ever shared with anyone.

The seal had been intact. I broke it.

I read the document twice before I allowed myself to reach any conclusions. Then I read it a third time, more slowly, paying specific attention to the sections I’d been inclined to move through quickly on the first pass because the implications of them were uncomfortable. That was how I’d learned to read important things, the sections your mind wanted to skip were usually the ones that mattered most.

The founding twins of the Silverhand were named Cade and Lorcan in the document. The historical records I’d already compiled had given me their existence and their founding role but not their names, not the source of the ability, not anything beyond the structural mechanics of what they’d built. The document in front of me gave me everything else.

They hadn’t become hunters out of hatred alone. I’d assumed ideological motivation, the kind of generational anti-wolf sentiment that built itself up over decades from accumulated fear and distance and propaganda. That was the simple explanation and it had been sufficient for operational purposes.

It was not the full truth.

There were two sisters. Twins, as their brothers had been. The document called them fractured twins, which the text used to describe twins who had emerged with a supernatural gift distributed between them rather than held in one person, each sister holding half of something that, together, formed a complete ability. The archive identified the source of this gift only as born of shadow and the space between. I had seen that description before, in the oldest tier of Moonveil cosmological texts. It referred to the same liminal space I’d been researching in connection with the in-between. The same border between what existed in the physical world and what existed beyond it.

The ability the sisters possessed was documented in detail. The capacity to see through wolf shapeshifting, not to resist it, but to see what was beneath it, to perceive the human form within the wolf and the wolf form within the human simultaneously. The ability to track supernatural entities by a specific quality of scent that was invisible to wolves themselves. And the ability to forge weapons from living silver, silver in a state between solid and liquid, suspended by something the text called the sisters’ intention, weapons that could wound even entities protected by divine power.

A Moonborn. The document was specific. The weapons could wound a Moonborn.

The sisters had given this ability to their brothers after an event the document described in careful, specific detail.

Their town had been destroyed.

Not by rogues. Not by a territorial dispute, not by a rogue Alpha losing control, not by any of the dozen explanations that might have made the destruction comprehensible within the existing framework of wolf-human conflict.

By a pack. A coordinated, deliberate assault by an Alpha-led pack. The Alpha was described in the document in language that I read three times before I was certain I had understood it correctly: silver-eyed, blazing with the Goddess’s own light, moving through the town like a fire that had decided the town should not exist. ƒreewebɳovel.com

A Moonborn.

The Silverhand had been created in direct response to a Moonborn.

The last Moonborn. Which meant Lyra was the first Moonborn with divine powers to appear in the world since the event that had created the organisation hunting her.

I closed the document.

I sat at the archive table for approximately three hours.

Not because I didn’t know what to do with the information, I knew I had to share it, and I knew I had to share it with Lyra specifically, because the operational implications required her to understand the full picture of what was hunting her rather than the incomplete version I’d presented to the group. Incomplete not because I’d withheld anything I’d had at the time, but because I hadn’t had this until now.

I sat because sitting was required before I could do anything else useful. The information had a weight to it that I needed to let settle properly before I tried to carry it anywhere.

The Silverhand wasn’t wrong about what they feared. freewebnøvel.coɱ

That was the thing I had to sit with. I had been working from the assumption, not stated, but implicit in every analysis I’d presented, that the Huntsmen were wrong. That their fear was irrational, their mission was ideologically driven, their existence was the product of hatred rather than legitimate grievance. That framing had made them easier to categorise as a threat and harder to fully understand.

The founding of the Silverhand was not ideological hatred.

It was specific historical trauma. Documented, traceable, with a cause that I could now name. A Moonborn had led the destruction of their family’s town. The sisters had given their brothers the tools to make certain it could never happen again. The Silverhand had spent three generations building on that original specific act of grief into something much larger and more dangerous and much harder to dismantle, but the origin of it was real.

They weren’t wrong about what they feared. They were wrong about the solution.

I opened my journal to the last clean page and wrote that down. Not because I needed to write it to understand it, but because writing things made them more real in a way that only thinking about them didn’t, and this needed to be real before I took it to Lyra.

The Huntsmen aren’t wrong about what they fear. They’re wrong about the solution.

I closed the journal.

I stood up from the archive table. Gathered the relevant documents, marked the pages, secured the sealed original back in its location with a new notation that it had been accessed and by whom. Then I walked toward the corridor that led to Lyra’s quarters.

I was about twenty feet from her door when the vision hit.

I didn’t call them visions usually, in my own thinking, I called them sight fragments, the term the Moonveil tradition used for the specific faculty that ran in my bloodline, the one that the archive had always noted could not be controlled and could not be filtered and arrived without permission in any moment regardless of readiness. I’d had them since I was twelve. I’d learned to receive them without being destroyed by them.

This one was different.

It hit with the specific force of the clearest visions I’d had, not murky, not fragmented, not the half-formed imagery that characterised most sight fragments. Clear. Detailed. Specific.

Lyra on her knees. Not in defeat, in something else, something I didn’t have a word for in the first second of receiving it, but which felt older than anything I’d ever seen in a vision before.

And above her, looking down at her, was a face identical to hers.

Not Lyra looking at herself. A different person, wearing Lyra’s face, looking at her with an expression I couldn’t read and didn’t recognise from anything in my existing framework.

There was something else. Something at the edge of the vision that I couldn’t name, couldn’t categorise, couldn’t pull into language, couldn’t organise into anything that made sense against what I already knew. It sat at the periphery of what I’d seen and refused to resolve into something comprehensible.

Then it was over.

I braced against the corridor wall. Both hands against the stone, the journal clutched against my chest, breathing deliberately through the specific protocol I’d developed over years of receiving sight fragments without anyone to help me process them.

In. Count. Out. Count. Again.

When it cleared I was still standing. But my hands were shaking.

My hands had shaken after a vision exactly once before. When I was sixteen, two days before a battle I hadn’t known was coming, when I’d seen something I’d understood fully and hadn’t been able to change. That had been the last time.

I stood against the wall in the corridor outside Lyra’s door, twenty feet from where she was, and I looked at my hands.

I needed to tell her.

I needed to tell her everything.