Warbonded

Werewolf Citadel, Throne Room of House Blackmaw

...

The Citadel stank of sweat, scorched steel, and denial.

Klaus stood at the center of the throne room, arms crossed over his chest, boots planted wide on the obsidian tiles. He was soaked in the scent of war — dried blood, rain, and the cloying tang of ozone. Around him, the room buzzed with the rustle of robes and quiet muttering from the Alpha’s council. They avoided his gaze. Cowards. All of them.

At the head of the room, lounging on his blackthorn throne as if nothing bled in the world beyond these walls, sat the Alpha, Malzan.

"You would have me panic over ghost stories," Malzan said, voice thick with disdain. "We’ve faced vampire raids before, Beta. And we crushed them."

Klaus’s molars ground together with a force that would’ve cracked human bone. “This isn’t a raid,” he growled, barely holding back the wolf in his throat. “This is systematic, coordinated, it's been calculated. Outposts are going dark. Entire packs wiped. We haven’t heard from The Watchers in four days.”

Malzan lifted a goblet lazily, swirling its crimson contents. “Perhaps they grew tired of your endless doom prophecies and fled.”

There was a soft chuckle from one of the Alpha's many bootlickers. Klaus turned his head sharply, and the laughter died with a swallowed gulp.

He took a step forward. “You think this is a game. That we’re untouchable because of our walls and wards. But they’re testing us, Malzan. Studying us. Picking off the weak and isolated first.”

Malzan didn’t even look at him now — he was too busy admiring his own reflection in the bloodwine.

The rage in Klaus’s chest boiled into something cold. Damn the Alpha. Damn his arrogance, his ancient glory, his obsession with clinging to the old ways while their enemies evolved.

“They have a new leader,” Klaus said, voice like flint on steel. “Name’s whispered in every blood-soaked corner we still have ears in. Moloch.”

That got their attention.

Malzan lowered his cup. His eyes, ice-grey and pitiless, finally met Klaus’s. “We’ve had dozens of ‘new leaders’ over the centuries. They burn. They fall. We remain.”

Klaus’s claws ached to unsheath.

“Moloch is different.”

“Based on what?” the High Shaman hissed, lifting his wrinkled hands. “Rumors? Feral mutterings from dying scouts? Do you not smell the desperation in your own voice, Beta?”

“I smell death,” Klaus snapped. “And it’s crawling up our walls while you all sit here drinking and jerking off your own shadows.”

A growl rippled through the room. Malzan's personal guards stood, bristling.Growls rumbled like lightning in the room.

Malzan remained seated, but his power flared, subtle yet dangerous. Klaus felt the invisible hand of dominance trying to press him to his knees.

He didn’t budge.

Instead, he said quietly, “How many more provinces need to fall before you act?”

The silence was thunderous.

“Enough,” Malzan said. He rose slowly, stretching, as if bored by the entire affair. “We will double patrols in the borderlands. If these… rumors persist, we’ll revisit the issue.”

“You’ll revisit it when our throats are torn out,” Klaus muttered, low enough that only those with sharp enough ears would hear.

As he turned on his heel, cloak swirling behind him, a figure peeled from the shadows by the obsidian pillar — lean, amber-eyed, her presence always sharp, always alert.

“Beta Klaus,” Thyra said, falling into step beside him, her tone low. “You're giving them more reasons to take you out.”

He glanced at her, his second, his fiercest soldier, always battle-ready, her braid tied in leather, her jaw tight with the same worry he refused to show.

“It’s getting harder to play according to their rules,” he muttered, voice like gravel sliding through stone. “Because every day I wake up, the scent of blood’s closer.”

They walked in silence through the Citadel halls, carved into the spine of the mountains, blackstone lined with red flame torches, their footsteps echoing like war drums in the stillness.

Thyra finally said, “You’re not wrong. The Watchers wouldn’t just vanish.”

“They didn’t,” Klaus said flatly. “I saw it.”

She blinked. “You went out there?”

Klaus nodded once. “Two days ago. Alone.”

She hissed out a breath, half impressed, half furious. “You could’ve been killed.”

“I was hoping I’d find someone who wasn’t.”

~~~

-Two Nights Earlier-

The outpost at Marra was a graveyard.

Snow fell softly over scorched bones and frozen ash. The guard towers were torn apart, their wooden beams shredded as if by monstrous claws. Blood had soaked into the earth, now black and crusted. There were no bodies, just... parts.

Klaus moved through the silent ruins, scenting the air. Vampire. Too many of them. But there was something else, a strange distortion in the air, like the crackle before lightning, but cold.

He found a sigil burned into the wall of the war room, fangs devouring the sun.

Something older, something worse, and it was coming for them.