Sable's first report arrived on a Tuesday, folded inside a merchant's shipping invoice. It was written in a cipher so dense it looked like a ledger of grain prices.
We watched Kael decode it in the war room: Caius and I standing like statues, because watching Kael work a cipher was the kind of activity that didn't benefit from breathing, let alone commentary.
He read the decoded text. Then he read it again. Finally, he set the parchment on the table face-up and pushed it toward us without a word.
I read it first, my eyes skittering over the jagged lines. Then I read it again, slower.
I then slid it toward Caius and watched his face. He wore the controlled-blank expression he used when he was genuinely alarmed and absolutely refusing to show it.
Sable had accessed the Codex. She had found the relevant section after three hours of frantic searching. She described the document as a thousand-page tomb written in four languages, two of which hadn't been spoken for centuries. The section was buried in a chapter titled, in an ancient Lycanic dialect, Mechanisms of Binding and Release.
The curse wasn't a curse. It was a Tethering.
With a capital T. A specific, documented construction of dark magic that had been used only twice in recorded history and formally prohibited by the High Council of Wolf Scholars three centuries ago. Not because it was cruel, but because of what it did.
A Tethering didn't just drain a wolf; it bound a bloodline to a physical location. Literally. The curse acted as a living bridge between the host and a dormant magical site, feeding on the host's life energy to keep that site in a state of readiness. When the host deteriorated far enough; when the life energy reached a critical threshold, the site would activate. It would open. It would release whatever had been sealed inside it three hundred years ago.
Nobody knew what was inside.
Sable had written it in the margin, her letters even smaller than her cipher:
["The Codex doesn't say. The original documentation of what was sealed was destroyed. I don't know if that was deliberate. Given everything else about this situation, I'm going to assume yes."]
I set the report down. My hands were cold.
"The site," Caius said, his voice dropping into a dangerous register. "Where is it?!"
"Sable doesn't have the coordinates yet," Kael said. "The Codex references the location in the destroyed section. She's hunting for secondary sources; private maps, journals of the original scholars."
"How long will that take?"
"She estimates three to five days give or take for secondary sources."
"And my deterioration rate," Caius said. It wasn't a question.
Kael and I shared a look. A heavy, hollow silence filled the room.
"The Codex describes the final stage of a Tethering as accelerated," Kael said, his eyes fixed on the table. "The closer the host gets to the threshold, the faster the magic consumes them. It's a compounding interest of decay."
"How close am I?"
The silence stretched. It was the bad kind.
"Aldric estimated four to six weeks at the previous rate," Kael said softly. "With the acceleration described in the Codex..."
"Kael."
"Two to three weeks."
The war room went absolutely still. Through the heavy stones, I could hear the muffled sounds of the pack in the courtyard: boots on stone, a distant laugh, the ordinary sounds of a Tuesday in a house that had just been handed a death clock.
Two to three weeks. My training timeline, even with my mother's journal, was three weeks. The numbers didn't overlap. There was no safety margin left.
Caius stood. He walked to the window and placed one hand flat against the stone wall.
He stood with his back to us, the afternoon light spilling over the black markings on his neck.
I watched them pulse; that slow, relentless, parasitic rhythm. The Tethering was doing its work, feeding a nameless thing in a nameless place with the life of a man who had never been told he was born to be a battery.
A clean, cold rage went through me.
It wasn't for the danger or the stakes. It was for him. For three years of this methodical unmaking. For whoever had looked at a living, breathing man and decided he was a mechanism. A resource to be used until he was empty.
"We accelerate," I said.
He turned, his eyes searching mine.
"The training," I said, my voice hardening. "Aldric said three weeks with the journal technique. I want to try for two. I know the risk. I know what happened to my mother when she pushed too hard... but she pushed because my father used her love for the pack as a weapon. I'm pushing for a different reason."
"What reason?"
I looked him directly in the eye. At the exhaustion, the markings, and the three years of solitary, silent management of his own destruction.
"Because you're not a mechanism," I said. "And I am not going to let whoever built this treat you like one for a second longer."
Something cracked in his face. It was just a tiny fracture in the wall he had built so high and so thick that most people had forgotten there was a human being behind it.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.
Kael was looking at the map on the table with the intense focus of a man giving two people the privacy of a room without actually leaving it.
I appreciated that more than I could say.
"Very well then, two weeks," Caius whispered.
"Two weeks," I promised.
And I knew, looking at him, that I would either break the lock or burn the whole house down trying.