Chapter 115: Sombrosi
The tension in the room fractured the air like sharp, electric and crackling lightning, just beneath the surface. No one dared breathe too loudly, afraid even the sound might splinter the fragile calm teetering on the edge of eruption.
Rohen stood silent beside Lucia, as still as a storm waiting to break. His tall frame was cloaked in worn, ash-gray leather, damp from his journey and shadowed by the flickering firelight. His Long dark and damp hair dripped neatly to the ground whilst his aura shone bright, ancient, and unreadable energy, only narrowed with quiet calculation, glinting beneath his heavy brow. One gloved hand rested casually on the hilt of the obsidian dagger strapped to his belt, as if to remind them all that he didn’t need an army to be dangerous.
He had come alone to warn them, and secretly to make sure a little someone stayed safe. He didn’t have any use for guards, nor a beastly entourage. No need for fanfare. However, he had gathered a sturdy group of allies that were unthinkable in numbers and reputation. Far beyond the borders of the werewolf community. That was the influence and know-how Rohen possessed. Nevertheless, in this case he had come all this way to transmit only a message.
“You’re not ready for what’s coming,” he said.
His voice was low and quiet, but it struck through the silence like a blade.
Damian’s jaw clenched. Every instinct in him screamed to treat Rohen as an enemy, yet something about the man’s stillness, his steadiness, held him in place. Isla, however, felt no fear. There had been no deceit in his tone. Whatever had driven him here meant to be a warning. She had seen it too. In the dream.
A child, her child, standing alone beneath a bleeding moon, her small, radiant body framed by shadows that moved like smoke. The child’s eyes held a weight far beyond its years, and when a smile appeared, it was not innocence that shone, but knowledge. Terrible and ancient.
Before Rohen could speak again, Raven’s head snapped toward the hearth.
The flames flickered wildly for a moment, then surged high and green before dimming to an eerie stillness.
Raven’s pupils dilated until they nearly consumed her irises. Her voice dropped into a register that didn’t sound entirely human.
“Someone broke the Ninth Seal.”
The room froze.
Time seemed to slow, holding them all suspended between disbelief and dread.
It was Damian’s father, stern and skeptical, who found his voice first. He stepped forward, brows drawn into a deep furrow. “That seal is myth. A bedtime story.”
Raven didn’t blink. “It was real. Silas found out that The Elders placed it long before their rise, before the packs, before the wars. During the Before-Time. It was never meant to trap wolves.”
Her glowing gaze locked onto Isla like a blade to the throat.
“It was meant to trap what we feared might come again through her line.”
Silence bloomed, dense and choking.
Isla’s chest rose and fell quickly. A cold, invisible hand clutched her ribs. The firelight shimmered on the sweat beading her temples.
Lucia’s voice cracked, the weight of centuries in every syllable. “There was a race that predated even the wolves. Older than the Elders, older than recorded time. Not gods. Not demons. Something else entirely. We called them the Sombrosi, the Shadow-Forged.”
She paused, her gaze distant, as if peering into memories too terrible to hold for long. Rohen scrunched his fists as in impotence to seeing Lucia in that distant state.
“They were made of flesh and thought… and darkness. Shapeshifters of identity. They once walked beside man, perhaps even as allies. But their hunger grew. They sought to rewrite the very fabric of memory, to control the stories that made people who they were. They feed not on flesh, but on identity, on legacy. They don’t just kill a person. They erase them. Bloodlines vanish as if they never were.”
A chill moved through the room like frost over glass.
Isla’s arms wrapped instinctively around her belly, her hands trembling.
Damian stepped forward. “But the seal, how could it break?”
Lucia turned to Isla. Her voice was gentle now, almost mournful. “Because the Sombrosi were sealed, not destroyed, and it was never just the Elders who held that seal in place.”
She paused.
“…someone with Isla’s blood… has undone it.”
The room reeled.
Isla felt the floor shift beneath her, though her feet hadn’t moved. A buzzing filled her ears, distant and high-pitched. A memory flickered in her mind, unbidden and unwelcome. Fragmented. Fractured.
Her mother’s face. Serene, pale and too calm. Her voice like water running over cold stone.
Isla had always believed her mother died during childbirth. That had been the story. That was the truth she had grown around like ivy on a broken frame. But the dream from the night before returned in haunting fragments.
A clearing in the woods. Black birds that were not birds at all, shifting in and out of form.
Her mother, standing in the center, hands raised, speaking to something cloaked in thick, roiling fog.
She was offering it something.
Her name.
“Not her life,” Raven whispered. Her voice trembled, and the flames behind her hissed in protest. “Her name. That’s how the Sombrosi mark their prey. A name is a thread. Once given, it gives them power to unravel the soul.”
Isla staggered back, a gasp clawing from her throat. “My mother… she did this?”
Lucia nodded slowly, her eyes full of something like sorrow and fear. “ Not out of cruelty. She was likely one of them, or at least bound to them in a way even she didn’t understand.”
Rohen swore under his breath. His posture shifted subtly, like a predator sniffing the edge of a trap.
“This changes everything,” he muttered. “If the Sombrosi are loose, they won’t just come for the child. They’ll come for the packs and every other kind of creature. For what is left of the Elders and their allies. For the stories and laws that bind us. They’ll unmake the very foundation of who you are.”
The fire behind them flared suddenly. The flames licked upward in shades of blue and violet, twisting into shapes that made no sense and then Isla went still.
Her body locked in place, and her muscles went taut. Her head tilted slowly, not in pain, but in eerie surrender, like something inside her was watching through her eyes.
When she spoke, her voice was not her own.
It was smaller, sharper and hollow. Yet, it was full of knowing.
“They come in threes,” the child said.
The words echoed unnaturally. Like they didn’t belong to this room.
“One to remember. One to betray. One to burn.”
Gasps rippled through the room and then Isla collapsed.