Chapter 45: Morban
Ethan's POV
The silver rope burned against my wrists as the guards dragged me through the wilderness. Each stumble sent fresh waves of pain through my body.
My mind kept circling back to the prison cell. Lucas's men bursting in under cover of darkness. The stranger I'd glimpsed in the shadows before something struck my skull. Then nothing but blackness until I woke to rough hands hauling me upright.
The transition made no sense. I should have been dragged to the execution grounds for public display, not marched toward some unknown fate through increasingly desolate terrain.
"I should be dead," I thought, watching the landscape grow more barren with each forced step. "Why am I here? Who was that man in the cell?"
One guard—a stocky wolf with a scar bisecting his left eyebrow—kicked the back of my knee. I sprawled into the dirt.
"Keep moving! The sooner we dump you in Morban, the sooner we collect our reward."
His boot connected with my ribs as I struggled to rise. The impact drove what little air remained from my lungs.
The other guard, younger and visibly nervous, kept glancing toward the horizon where purple-gray clouds gathered like bruises against the darkening sky.
"They say just getting close to the border can corrupt you," he muttered, his hand unconsciously moving to the protective charm around his neck. "That the very air there turns wolves into something... else."
The word "Morban" hit me like physical force. Not execution then—something worse. Exile to the one place from which no wolf ever returned, where the very ground was said to be cursed by forces older than memory.
My legs nearly gave out again, but the stocky guard's grip on my bound arms kept me upright, kept me moving toward whatever horrors awaited in that forsaken wasteland.
---
We reached the border at dusk.
The sight stole what remained of my courage. The boundary manifested as a stark cliff edge, a violent demarcation between two incompatible worlds. Behind us, the forest remained lush and green, evening birdsong filling the air with familiar melodies. Before us, the land dropped away into a deep valley shrouded in that same purple-gray mist I'd glimpsed on the horizon.
The cliff's edge marked more than geographical division. It separated life from its absence.
Where our side bloomed with late summer vegetation, the valley floor far below presented a scorched hellscape. Earth burned to blackness as if some massive conflagration had swept across it, leaving only ash and twisted remnants in its wake. Dead plants rose from the charred soil in grotesque shapes, their branches contorted into positions that seemed to defy natural growth patterns, each one coated in a fine layer of black powder that might once have been leaves or bark.
Occasionally, faint silver glimmers caught the dying light. They appeared almost like fragments of moonlight trapped within the very dirt itself, frozen and corrupted into something that hurt to look at directly.
The younger guard produced a knife, its blade catching the last rays of sunset as he moved behind me. The silver rope around my ankles parted with practiced efficiency, though he left my wrists bound tight enough that the metal continued eating into my skin.
"Wouldn't want you running off before we finish the job," he said, his scarred face splitting into a cruel grin.
The sudden freedom in my legs sparked desperate instinct. I pivoted hard, driving my forehead into his face with all the strength desperation could muster.
Cartilage crunched. Blood exploded from his nose as he staggered backward with a surprised yelp.
"You fucking—"
The other guard's boot caught me square in the stomach before I could press my advantage. The blow lifted me off my feet and sent me stumbling toward the cliff's edge. Loose stones skittered over the precipice, their faint clatter swallowed by the mist below.
The younger one recovered quickly, one hand stemming the blood flow from his ruined nose while the other grabbed my shoulder.
"Should've saved us the trouble," he snarled.
Together they heaved me toward the drop.
I had one moment—a single suspended instant—to see their faces twisted with satisfaction before my feet left solid ground. Then I was falling, their triumphant laughter ringing in my ears and rapidly fading as the purple-gray fog rose up to swallow me whole.
---
The impact drove every thought from my mind.
The fall lasted long enough for instinct to override panic. In the final seconds my wolf forced a partial shift—not enough to change my form, but enough to harden bone and brace muscle against impact.
I struck the valley floor with bone-jarring force. The thick layer of ash erupted around me in a massive black cloud, the soft accumulation partially cushioning what should have been fatal.
When I finally managed to force myself upright, the full horror of my surroundings became impossible to ignore.
Thick black ash covered everything, rising in choking clouds with my slightest movement. The stuff coated my throat and lungs, each inhalation bringing the acrid taste of sulfur and something burnt that might once have been organic matter.
Beneath the ash, the ground itself had transformed into something alien. Hard-packed earth the color of coal, cracked and fissured as though subjected to immense heat. What vegetation remained stood as monuments to death—gray-white grasses that crumbled to powder at the slightest touch, twisted shrubs whose bark had petrified into something resembling volcanic glass.
Strange phenomena dotted the landscape. Small patches of earth would spontaneously erupt with blue-purple flames that burned without sound or smoke, flickering briefly before vanishing as mysteriously as they appeared. The rocks—those few that protruded from the ash—bore silver scars across their surfaces, patterns that resembled burn marks but gleamed with that same corrupted moonlight I'd seen from above.
Whatever had happened here, whatever cataclysm had transformed this valley into a dead zone, it involved forces beyond my comprehension.
My skin began to itch and burn where the ash made contact. The sensation intensified until it felt like thousands of tiny insects burrowing beneath the surface. Breathing grew harder, each lungful of tainted air seeming to carry less oxygen than the last.
The silver rope around my wrists—already weakened by hours of contact with my skin—suddenly accelerated its decay. The metal blackened and crumbled as the corruption in the very atmosphere attacked it. I pulled hard and the bonds shattered like dried clay, freeing my hands but offering no comfort.
I tried shifting, hoping my wolf form might better resist the injuries and the environment's assault.
The transformation began but felt fundamentally wrong. As though something in the air itself fought against my nature. Pain unlike anything I'd experienced tore through my changing body, my wolf manifesting only partially before my control shattered and I snapped back to human form with a cry of agony.
When I touched my face with trembling fingers, I could feel my eyes still held traces of the shift. Glowing faintly green in the gathering darkness, a sign that the corruption had already begun its work.
Desperate for any connection to the life I'd lost, I reached inward for the mate bond that should have tied me to Layla.
The space where that golden thread had always resided now held only silence. A void so complete it felt like having a limb amputated. Whether the distance was too great or the bond itself had been severed by this cursed place, I couldn't tell—but the absence drove home my isolation more effectively than any physical barrier could.
I turned back toward the cliff I'd fallen from, already knowing what I'd find.
The rock face rose nearly vertical, its surface smooth and featureless save for the occasional outcropping too small and too far apart to offer any hope of climbing. Even if I'd been uninjured and at full strength, ascending would have been impossible. In my current state, with corruption spreading through my system and my wolf form unstable, the cliff might as well have been a mile high.
"No way out," I whispered, the words disappearing into the ash-choked air. "I'm trapped here."
But even as despair threatened to overwhelm me, thoughts of those I'd left behind forced my legs to move. Maya, Layla, Elder Thomas and the others—they were still prisoners, still suffering. I'd promised to protect them, to find a way to save them.
That promise didn't end just because I'd been thrown into hell.
I had to survive. Had to find shelter, water, some way to resist this place's corruption long enough to... to what? Escape was impossible. Rescue unlikely.
But giving up meant abandoning everyone who'd trusted me, and I refused to let that be my legacy.
So I began walking, each step raising small clouds of black ash, searching the dead landscape for any sign of salvation I knew I wouldn't find.
---
Hours passed in that twilight hell. The sky above never quite darkened to full night but never offered enough light to see clearly.
I'd been searching for water—some stream or spring that might have survived the devastation—when the feeling hit me. A prickling awareness that raised every hair on my body, the unmistakable sensation of being watched by something that viewed me as prey.
I spun around but saw nothing, heard nothing.
The complete absence of sound should have been my first warning. Even in this dead place, there should have been some noise—wind through the ash, settling rocks, something. The silence was absolute, predatory, the quiet of a hunter holding perfectly still before the strike.
Then I saw them.