The Last Blue Lycan

Kael's Mother's Memory

Kael couldn't sleep after Elara's eyes turned blue. The Royal Courtyard was in lockdown. Zara's frozen hand had taken three Seers and a bucket of hot water to melt. Alpha Moros the second had declared it "a failed Seer attack from overwork" and ordered Elara locked inside the Moon Temple for "rest before the Contest."

That was the official story. The real story was that guards now stood outside the Temple doors with silver daggers. And Elara had been dragged inside by her father while her blue eyes were still blazing, while she was staring at her own frozen hands asking "What am I?"

Kael had tried to run to her. Jorn had put a knee in his back and held him down in the frozen puddle and whispered, "Demon lover."

Now it was midnight. The Blue Moon was in less than two days. Kael lay on straw in the Omega house, his cheek still stinging from Zara's slap, his straw wet from the leak, and he stared at the ceiling, listening to the other Omega boys snore.

He didn't mean to fall asleep, but he did. And he remembered.

---

He was three years old, Small enough to be carried on a hip.

Fire. Everywhere fire. The Royal Courtyard wasn't stone then, it was wood and blue banners. The Stone King was a man, alive, tall, blue eyes blazing, standing on the Alpha House balcony shouting orders while blood ran down his arm.

King Vael. His grandfather. Alive. Screaming: "Take the pups! Take the pups to the Seer Temple!"

A woman held Kael tight against her chest, running. She had his ice-blue eyes. She had long black hair with a blue tint. She was beautiful and she was bleeding from a cut on her head.

His mother. He had never remembered her face before. The Omega house told him his mother was a rogue who died in a ditch. But now, in the dream, he saw her. Princess Lira. Crown Prince's wife. Last Queen of Blue Demons.

"Hold on, Kael, hold on, my snow," she whispered to him, running. She wasn't a rogue. She was a queen running through her burning palace with her three-year-old son.

Black Wolves everywhere. Black eyes. Swords. They were killing Blue Demon women. Killing pups. One Black Wolf grabbed a Blue Demon child by the hair...

Kael's mother didn't stop. She ran for the Seer Temple. The small temple behind the big one, the forbidden old temple where he and Elara trained.

Inside the temple, a young Seer woman waited, shaking. Not old Seraphine. This one was younger, with brown hair, white streak. Her Seer robes were too big for her. She was seventeen, maybe eighteen.

Lyanna. Elara's mother. But in this memory, she wasn't a mother yet. She was a girl, holding two bundles.

One bundle was a baby, wrapped in blue. Kael, three years old, could see it; a baby girl with brown hair and a tiny white streak, sleeping, with tiny fists that glowed faint gold-blue.

Baby Elara. Lyanna held baby Elara in one arm, and with the other arm, she pulled Kael's mother inside and slammed the temple door.

"They killed Malor," Lyanna sobbed to Kael's mother. "They killed my father Malor. They are killing all who swore to Blue Demons."

Queen Lira knelt, holding three-year-old Kael, breathing hard. "Lyanna. You have to go. The northern tunnel. Vael made it for this. Take Elara and take my son."

"And you?" Lyanna cried.

"I will hold the door. I am Queen. If they find you, they find the last female. Go."

Outside, Black Wolves banged on the temple doors, shouting: "Open in the name of Alpha Moros!"

Lyanna looked at Queen Lira, then at three-year-old Kael, then at baby Elara in her arms.

She made a choice Seraphine would have been proud of.

She took off her Seer cloak and wrapped three-year-old Kael in it. "No. You take her. You are Queen. Your blood is purest. If one of us must live, it is you. Take my daughter. Take her as your own if you live, or hide her if you die. Her name is Elara, after my mother's mother. Promise me."

Queen Lira stared at baby Elara, then took the baby with one arm, holding her own son Kael with the other. Two babies, one three years, one newborn.

Lyanna kissed her baby daughter's forehead. "Be a failed Seer, my love. Be useless. Be safe."

Then Lyanna opened the secret floor stone - the same loose stone Elara found grandmother's diary under fifteen years later, and pushed Queen Lira and the two children into the darkness below.

"Run!" Lyanna screamed as Black Wolves broke the door. "RUN!"

Last thing three-year-old Kael saw before the stone slid shut above him was Lyanna picking up a temple candlestick and standing alone against six Black Wolves to buy them seconds.

She didn't scream when they cut her down.

She just whispered, "Elara."

In the tunnel, in pitch black, Queen Lira held both children and ran, barefoot, through mud and water, until she came out miles away, in the Omega slums.

She hid baby Elara first; left her on the steps of the Seer Temple where High Seer Theron would find her and think his sister's daughter had been orphaned in the raid, which was almost true.

Then she ran with Kael, but she was bleeding too much. Black Wolves found her at the edge of the Omega house.

"Rogue whore with a demon pup," one said.

She held Kael to her chest and took the knife.

Three-year-old Kael didn't understand death yet. He understood cold. His mother went cold.

An old Omega woman pulled him from his mother's arms. "Shh, shh."

And Queen Lira's last words, before she went cold, were not to her son. They were to the Omega woman:

"His name is Kael. And tell Lyanna's girl... tell her I kept my promise."

---

Kael woke up screaming. A raw, throat-tearing scream that woke all nine Omega boys, that made the guards outside the Omega house kick the door open.

He sat upright in straw, soaked in sweat, ice-blue eyes blazing so bright the dark Omega house lit up blue.

"LYANNA!"

He screamed a name he had never heard awake in his life.

"LYANNA! ELARA! THEY KILLED HER! SHE HELD THE DOOR!"

The guards dragged him out, thinking he had a fit. They threw water on him.

Kael knelt in mud, sobbing, shaking, sixteen years of missing memory crashing back.

His mother didn't abandon him. She saved Elara first.

Elara's mother didn't die in childbirth. She died holding a candlestick against six Black Wolves to save him.

And Elara was not just quarter Blue Demon, She was the daughter of the woman who died for him.

And he had just screamed her mother's true name in front of guards who would report every word to Alpha Moros the second.

From the Moon Temple balcony, behind locked doors, Elara woke up from her own dream at the exact same second, her blue eyes blazing, screaming the same name back:

"LYANNA? MOTHER?"