The Last Blue Lycan

The Seer's Oath (Flashback)

The High Seer Temple smelled of old paper and cold stone, not incense like the Black Wolves thought.

Elara loved that smell. It meant safety. And safety meant her father wasn't shouting.

She was ten years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Forbidden Archive, the room her father told her never to enter because "Seer girls who go in there lose their sight."

She had gone in anyway because Kael had been beaten again.

That morning, Jorn's gang had broken Kael's two fingers for looking at the statue too long. Elara had found him behind the Omega house, cradling his hand, his ice-blue eyes watering but refusing to cry because half-castes weren't allowed to cry.

She had healed him. Gold light from her small palms, the only magic she had ever been able to do. She couldn't See the future like her father. She couldn't See who would have pups or when it would rain. The other Seer kids called her useless. Her father called her "late bloomer."

But she could heal Kael. And when she healed him, the pain in his fingers went away, and for a second, his blue eyes looked at her like she was the only real thing in the world.

Tonight, her hands still tingled from healing him. And the tingling wouldn't stop. It was crawling up her arms, hot and cold at once.

She had snuck into the Forbidden Archive to find a book on healing. Instead, she found a diary that wasn't supposed to exist.

It was hidden under a loose stone where her father always prayed. Leather cover, blue faded to grey. No title. Just a name burned into it in shaky letters:

SERAPHINE

Elara had heard that name once. When she was five, she asked her father why her hair had a weird white streak in it when all Seers had black hair. Her father had gone pale and said, "It was your grandmother Seraphine's. She died before you were born. Don't say her name in front of the Alpha."

Elara opened the diary.

The first page hit her like a slap.

I am High Seer Seraphine. I have broken my oath. Moon Goddess, forgive me.

---

Twenty-Three Years Ago. Three Years Before the Massacre.

Seraphine was twenty-four and the most powerful High Seer in a hundred years. She could see three days into the future with perfect clarity. The Black Wolves hated her because she told them truths they didn't want to hear. The Blue Lycans loved her because she told King Vael when the Black Wolves would attack.

King Vael was kind to her. He gave the Seers a temple inside the Royal Courtyard, not outside the walls like the old kings did. "Seers see," he said. "Let them see close."

King Vael had a younger brother. Prince Rhyen.

Where Vael was stern and scarred and married to his duty and his Queen, Rhyen was... different. Rhyen laughed. Rhyen had been born with one blue eye and one black eye; a throwback to when Blue Lycans and Black Wolves were once one tribe. The elders whispered he was impure, but King Vael loved his brother fiercely.

Rhyen was the only Blue Lycan who ever visited the Seer to ask Seraphine if she had seen whether it would rain, because he wanted to take his wolf out to run.

Seraphine, who had taken a vow of celibacy at thirteen to keep her sight pure, had never been looked at the way Rhyen looked at her. Not like a tool, but like a girl.

One night, during the Festival of Two Moons, Rhyen found her on the temple roof, crying because she had Seen her own mother's death the next week and could not stop it.

He didn't say "It's the Goddess's will." He just sat next to her and said, "That's a stupid rule. If you can see it, you should be able to stop it."

She laughed through tears. No one ever said Seer rules were stupid to her face.

That night, she broke her oath.

It was not a grand romance. It was two lonely people who were told they could not have love finding it for one night on a temple roof under two moons.

She knew she was pregnant two weeks later, because Seers always know.

She went to King Vael, terrified, kneeling at the foot of the king that is now an ancestor to a statue, but then was just a man on a throne.

"My King, I have broken my oath. I am with child. It is Prince Rhyen's."

She expected death. Seers who broke celibacy were blinded.

King Vael was silent for a long time. Then he stood up and walked down and lifted her up with his own hands; a King touching a Seer was forbidden.

"Does my brother know?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Does he want the child?"

"He says he wants me. But I am a Seer. He is a Prince. The council will kill the baby. Half Seer, half Blue Lycan. They will call it an abomination worse than a half-caste."

King Vael looked at her belly, then at his brother Rhyen who stood shaking in the doorway.

Vael sighed. "My brother has always had one black eye. The council already whispers he is impure. If they learn he fathered a half-breed with a Seer, they will use it to say our line is weak. The Black Wolves will use it to start war."

Seraphine wept. "I will go into the woods. I will have it alone."

"No," Vael said. "You will not. You will have it here. And we will hide it. Because Moon Goddess told me last night in a dream that a child of Sight and Fang will be needed when darkness comes."

He called his most loyal man; her own younger brother, Seer Malor, Elara's granduncle.

"Malor," King Vael said. "Your sister will go into isolation for a vision quest. Nine months. No one sees her. When she gives birth, you will take the baby and raise it as your own daughter. Tell everyone your wife had a late child. Do you understand?"

Malor, who was only eighteen, nodded, crying.

And so Seraphine disappeared into the inner temple. For nine months, only Rhyen was allowed to bring her food. She gave birth on a night with no moons, so no Seer could See it.

A girl. With brown hair, but with one tiny streak of white - and eyes that flickered, just for a second, ice-blue, before settling to Seer brown.

Lyanna. They gave her to Malor. Malor and his wife raised her as their own, as Elara's aunt, then later, Elara's mother.

Prince Rhyen was exiled quietly a month later for "insubordination"; King Vael's way of saving his life. "Go to the northern mountains," Vael told his brother. "Live. Your daughter lives."

Seraphine never broke celibacy again. She became even more powerful, because guilt made her Sight sharper. She wrote it all in her diary.

On the last page, she wrote:

Lyanna is three. She healed a bird today with gold light that turned blue. Malor is scared. Rhyen is gone. Vael says war is coming. If the Black Wolves come, I have told Malor - if they kill us, hide the children. Hide Vael's sons. Hide my granddaughter. The Seer's Oath is not to the throne. The Seer's Oath is to the Blue Lycans blood, no matter how diluted. Even if it is half. Even if it is a quarter. Even if it is called half-caste.

Moon Goddess, let them live.

---

Elara slammed the diary shut, her ten-year-old heart hammering so loud she thought the temple walls could hear.

Lyanna. That was her mother's name. Her mother who everyone said died giving birth to Elara.

Her mother wasn't just her mother's sister. Her mother was the illegitimate daughter of a Blue Lycan Prince and a High Seer.

Which meant Elara wasn't a failed Seer.

She was quarter Blue Lycan.

No... wait. Seraphine wrote gold turned blue. That was exactly what happened to her hands when she healed Kael behind the statue.

Her hands weren't failing.

They were remembering.

Footsteps. Her father, High Seer Theron, walked into the Forbidden Archive. He saw her with the diary in her lap.

His face went white. Whiter than the white streak in her hair.

"Elara," he whispered. "Where did you find that?"

Elara looked up at her father, tears in her brown eyes that were, just for a second, flickering blue.

"Father," she asked, holding up the diary with shaking hands, "am I a half-caste too?"

Outside, the horn blew for Evening Offering, but inside the archive, the only sound was the old Seer's oath breaking all over again.