The morning following the Multi-Pack Territorial Summit breaks with a heavy, suffocating fog that blankets the outer valleys of the Valerian Empire.

By noon, the news of the catastrophic display in the Grand Hall reaches the borders of Black Hollow like an executioner's bell.

Their Alpha had not only failed to retrieve the woman he publicly discarded, but he had also been broken, shattered, and thoroughly humiliated in front of every dominant pack leader on the continent.

The Black Hollow's sovereignty fractures instantly.

For months, the internal stability of the eastern pack had been decaying under Kaelen's erratic, jealousy-poisoned neglect.

Now, faced with the terrifying prospect of an absolute imperial cleansing from the Western, panic detonates within the tribe's hierarchy. The very same elders and high-ranking councilors who had stood in cynical, cold silence during the full moon coronation are suddenly running out of time. They realize that following a rabid dog will only lead them all to a communal grave.

At the secluded, iron-reinforced side gates of the Obsidian Citadel, three senior Black Hollow elders stand shivering in the damp mountain air.

They do not wear their formal, gold-trimmed robes; they are wrapped in plain, dirt-encrusted traveling cloaks, their faces pale, hollowed out by absolute terror. They are trembling so violently that the heavy parchment documents held in their hands rustle like dead leaves.

Inside the small, heated stone receiving chamber adjacent to the courtyard, Anastasia sits in a heavily carved, high-backed master chair. The room is quiet, smelling faintly of clean beeswax and drying winter-herbs. She wears a simple, deep charcoal tunic, her fingers methodically turning the thick, yellowed pages of an ancient botanical text.

She does not look up. She doesn't break the rhythm of her reading.

The oldest elder, a man who had previously signed the document stripping Anastasia of her lineage, drops heavily onto his hands and knees on the freezing flagstones.

"Anastasia... Lady Anastasia," the old man gasps, his forehead pressing directly against the stone as tears of pure desperation cut through the grime on his face. "We were blind. The council was deceived by the Alpha's bloodline promises. We did not understand the madness consuming him."

"He is entirely gone," another councilor confesses, his voice cracking into a high, frantic register as he kneels beside the first. "Since the night of the rejection, the necrosis has devoured whatever remained of his mind. He doesn't sleep. He doesn't rule. He treats the territory like a cage and his own people like enemies. He is a dangerous, violent beast who will drag the entire Black Hollow tribe into a war of total extermination! Please... you must speak to the King. You must stay his hand."

Anastasia doesn't afford them a single look. Her features remain as unyielding and smooth as mountain ice. She gracefully slides her finger beneath the edge of the parchment, turning the page with a faint, dry scrape that cuts through their panicked breathing.

Desperate groveling of cowards finally realized the altar they built is about to collapse on top of them.

----

Deep within the subterranean iron cells of the Obsidian Citadel, the reality of that madness is confined behind three inches of solid obsidian-reinforced bars.

Kaelen Varros has ceased to look human.

The absolute, crushing weight of Draven's sovereign aura from the day before had completely pulverized his physical skeletal structure, but the psychological severance has done far worse. Trapped inside the dim, stone chamber, his giant, black wolf form has erupted through his skin in a violent, chaotic mutation, completely uncoupled from his conscious mind.

The beast is entirely feral, its eyes glowing a fractured, milky silver as it launches its broken body indiscriminately against the iron walls. It snaps blindly at the stone, its jaws fracturing against the obsidian, tearing its own paws to shreds as it attempts to claw through the solid mountain.

When a junior guard approaches the viewing slit to check the restraints, the wolf hurls itself against the bars with a sub-human, wet shriek of pure, obsessive agony.

----

Back in the receiving room, the heavy oak doors click open, and the freezing, absolute gravity of the Valerian Empire enters the space.

Draven Thorne steps into the chamber, flanked by Lord Commander Rowan. The King wears his dark military uniform, his long black coat trailing behind his boots like a shadow.

He stops beside Anastasia's chair, his ice-blue eyes lowering onto the three kneeling eastern figures with a look of supreme, unbothered disgust.

Rowan steps forward, his leather-gloved hand extended. With a cold, silent precision, the Lord Commander wrenches the documents from the lead elder's trembling fingers—a formal, blood-signed contract of total submission and surrender from the Black Hollow council.

Draven doesn't even look at the papers. He tilts his head slightly toward Rowan, his voice a low, indifferent baritone.

"Take the trash out of my basement," Draven says calmly. "Return the broken thing to his kennels. If he steps across my boundary line again, his tribe becomes vacant land."

"Immediately, Your Majesty," Rowan replies, signaling to the heavy guards waiting in the corridor.

The King refuses to grant Kaelen the dignity of a formal execution or a royal trial. To Draven Thorne, a broken, unhinged border Alpha is not an enemy to be feared or respected.

The guards will haul the locked, snarling crate containing Kaelen's mutated wolf form back to the East, dropping him into the deepest, darkest dungeon of his own ruined compound to await the judgment of his own desperate councilors.

The guards grab the elders by their cloaks, dragging them toward the stone exit.

The lead elder twists his body desperately, his hands scraping against the frost-covered floorboards as he fights to keep his eyes on the unmoving silhouette of the woman in the chair. The reality of their Karma is absolute—the very tribe that had discarded her like a worthless offering is now reduced to begging her.

The old man's voice cracks into a final, broken shriek as the iron gates begin to close between them, the sound echoing through the cold stone corridor like a death rattle:

"Lady Anastasia... please... save Black Hollow! Do not let the Western King destroy the innocent! The Alpha has gone completely mad!"