Hour of the Moon

Chapter 7: The Seer

The forest swallowed sound.

My tires rasped over gravel and root, the engine's growl dying into a hush that felt ritual. Pines rose on either side like sentinels, their limbs interlocking in a canopy of bruised gold and shadow. The air hung damp, resin-sweet, consecrated by rot. Sunlight, what little reached this far, fell in slanted knives—holy daggers through cathedral glass.

The Seer lived an hour into the belly of this place—deep enough that even the wind forgot your name.

Damn Faeries and their labyrinths.

The deeper I went, the more the world bent. The scent changed first—moss, iron, something faintly floral beneath the decay, a whisper of her perfume where she had never walked. My hands tightened on the wheel. The wolf stirred, restless. Desire is a compass that doesn't care what it ruins.

When the path narrowed to nothing, I cut the engine and stepped out. Silence gathered, thick and sentient. The forest breathed me in, tasted me.

I let the wolf rise. My pupils widened, color bleaching to the molten gold of revelation. Through that sight, glamour peeled back like old paint: the shimmer of veiled wards, the outline of a structure pretending to be ruin. A shack, humble and impossible, wrapped in prisms. Beauty and deceit were twins.

When I reached for the door, the illusion cracked—shattering in a rain of color that stung the skin.

I was expecting you, Waya of the Clearwater clan.

The voice wasn't sound. It was a vibration inside my skull—older than language, edged with amusement.

Akita emerged from the aperture like a shadow remembering form. His shamma fell in cream folds, his feet bare, his skin the color of sun-baked clay. The blindness in his eyes was luminous, a blue-white film that caught the dim light and held it.

"At long last," he said aloud, voice textured like river stone. "The wolf who comes to bargain with ghosts."

Inside, the air was thick with rosemary and dried lavender, the scent steeped into the wood until it had become its own kind of incense. Shelves curved with jars—powders, bones, petals—each pulsing faintly with residual life. Space twisted in here. It was wider than it had any right to be, the geometry wrong in quiet ways.

He gestured to a circular rug surrounded by books that leaned like drunken priests. "Sit."

I stripped my boots and obeyed. The floorboards sighed beneath me, cool as skin left too long in the moonlight.

"You're afraid," he said, and smiled. "Good. Fear means you're still more man than myth."

"They call you a traitor," I said.

His laugh was soft and terrible. "They call everything they can't control a betrayal. I call it survival."

His sightless eyes shifted, fixing somewhere behind my heartbeat. "But you didn't come to talk about history. You came because of her."

The word slid through me like a blade through water.

"She's human," I said, my voice quieter than I intended.

He tilted his head. "And exquisite."

"That isn't what this is."

"No?" His mouth curved. "Then why does your blood sing of her? Even now, I can smell her on you. Black currant and citrus. Lily bruised under the hand. You carry her like a wound you keep licking."

My pulse tripped. The wolf stretched inside me, eager and humiliated.

"She isn't mine," I managed. "She can't be."