Bid My Blood to Run

Webs are made mostly of spaces. They break easily. They barely exist. They belong to the category of half-things: mist, smoke, shrouds, ghosts, membranes, retinas or rags; and they quickly fill up with un-things: old legs and wings and heads and hollow abdomens and body bags of wasps.
-- Alice Oswald

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The rough wood of the Nemeton's exposed trunk pulsed with a steady sort of power beneath Stiles' crossed legs, ley lines' node burning as bright as a dwarf star beneath the teen's jeans-clad thighs. While it was true enough that, once upon a time ago, the Nemeton had flared brighter still... even now, the focal point packed enough of a punch to allow Stiles to accomplish what he had come here to do: so, too, had the node slowly began gaining power once more, growing stronger over the course of the past several months and the attention that the Spark had paid to it, nursing the node bit by bit and making it stronger.

Scott and the rest of his Pack were unaware of Stiles' silent task, Deaton and his sister as blind as the majority of them, but that was all to the teen's own benefit. If they had known... perhaps the Nemeton would have been burned to ash and soot this time around. Perhaps they would have found a way to bind Stiles' own powers, ruling that the magic that coursed through the amber-eyed boy's veins was too much for one person to contain. Honestly, the latter wouldn't have surprised Stiles by this point in the game: but that was also why he was here.

Beacon Hills' True Alpha saw the world painted in shades of black and white, labeling monsters-made-flesh with arbitrary terms of 'good' and 'evil' when... things were so much more complicated, so much more complex, than all of that. The world was colored in various hues of gray, 'good' and 'evil' were concepts that only children truly believed in anymore, and the dismissive, irresponsible sort of behavior that Scott tended to fall back on would one day get the Pack and their families killed. Stiles had learned the hard way that Scott was blind in the worst sorts of ways; while the Spark still viewed the other boy as a brother... it was family, oftentimes, that became intimately aware of each other's flaws.

Stiles himself was no saint—he would be the first to admit to his own shortcomings—but Scott painted himself as some sort of Messiah 'wolf with the title of True Alpha and—the other teen still knew nothing of the culture he was now indoctrinated into or even his own role within the Pack and the territory he now claimed as his own as Alpha. He was still willfully, happily ignorant of his responsibilities, and Stiles could easily see just how that attitude was trickling down to the others, how the arrogance and carelessness and rejection of the wolf within reflected itself a multitude of times until the Pack became nothing more than a sham of what it was truly supposed to be.

It wouldn't be long, then, before they faced a Big Bad that they couldn't overcome, didn't understand, or Scott would wrongfully grant a second chance to. The hourglass to that particular event had been trickling ever onwards in the back of Stiles' head for weeks, months—years, even—but it hadn't been until the previous week before that the whiskey-eyed boy finally decided to do something about it.

(A second chance granted to a group of rakshasa. Three families had been decimated two days later as a result.)

So everything had finally come to a head for Stiles, which was why he was here, now, carefully drawing up thick strands of the Nemeton's power, tugging gently to then imbibe them into the series of runes that had been painted in blood over his arms and along the outside of the sacrificial bowl.

The power built, the air within the clearing grew heavier, and Stiles' eyes glowed in the midnight darkness—

A dark shape prowled the edge of grass and trees, just a flicker of movement—here and gone again—but it was enough of a shift for the teen to catch sight of it; he tracked the hidden figure with a still-bright gaze, never looking away until that shape finally stepped forward and into the moonlight. It revealed itself to be a too-large wolf, broad in the shoulders and large enough that its head would have been level with the teen's shoulder—too huge to be fully natural, fur a matte, inky black that blended in with the shadows that slowly creeped in as the moon dipped low towards the horizon. It was the wolf's gaze that gave away its supernatural status, however: a pair of bloodily crimson eyes stared up at the boy perched upon the Nemeton's corpse.