To heal a Rogue

LYSANDER

I searched every face in the room, waiting for the smirk, the crack in someone’s expression, anything that would tell me this was an elaborate joke that had gone far enough.

No one smiled. No one even looked uncertain.

"The Lycan King," I said slowly. "Why is he inside a glass tube, and..."

The words caught in my throat.

The figure drifted almost weightlessly in the green-lit liquid, pale skin crossed by veins that seemed to pulse with an eerie silver glow beneath the surface. Tubes disappeared into his back, his arms, his neck. His eyes remained closed.

Something about him felt wrong. He did not look dead. Though I could be wrong. He did not look alive either.

Whatever he was, it was something suspended between the two.

"...is he alive?"

"Yes," Beta Bradley answered.

The single word echoed through the chamber.

I barked out a laugh before I could stop myself. "No."

I half expected them to do the same. But all I got back really was silence.

I looked from Bradley to the elders and realized they were being serious about this.

"No, absolutely not. Someone needs to explain why any of this matters, because I feel like I’ve walked into the middle of a very expensive hallucination."

One of the elders stepped forward with measured, reverent steps. His hands folded before him as though he were approaching an altar rather than a prison.

"You know the old rhyme," he said quietly. "’The goddess blessed some and cursed some. Selene blessed us with her light and cursed them with the dark.’"

I folded my arms. "Of course, I know the nursery rhyme. Everyone does."

"It is no nursery rhyme."

His eyes never left mine.

"One of those she cursed was her own son. A child born of the moon goddess herself, who believed his judgment greater than hers."

Something cold settled in my stomach.

"...Selene had a son?... Like she birthed one?"

The elder inclined his head like he found my thought process ridiculous and I would give it to him. It probably was. But what was I to do?

Bradley continued. "Our goddess walked this world when the earth was still young. She loved a mortal man and remained among humanity for a time, teaching them how to survive, to build, to flourish."

His voice seemed swallowed by the chamber itself.

"But humanity was not alone."

Images I’d seen in old paintings my father loved and the stories as well flashed through my mind.

Dragons.

"The Drakori," Bradley said. "The ancestors of what people now call the elusive dragonkin. They served another deity, Aureon, the Sun God. They refused Selene’s guidance because they believed she was beneath their own god, a younger celestial who had abandoned the heavens to concern herself with mortal lives."

The elder’s expression hardened.

"That insult did not anger Selene. It angered her son."

Bradley nodded once.

"Lycaon."

Even the name seemed to linger in the air.

"He believed himself protector of his mother’s honor. Without her blessing, he gathered those loyal to him and declared war upon the Drakori. Entire cities burned. Blood stained lands that had never known violence. He believed every life he took glorified his mother."

My mouth had gone dry.

"And Selene?"

"She was horrified."

The answer came instantly.

"When the war finally ended," Bradley said, "she did what no god had ever done." His gaze shifted toward the tube. "She judged her own child."

The room felt smaller.

The green glow from the cylinder painted everyone’s faces with sickly light.

"She stripped him of the blessings she had given him by twisting his immortal body into something neither divine nor mortal. She cursed every warrior who had followed him, every soul who willingly took part in his crusade."

The elder lowered his head.

"And thus the first Lycans were born."

The words settled over the chamber like falling ash.

"Their greatest punishment," another elder murmured, "was not the curse itself."

Bradley looked back at me.

"It was that Selene turned her face from them forever."

He lifted one hand toward the towering cylinder.

"That..."

His voice became almost reverent.

"...is Lycaon."

I stared at the figure.

The shape inside the glass had not moved.

Yet every instinct I possessed screamed that something beyond human understanding rested only a few feet away.

"This..." My voice came out hoarse. "You’re telling me the founder of the Lycan race..."

I couldn’t finish the sentence.

My heartbeat thundered in my ears.

It was ridiculous.

Impossible.

My mind clawed desperately for another explanation.

A clone... Some elaborate genetic experiment... Anything but this.

"You cannot seriously expect me to believe that’s a demigod."

No one answered.

That silence frightened me far more than any argument could have.

I took an involuntary step closer to the cylinder.

The liquid rippled.

Just once. It was tiny and barely noticeable.

Yet every hair on my arms stood upright.

"How long..." I swallowed hard, unable to tear my eyes away from the thing suspended inside the glass.

"...how long has he been here?"

"Surprisingly, not long at all," Bradley said. "Two decades ago, he attempted to reclaim influence over the throne, perhaps to further shame his own mother in front of the world she’d left him to answer for. Lucky for us, we had capable witches and soldiers willing to lay down their lives to stop him. Many did."

"Then why in the goddess’s name are we keeping him as some kind of trophy," I said. "Why not simply kill him?"

"Because he is part god," Bradley said. "We would very much like him dead. We do not have that choice." He gestured toward the tube. "He is currently suspended in a potent mixture of liquid silver and the purest wolfsbane nectar known to exist. He is drowned in it constantly, electrocuted at intervals to keep his heart from strengthening past a controlled threshold, and held beneath a rune crafted by fifteen powerful witch bloodlines working in tandem to keep him unconscious and immobile." His jaw tightened. "And still, he remains a risk to us."

"We brought you here, Alpha Lysander," he continued, "to explain the foundation of your rule. Protecting this kingdom means, in part, ensuring the creature in that tube remains exactly where he is. Forever, if we are fortunate." He gestured toward the space before the tank. "This is where you will make your secret oath. An oath nobody but the people in this room can know. Before the High Elders, before your predecessors, and before the goddess herself."

"How can any of us be certain this is what the goddess actually wants?" I said.

"One thing about the goddess," Bradley said, something almost dry in his tone. "If she hates something, you will know it plainly enough. She does not hide her displeasure."

I looked back at the floating, hairless figure in the tube, at the wires and the sickly green water and the stillness of a body that had apparently once burned the sky.

I needed to get this over with quickly.

"I don’t have a problem with it," I said. "What oath do I need to take?"

The elders began speaking the words to me, slow and deliberate, and I repeated each line back with my eyes fixed on the tube in front of me.

"I, Lysander Asker, swear before the goddess Selene and the High Elder Circle to guard the seal that binds Lycaon, son of the moon, enemy of the sun. I swear to protect this kingdom from the darkness he represents, to uphold the laws set forth to contain what remains of his curse, and to never, by word or deed, allow his release. This I swear on my blood, my crown, and my line."

When I finished, every elder in that room bowed low before me, their heads dipping in near perfect unison, the ceremony complete.

I glanced back toward the tube one final time.

For a single, impossible second, the man’s eyes looked like they were open, fixed directly on me through the murky green liquid, pale and unblinking and entirely too aware for a creature supposedly kept unconscious by fifteen bloodlines of witch magic.

I blinked and turned back to it.

His eyes were closed again, exactly as they had been the entire time, still and lifeless behind the glass.

Had I imagined that?

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