Chapter 2: The Wolfborn

The morning after the blood moon,Kaelen woke with a scream caught in his throat and sweat soaked into his sheets. His chest heaved like he’d been sprinting for hours, lungs ragged, heart hammering. His dreams had been filled withmetal—twisting gears and rusted fangs, glowing eyes and the relentless pounding of claws on iron ground. And over it all, a howl that shook the dream-world apart.

He sat up, blinking in the half-light of dawn. Something was wrong.

The quiet that usually accompanied the early hours of the morning felt heavier today, like the very air had thickened in his lungs. Kaelen paused, struggling to clear the fog of sleep from his mind, but it wasn’t just grogginess weighing on him. There was something in the atmosphere, something faintly unsettling.

The familiar scents of the smithy—coal, ash, oil—were suddenly sharper, crisper, like each breath filled his lungs with a clarity he hadn’t known before. He could almost taste the burnt metal on the air, the sharp tang of iron from the forge, the earthy bitterness of the soot that coated the walls. The smell was no longer just a part of his daily routine; it was a presence, as though the very air itself was alive, breathing with him, in rhythm with the pulse of his heart. Each inhale seemed to stir something deep within him, as though he was attuning himself to something ancient and untapped. The sounds, too, were exaggerated. The thud of the village baker kneading dough half a street away rang out with such clarity that it felt like he was standing in the same room. The low hum of conversation from the market square, the faraway chatter of children playing near the fountain, all seemed to merge into a symphony of life, each note vibrating through his bones. Every creak of wood, every bird’s flutter in the trees, reverberated through his mind, louder and more detailed than ever before. It was overwhelming, a cacophony that threatened to drown him in its intensity, yet it also felt… right, as if the world was finally in focus, in tune with something deeper than his own awareness.

The steady drip of water from the leaky faucet in the corner of his room was a steady rhythm, almost maddening, echoing in his ears as though it were a drumbeat. The sound repeated, insistent, punctuating the silence between the other noises, a reminder that his perception had shifted. He could hear the way the droplets splashed against the basin, the way they shifted from plink to plunk as the pace quickened, creating an almost hypnotic pattern in his mind. Each drip seemed to carry with it a weight, a message he couldn’t understand but could feel in the pit of his stomach. The sound took on a different quality, the way a distant bell might toll, drawing his attention to it in a way that no normal drip ever had.

And his stomach. It growled, but not in the way it had before. This hunger was a ravenous, insatiable thing, gnawing at his insides with a force that left him breathless. He had been hungry after a long shift at the forge, yes, but nothing like this. This was the hunger of something primal—wild—something deeper th