The wind howled across the tundra like a wounded god. Snow fell in razors, blinding and merciless. A woman stumbled forward, arms clutched around a bundle of furs. Her silks were long since tattered, her perfume faded by the days in the wilderness. Her name was Liora, once a courtesan of Dal’Kaldera, once proud and beautiful, now gray and near-dead, her skin mottled with frostbite.

She had dragged her son across this wasteland for weeks. He was seventeen and gaunt, but strong in the way desperate children are. His name was Tyr. A clipped curse spat from his mother’s lips. Short for tyrant, she had told him, when the rot took her mind. You are your father’s child.

 

Now she fell.

Tyr screamed and shook her body, but she didn’t move. Her lips were blue. Her eyes stared into nothing. 

“Mom! Mom, get up!”

“Tyr… It’s a strong name. Wintival would like it. The moon favors wolves, not kings,” her voice was barely above a whisper. Her breathing was shallow.

“Mom… we have to keep going…”

The corner of her lip twitched, she tried to smile, but couldn’t. The chapped lips and frozen crust of blood made it too painful.

“You’ve grown up hard… I- I should have been… Don’t let the world use you, son. It’s taken enough from us.”

Tyr began to sob.

"I’m sorry… I-"

She exhaled and went completely still, mouth agape in the frozen expression of her last syllable.

For a long time, he didn’t rise. Just knelt. Just watched the storm erase her face. Something in him split.

 

And something else emerged.

 

The transformation was not elegant. It was agonizing… Every bone shifting, muscles snapping, and stretching. His breath turned to steam, then howls. When it ended, Tyr was no longer a boy, and Liora was no longer whole.

He tore her apart beneath a deep yellow moon, full and bright enough to illuminate the sky, a striking tapestry of auroras, stars, and deeply shaded clouds from the departing blizzard. (edited)

 

When he awoke, stained in blood and horror, he wanted to die.

 

Then…

 

Bootsteps. Slow. Unhurried.

 

One-Dog was tall and fur-wrapped, clad in chainmail and wolf-hide. A steel mask covered his face, streaked with a single cobalt stripe. He stood over the blood-slick snow and stared at the feral boy curled in a ball.

“...You’re a cursed little whelp,” said the man.

Tyr, half-conscious, didn’t speak. He couldn’t.

The man lifted the boy with one arm, his fur cloak crackling with frost. “Lucky for you, I like dogs.”

 

Tyr noticed two more following the man.

“He’s cursed,” said Cur-Grin, a wild-eyed man with too many knives and sharpened teeth. He stepped over a puddle of blood and cringed, looking at Tyr skeptically.

“He’s hungry,” said Kay-Nine, adjusting her goggles and scanning the prints around the corpse. “And alone.” She was young, maybe a year or two older than Tyr, but she carried herself with the strength and maturity of someone who’d already seen a lot.

“You got a name, pup?” One-Dog asked.

Tyr blinked. Said nothing.

One-Dog tossed him over his shoulder. “Then we’ll call you Stray-Wulf.” 

They brought him back to Galcea, the ancient skeleton of a frost dragon, half-buried in ice, ribs forming arches wide enough to hang hammocks from. The Order of the Dog made their home here. Mercenaries, all of them. Wintivalians, some devout, others apostate. They took contracts for coin or favors. They lived without a king and bowed to no crown but survival.

 

On full moons, they would lock him in a cage in the dug-out cellar underneath the dragon's skull. He’d howl and beat himself against the bars, but when he’d finally give up and go quiet, One-Dog brought him food, and he learned to behave and not attack the Order of the Dog.

 

He would train with each when not out on contracts or hunts.

 

The bones of Galcea groaned under the weight of snow and wind, but within the ribcage of the long-dead frost dragon, firelight danced off rusted weights and hand-forged iron bars. This was One-Dog’s domain, the gym, the forge, the proving ground.

Tyr, still lean from hunger but thickening now with muscle, wrapped his wrists in leather. His breath fogged the air in short bursts. One-Dog stood like a statue of war, furs draped over chainmail, and that steel mask with the faded blue stripe staring back with no expression.

“You’re weak,” One-Dog said. “But weakness is just the body begging to be challenged.”

He loaded the bar with slabs of scrap metal, repurposed shield plates, and gearheads from broken siege engines. Tyr slid under the bar and gritted his teeth.

“Strength isn’t just lifting. It’s enduring.”

Tyr pushed until the blood vessels in his neck felt ready to burst. One-Dog didn’t shout. He didn’t count. He watched, unmoving, until Tyr dropped the bar and collapsed on the cold floor.

Only then did he speak:

“Again. One day, you’ll need to lift more than metal. You’ll need to lift a brother from the ground. A woman from the fire. Yourself from ruin.”

Tyr groaned. Then he got up.

 

Cur-Grin’s teeth were filed to points, though whether they’d always been that way or he'd done it himself was a matter of debate. He smelled like fermented meat and always laughed too loudly.

He trained Tyr in the ruins of an old cathedral, where statues of forgotten saints lay broken in prayer. Here, Tyr learned movement. Flow. Brutality.

“Never fight fair,” Cur-Grin said. “Fight fun.”

They practiced with blades and fists. Cur-Grin taught him to smile when his nose broke, to laugh when surrounded. In battle, morale was a weapon. So was madness.

Tyr adapted well to this, recalling his street fights with the older boys in Glacikaldr.

 

Kay-Nine trained him hardest.

She was lean, blunt, and brilliant. The gang called her “the brain,” but never to her face. She made bombs out of nitre and metal scrap. She taught Tyr how to lay traps, read signs from nature, and track animals and enemies as if they were one and the same.

She would have him train blindfolded.

“Feel with your nose. Your ears. You’re a wolf, aren’t you?”

Tyr grunted. “I’m trying not to be.”

Kay-Nine laughed, wild and ragged. “Don’t fight the beast. Befriend it. Make it heel.”

She pelted Tyr with snowballs and whatever else was close. “You think the world waits for you to grow up?”

One caught Tyr in the ribs. He tackled blindly, knocking Kay-Nine over.

“Better,” she said, grinning with a split lip. “Now bite.”

 

He loved her. Of course he did.

Once, he tried to say it. They were skinning an elk under Galcea’s ribs.

“I feel things when I look at you,” he muttered.

Kay-Nine didn’t look up. “You’re young.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re still learning to control what’s inside you, Stray-Wulf.”

He stared at the knife in her hand.

“Do you feel anything for me?”

Kay-Nine hesitated.

“...I feel responsible for you.”

He didn’t ask again.

 

But he watched her back every mission since.

 

The years passed like teeth through meat.

 

They stole from warlords. They escorted priestesses across wolf-infested trails. They hunted beasts in the tundra and raided Emeraldites for their aldwan caches. Tyr grew taller, colder.

They taught him to kill. To listen. To think.

But more than that, they taught him to belong.

 

They weren’t just rogues and mercenaries. They were his pack.

 

He was loyal. He was dangerous. He was happy.

 

Then came the Dietakas.

 

The sky cracked. The sea boiled. Ice split and mountains fell. Volcanoes long dead stirred and erupted. Galcea, the dragon’s corpse, shook as the world remade itself.

 

Tyr had seen storms before, but nothing like the Dietakas. The mountains moaned. The very bones of the world quaked beneath his feet as winds howled with the fury of dying gods. Frostfire lashed the horizon, pale blue flame that did not burn, but froze on contact. The leylines of Templehelm were overflowing with arcana from the shattered barrier.

 

One-Dog shouted orders, his voice muffled beneath the steel mask. Snow stuck to his fur cloak, his chainmail clinking as he yanked a half-frozen gate shut.

"Secure the south arch! Kay-Nine, get the packs! Cur-Grin, check the vents! Tyr, with me!"

The wind screamed louder than any voice. A bolt of Dietakan lightning struck the ridge behind them. The sky bled light. Glacial ice cracked. The entire wall of the mountain began to slide.

Inside, the skeleton shuddered. Bones the size of ships trembled. Frost poured in through every crevice, gnashing like invisible jaws.

Tyr’s breath caught as Cur-Grin tried to hold a support beam up, but it snapped, and the rib crushed him. No scream. Just a sickening crack. Red on white.

Tyr lunged forward, only for Kay-Nine to grab his collar and pull him back.

“Too late,” she growled, face streaked with ice and soot. “He’s gone. Run.”

But Tyr didn’t run. Not at first. He stood there, shaking, frostbitten, unable to breathe. He watched the people who saved him fall apart like bones beneath an avalanche.

One-Dog, Kay-Nine, and Tyr reached the heart of Galcea’s spine. They slammed the stone hatch shut, bracing it with spears and will.

Then the quake hit. The final one.

Stone turned to salt. Bone cracked like glass. And the heart of Galcea, where they had built their war room, collapsed inward.

Kay-Nine tried to shield Tyr.

One-Dog tried to lift the weight.

 

Both failed.

 

Kay-Nine's hand slipped from Tyr’s as the frostfire swallowed her. She screamed terribly as Tyr still reached out for her hand.

One-Dog made no sound as he was buried.

 

The ground cracked beneath them, and Tyr was thrown into a chasm of ice and darkness, shielded by sheer dumb luck. 

 

He screamed, but no one answered.

 

He waited for death, but it didn't come. 

 

Only silence.

 

Maybe it was a day... Maybe it was two, but the change overcame him violently. He was not strong enough on his own to pull himself out of the crevice, but the wolf had a will to survive stronger than the weight of boards and two walls of ice. 

 

He clawed his way from the wreckage like a cornered animal. Hungry and mad.

He made his way into the unfamiliar wilderness alone. Older. Colder.

The world would not grant him a throne.

So he would carve one from its bones.