The night sky over the Broken Star Belt was unusually clear. Twin moons hung overhead—one large and silver, casting a cold, clean light, the other smaller, glowing with a baleful crimson. Their combined radiance etched sharp, distorted shadows from the jagged metal wreckage scattered across the ground.
Cookie was deeply agitated.
He no longer lay quietly at Selene's feet. Instead, he paced the cramped confines of their shelter, a suppressed growl rumbling in his throat. His silver-gray fur bristled as if stirred by an unseen wind. What truly sent a chill down Selene's spine were the moments when the intertwined light of the twin moons fell upon him. His outline would blur, as if another, far larger and more spectral form was struggling to break free. The vision lasted only a split second, leaving behind a faint energy hum in the air.
"Cookie?" Selene called out tentatively, reaching a hand to soothe him.
He shied away from her touch. His silver-gray eyes churned with pain and conflict, but beneath that struggle lay something deeper, more stubborn—a profound attachment. He retreated two steps, then immediately closed the distance again, finally settling to lie by the doorway, the spot closest to her. His body was taut as a drawn bow, tense against the outside world and positioned squarely in front of her, as if fighting a tidal force threatening to erupt from within. It felt like a silent farewell.
As the night deepened and the twin moons climbed to their zenith, the tremors wracking Cookie's body grew more violent. The blurred, phantom apparition appeared more frequently, lasting longer each time. Selene huddled in her corner, her heart gripped by a nameless dread. She knew, with chilling certainty, that something beyond her comprehension was happening.
Suddenly, he let out a long, agonized howl that sounded nothing like a dog. Then, a blinding silver light erupted from within him, instantly swallowing his familiar form. Within the radiance, his outline stretched and expanded violently.
Selene instinctively threw an arm over her eyes. As the glare subsided, she stared, stunned, at the figure now standing in the moonlight… a shimmering apparition.
It was the outline of an impossibly tall man, with a cascade of silver hair and two familiar, fuzzy wolf ears atop his head. His build was powerful and athletic, but he flickered like a faulty hologram, his edges dissolving and reforming, threatening to collapse at any moment. He was slightly hunched, as if bearing immense pain, his consciousness clearly not his own.
He turned toward Selene. Those silver-gray eyes, starkly clear even within the spectral form, were filled with chaos, yet burned with a searing, unfamiliar intensity in their depths.
In the next instant, he moved. With a desperate, final resolve, he closed the distance between them in a few strides. Without a word, he wrapped his semi-transparent yet astonishingly strong arms around her, crushing her against him. The embrace was brutally tight, driving the air from Selene's lungs, a bizarre mix of icy intangibility and residual warmth.
He buried his face deep in the curve of her neck, greedily inhaling her familiar scent, his scorching breath searing her skin. Then, a voice—hoarse, deep, utterly unlike a puppy's, laden with ancient resonance and heart-wrenching devotion—whispered against her ear, a vow and a despairing sigh all at once:
"By blood and honour… Mine…"
The words cut off abruptly.
A new, catastrophic wave of energy erupted without warning—ten, a hundred times stronger than before! A blinding white light utterly consumed the fragile apparition and Selene's vision. She felt thrown into the heart of a supernova, every sense obliterated.
Within that vortex of pure light and power, Kaelan Wolfstein's shattered consciousness was forcibly gathered and remade. Memories, glacial in their age, collapsed and instantly refroze—the honour of House Wolfstein, the fires of border wars, political machinations in the Imperial Senate, the duty and power belonging to the Empire's Marshal… A torrent of immense information scoured every inch of his awareness, repairing the gaps left by his grievous wounds and degeneration.
Yet, in this precise, merciless process of restoration, a set of data, a cluster of emotions, were flagged as "anomalous," "redundant"—"interference" incompatible with the identity of the Marshal. These were the memories of being "Cookie": the warmth of a sheltering embrace, gentle strokes, kisses pressed to his forehead, the sensation of fingers teasing his tail, the shared body heat on cold nights, and that pure, soul-shaking dependency and affection, untainted by any ulterior motive… All this softness was ruthlessly severed, stripped away, and sealed by the stronger, icy flood of memories belonging to "Kaelan Wolfstein," pushed down to the darkest, most remote depths of his mind and buried under a thick layer of ice.
The white light vanished as abruptly as it had appeared.
Selene, stunned by the flash and the energy shockwave, collapsed to the ground, her vision swimming with spots of light. She blinked rapidly, her gaze desperately searching the space before her.
The moonlight was as cold as ever. But where the apparition had stood, there was now a solid, physically present man with silver hair and a perfectly sculpted physique. He stood straight as a pine, clad in a strange, dark material of a military-style uniform that had somehow manifested upon him. His shoulders were broad, his waist narrow, and he exuded an indescribable, heart-stopping aura of authority. His face was all sharp, cold angles, as if chiseled by a master sculptor—flawless, and devoid of any remnant of "Cookie's" softness.
He slowly opened his eyes.
They were the same familiar silver-gray, but all the chaos, pain, devotion, and warmth were gone. Replaced by the ice of the polar caps, a scrutiny as sharp as a scalpel, and the absolute authority born of commanding power over life and death. His gaze fell upon Selene, crumpled on the ground, looking utterly wretched and insignificant. It held no fluctuation, as if he were looking at a speck of dust beneath his feet, or a piece of irrelevant, incidental debris.
Selene stared up at him, dumbfounded. The phantom pressure of that desperate embrace seemed to linger on her skin; the echo of that unfinished, burning vow still whispered in her ear. Yet the man before her now, his gaze, was a million times colder than the most frigid night the Broken Star Belt could conjure.
He frowned slightly, a flicker of impatience and confusion crossing his features at the sight of his surroundings and this unknown woman whose genetic signature was too weak to register. His thin lips parted. The icy voice that emerged shattered Selene's last, fragile hope and severed, completely and finally, any connection to "Cookie":
"Who are you?"