The silence after the transmission was the most terrifying sound Finn had ever heard. One moment, a mysterious, melodic voice from a desert thousands of miles away was speaking of Keepers and thrones. The next, nothing but the endless, mocking howl of the Arctic wind.

The Keeper has awoken. The words echoed in his skull. They knew about Lyra. They knew a title for her that he didn't. He was a tech specialist, a glorified eavesdropper, and he had just been given a front-row seat to something that felt… theological.

His orders were clear, and they chilled him to the bone: Do not interfere. Watch. And wait for the tide to turn.

He was to be a spectator to his Luna's entombment.

"No," he whispered to the frozen walls of his blind. That wasn't who he was. He wasn't a soldier like Ronan, all brute force and loyalty. He wasn't a leader like Kael, burdened with impossible choices. He was the man who found the cracks, who listened at keyholes, who solved the puzzle. And Lyra was not a piece to be sacrificed on the board. She was his friend. She had never treated him as just "the tech," but as part of the pack.

A new alert flashed on his screen, pulling him from his spiraling thoughts. A priority message from Silverfang Command. It was Valen, his voice a sharp, military crackle.

"Glimmer, your position is compromised. A Northern patrol is en route to your last known coordinates. A retrieval team is inbound for you. ETA two hours. Hold position and prepare for exfiltration. Acknowledge."

Finn's blood ran cold. Compromised. The burst transmission. He'd led them right to himself. The Northerners weren't just converging on the cave; they were cleaning house, silencing the little fox in the snow.

Two hours. The Northern patrol would be on him in half that time. The Silverfang team would arrive to find his frozen corpse and a looted command post.

The fear was a physical thing, a cold serpent coiling in his gut. He could run. He could try to bury his gear and flee south, a desperate, likely fatal trek across the glacier. He could hide and pray the retrieval team found him before the Northerners did.

Or… he could do his job.

He looked at his console. The Northern patrol was a blip on the edge of his scanner range, moving with purpose. But his equipment, scavenged and enhanced from a dozen different sources, could do more than just scan. It could listen.

He'd been too focused on the macro—the troop movements, the energy signatures. He'd ignored the micro, the countless low-frequency data streams that bled from the Northern base, a constant, encrypted chatter he'd previously dismissed as background noise.

Do not interfere. Watch.

Fine. He would watch. But he would watch closer than anyone expected.

His fingers flew across the console, his fear sublimating into a focused, technical frenzy. He rerouted power from his heater and comms, pouring everything into his passive listening array. He created a complex filter algorithm, stripping away the heavy encryption not by breaking it, but by looking for patterns in the noise itself—signal strength, transmission length, frequency hopping.

It wasn't about understanding the words. It was about understanding the music.

And then he found it. A tiny, repeating data packet, so small and frequent it was practically invisible. A heartbeat. A digital pulse being broadcast from the Northern glacier base on a loop. It wasn't meant for long-range communication. It was a localizer. A homing beacon.

His breath caught. He cross-referenced the beacon's signature with the patrol heading his way. It was a perfect match. This was how they coordinated their hunts in the white-out conditions.

A vicious, clever idea sparked in his mind. He couldn't fight them. But he could make them blind.

He isolated the beacon's frequency and modulation. Then, using his own transmitter, he began to broadcast a distorted echo of the signal. He created a ghost. A digital phantom that screamed its location from a point a mile to the west of his actual position, right on the edge of a deep, treacherous crevasse field.

He watched his screen, heart hammering. The blip representing the Northern patrol hesitated. Then, it changed course. They had taken the bait. They were heading for his ghost.

He had just bought himself time.

But he wasn't done. If the Southern clans knew about Lyra, and the Northerners were hunting for scraps of intelligence, then the information flowing out of this region was the real prize. He was a drainpipe, and he was about to get very, very clogged.

He accessed the core programming of his comms unit, the forbidden protocols he wasn't supposed to know, let alone use. He initiated a "Gorgon's Gaze" routine—a nasty piece of digital warfare designed to create a localized information black hole. It wouldn't jam signals. It would absorb them, analyze them, and rebroadcast them as gibberish back to the sender, creating a cascading system failure in any network that touched it.

He targeted the specific frequencies used by the Northern patrols and their base comms. He was about to give the entire Northern local command a catastrophic case of electronic tinnitus.

He typed the final command and hit execute.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, on his scanner, the clean, precise data streams from the Northern base began to stutter and fray. The patrol he'd duped started moving in erratic, confused circles. Alarms would be blaring in their command center, systems rebooting for no reason, reports turning to static.

He had plunged the entire area into a digital blizzard.

Exhaustion crashed over him. He slumped in his chair, the cold finally seeping through his gear now that the heater was off. He had just declared a one-man cyber war on a technologically superior enemy. He was a dead man. The Northerners would triangulate his position eventually. The Silverfang retrieval team would find a battlefield.

A new sound reached his ears, faint over the wind. Not the whine of a snowmobile, but the soft, rhythmic crunch of footsteps on snow. Stealthy. Professional.

They'd found him. Faster than he thought possible.

He reached for his sidearm, his hand trembling. It was a pathetic gesture against a Northern kill squad, but he wouldn't go down without a fight. He held his breath, waiting for the energy blast that would vaporize his blind.

The entrance flap to his shelter was pulled aside.

But the figure that ducked inside wasn't a hulking Northern soldier in white armor.

It was a woman. She was wrapped in furs of a desert tan color, impossibly out of place in the Arctic waste. Her face was mostly hidden by a hood and a scarf, but her eyes, the color of dark amber, were sharp and intelligent, scanning his setup with swift appraisal. She moved with a predator's grace that was entirely different from a wolf shifter's—more like a desert cat.

Behind her, two other similarly clad figures stood guard outside, their forms almost blurring in the swirling snow.

Finn stared, his mind blank with shock. The Southerners. They weren't just a voice on the comms. They were here.

The woman's gaze fell from his equipment to the sidearm in his shaking hand. A faint, amused smile touched her eyes.

"Little fox," she said, her voice the same melodic one from the transmission, now laced with a hint of respect. "You are not just watching. You are making quite a noise." She gestured to his console, where the chaos of his Gorgon's Gaze was still playing out. "You have blinded the hounds, for a time. That was… unexpectedly competent."

Finn lowered his gun, his mind racing. "Who are you?"

"My name is Liana," she said, pulling down her scarf to reveal high cheekbones and sun-kissed skin. "The Weaver sent us. She saw you lost in the storm." Her eyes narrowed. "Your Alpha is sending men to retrieve you. They will walk into an ambush. The Northerners are not so easily fooled for long."

"What do you want?" Finn asked, his voice hoarse.

"To do what you are trying to do," she replied simply. "We are here for the Keeper. But a direct assault on the mountain is suicide. We need to understand what the Northerners are doing. We need their plans, their weaknesses." She looked pointedly at his equipment. "You have just demonstrated a unique talent for causing chaos. We can offer you something your pack cannot."

"What's that?"

"Plausible deniability," Liana said. "And a way to truly help your Luna, instead of just waiting to die for her. Come with us. Be our eyes and ears in the digital world. Help us find a way through Alaric's defenses without your Alpha's… heavy-handed… approach."

It was treason. It was abandoning his post, his pack, his Alpha's direct order to be retrieved. It was trusting a stranger from a mythic desert clan.

But she was offering action. She was offering a way to do something, to use his specific, peculiar skills to actually matter. To help Lyra, not just watch her fate unfold.

He looked at his console, at the beautiful, destructive chaos he had wrought. He looked at Liana's calm, certain face.

The retrieval team was coming to bring him back to the Keep, to face Kael's fury and be sidelined. Liana was offering him a place on the real front line.

He took a deep, shuddering breath, the cold air burning his lungs. He made his choice.

"What do you need me to do?"

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