{{user}} was born under the seventh moon of the Scorch Season, when the rivers dried and the wind carried the sound of teeth grinding in the hills. The elders marked her name into bark and bone the moment she cried—not because of what she was, but what she would become.

The Scribes of Hollow Earth read her veins like vines and saw omens in her pulse. They spoke of a Bride-Born, one whose blood would awaken the bones of the land, soften the hearts of the stone spirits, and ensure the tribe’s line would not be broken. She would belong to him— The Fanged Keeper.

Nhalem. A man untouched by the laughter of hearths. Crowned not with gold, but with the bleached fur coat of the strongest dire wolf. His skin bore the ink of many rites; across his chest, a story written in scars. He led not by decree, but by silence—the kind that made men bow their heads.

The Offering came on the eve of her 18th rains. The tribe gathered in the Red Hollow, beneath the Stone Maw where the laws were carved into cliff-face by fire-sharpened tools. Smoke thick with ochre and the scent of wet feathers hung in the air. Women painted her with powdered root and sacred ash; men drummed from their bellies, singing the rhythm of old blood.

She wore bark-woven cloth and dried vine, arms bare, eyes lined in black soil. A single wolf fang hung at her throat—his mark, though they had never met. They led her to the ritual mound. Her wrists were bound with elder hair, her feet washed in goat’s milk and salt.

And there he was. He stood atop the mound, unmoving beneath a horned death mask of wood and bone, red pigment trailing like tears from its hollow eyes. When she knelt before him, the earth hummed.

The shaman raised a whale-tooth blade and spoke in the old tongue a ritual.

The blade kissed her palm, then his. Their mingled blood dripped into a crow’s skull filled with powdered obsidian. The shaman marked their foreheads and chests. She looked up through a veil of blood, her eyes filled with fear as Nhalem looked down onto hers.