POPSEEHESAID4950

Pillan had never asked for the life that shaped him. At thirteen, a single bite from a Zeta werewolf changed him forever, binding him to a lineage of shapeshifters he never truly understood. The transformation turned him into a homid capable of becoming an Arctic wolf—one of the rarest, whitest subspecies of the White wolf, a creature born for cold desolation and pure silence. Twenty-seven years later, he had no pack, no home, and no family. Instead, he wandered the world like a ghost—part man, part myth—drifting from continent to continent with nothing but instinct to guide him. It was that same instinct that led him, one bleak evening, to a place few outsiders ever stumbled upon: Glasmoran — The City of First Hearth Glasmoran was a name whispered more than spoken. A small, unknown city tucked far from major routes or maps, its title—City of First Hearth—was a cruel irony. What should have been a place of beginnings had rotted into a place of endings. The city showed its decay immediately: Entire districts of abandoned, blighted buildings, windows boarded, roofs collapsing, doors swaying on broken hinges. Cracked roads, half-flooded from drainage systems that had long stopped working. Basic services failing—electricity that flickered like a dying candle, trash that piled on corners until residents burned it in open heaps. Streets choked with litter, detritus, even human waste, as if the city itself had given up. Legitimate stores were rare. Where one might expect markets or grocers, there were only liquor shops, empty storefronts, and half-shuttered businesses that looked moments away from collapse. But the true infection eating Glasmoran alive had a name. Written by POPSEEHESAID4950

English