Rejected Moon — A Rejected-Mate Werewolf Romance
Oct 4, 2026 · 8 min · 5 segments
Episode 52 of Rejected Moon.
Rejected Moon.
"And you are?" "Halric," he said.
"Formerly of Stillwater's patrol.
Currently of...
I confess I haven't entirely worked out what I'm currently of.
Considerably less certain than I used to be about most things." We took our first weeks as husband and wife on a slow ride toward the watchtower, standing our own turn at the Keystone's watch, and it was there, on the wide gray sea's edge, that we received the strangest visitor the tower had yet known.
He arrived at dusk, on foot, having apparently walked a very long way, a thin, careful man in the plain gray robes of a scholar, who introduced himself, once he'd caught his breath, as Master Corvith, keeper of what remained of the founder's own written records.
"I did not think anyone still held those," I said, watching him warily, remembering Isolde's stories of the founders' careful secrecy, the ledger's 300-year silence.
"Almost no one does," Corvith admitted.
"I am the last of a very small, very quiet order, sworn generations ago to preserve what the founders wrote, not to use it, only to keep it from being entirely lost.
I have spent my whole life reading things I was never meant to understand fully, Ren Alaric.
And I have come a very long way, at very great personal risk, because I believe I have finally found something in those old records that you deserve to know before you free your next door." Kael and I brought him into the tower's dry chamber, keeping careful distance from the silverrot bundle humming softly at its center, and listened as Corvith unpacked a leather satchel of brittle, careful pages.
"The 17th grave," he said, without preamble, "the one your ledger told you she does not fully understand, I believe I have found the founder's own account of why it was dug apart from the others, decades after the original 16." He smoothed a fragile page with trembling care.
"It was not a monster they buried there, Ren.
It was a mistake.
Their own mistake, made in the earliest days of the whole terrible project, that they could not bring themselves to either undo or fully confess." "What mistake?" I asked, feeling the old cold arithmetic stir again, the one I'd promised myself, at my own wedding, I'd finally set down.
"The founders did not begin," Corvith said slowly, "by shattering a monster at all.
Their own earliest records describe something else entirely, a single, whole, ancient power, neither good nor evil in itself, that had simply always existed in the world, the way weather exists, or tide.
The founders feared it, not because it had ever done them harm, because they could not control it, and men who cannot control a thing often cannot tell the difference between fearing it and needing to destroy it." He turned another brittle page.
"They shattered it," he continued, "16 pieces, scattered and buried, exactly the story you already know.
But their own earliest account, written, I believe, by one of the very few founders who ever expressed doubt about the whole undertaking, records that the shattering itself was never clean.
That some essential part of the original whole power survived the breaking entirely intact, not scattered into pieces at all, but simply hidden, whole, waiting.
And it was that surviving whole piece, not a 16th shard, that the founders' own children buried apart, decades later, in the 17th grave, because they discovered, to their horror, that their parents had never actually destroyed the thing they feared.
They had only broken most of it and buried the unbroken remainder separately, hoping no one would ever think to look for both." I sat with that revelation a long time, the tower's fire burning low, Kael's hand steady in mine.
"So the keystone I'm carrying," I said slowly, "and the 16 shards scattered wide, they're not actually pieces of the same broken thing at all.
Rejected Moon.
"And you are?" "Halric," he said.
"Formerly of Stillwater's patrol.
Currently of...
I confess I haven't entirely worked out what I'm currently of.
Considerably less certain than I used to be about most things." We took our first weeks as husband and wife on a slow ride toward the watchtower, standing our own turn at the Keystone's watch, and it was there, on the wide gray sea's edge, that we received the strangest visitor the tower had yet known.
He arrived at dusk, on foot, having apparently walked a very long way, a thin, careful man in the plain gray robes of a scholar, who introduced himself, once he'd caught his breath, as Master Corvith, keeper of what remained of the founder's own written records.
"I did not think anyone still held those," I said, watching him warily, remembering Isolde's stories of the founders' careful secrecy, the ledger's 300-year silence.
"Almost no one does," Corvith admitted.
"I am the last of a very small, very quiet order, sworn generations ago to preserve what the founders wrote, not to use it, only to keep it from being entirely lost.
I have spent my whole life reading things I was never meant to understand fully, Ren Alaric.
And I have come a very long way, at very great personal risk, because I believe I have finally found something in those old records that you deserve to know before you free your next door." Kael and I brought him into the tower's dry chamber, keeping careful distance from the silverrot bundle humming softly at its center, and listened as Corvith unpacked a leather satchel of brittle, careful pages.
"The 17th grave," he said, without preamble, "the one your ledger told you she does not fully understand, I believe I have found the founder's own account of why it was dug apart from the others, decades after the original 16." He smoothed a fragile page with trembling care.
"It was not a monster they buried there, Ren.
It was a mistake.
Their own mistake, made in the earliest days of the whole terrible project, that they could not bring themselves to either undo or fully confess." "What mistake?" I asked, feeling the old cold arithmetic stir again, the one I'd promised myself, at my own wedding, I'd finally set down.
"The founders did not begin," Corvith said slowly, "by shattering a monster at all.
Their own earliest records describe something else entirely, a single, whole, ancient power, neither good nor evil in itself, that had simply always existed in the world, the way weather exists, or tide.
The founders feared it, not because it had ever done them harm, because they could not control it, and men who cannot control a thing often cannot tell the difference between fearing it and needing to destroy it." He turned another brittle page.
"They shattered it," he continued, "16 pieces, scattered and buried, exactly the story you already know.
But their own earliest account, written, I believe, by one of the very few founders who ever expressed doubt about the whole undertaking, records that the shattering itself was never clean.
That some essential part of the original whole power survived the breaking entirely intact, not scattered into pieces at all, but simply hidden, whole, waiting.
And it was that surviving whole piece, not a 16th shard, that the founders' own children buried apart, decades later, in the 17th grave, because they discovered, to their horror, that their parents had never actually destroyed the thing they feared.
They had only broken most of it and buried the unbroken remainder separately, hoping no one would ever think to look for both." I sat with that revelation a long time, the tower's fire burning low, Kael's hand steady in mine.
"So the keystone I'm carrying," I said slowly, "and the 16 shards scattered wide, they're not actually pieces of the same broken thing at all.
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