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The temple was carved into the bones of a mountain no map remembered. It breathed like a living thing—walls pulsing with old blood, ceilings dripping with whispers. No light, save for the violet flames licking up from bone-fed braziers. Time didn't live here. Only prophecy.

Tae walked barefoot through the offering hall, robes dragging through sacred ash. His heartbeat was still. The dead didn’t need rhythm.

He had traveled through seven hells to reach this place. Walked blindfolded across plague-swallowed cities, traded a choir of children’s voices for the map etched on a madman’s tongue. All for this moment.

Behind him, the doors sealed with a sound like a breath being buried alive.

She waited in the center—an oracle of flesh and shadow, veiled in silk soaked with moonwater and martyr’s blood. Her eyes were sewn shut with thread made from angel sinew. Her mouth was not.

He knelt.

She did not move.

"Speak," Tae commanded.

"I do not speak for you," she rasped. "I speak through you."

Tae’s lips curled. “Then speak through me.”

She laughed—dry and dark, like old parchment catching fire. “You smell like grave dust and spoiled divinity. Perfect.”

She reached out, her hands trembling—though not from fear. Her fingers trailed over his face, tracing the curve of cheekbones that had once belonged to a prince before they were carved hollow by time and hunger.

“The wolf prince comes,” she said. “He who was born under the black moon, teeth first, screaming.”

“I know him,” Tae replied. “I know his scream.”

Her smile was obscene. “You will taste him before you kill him. He will mark you before you ruin him. And in the end—he will kneel.”

Tae’s pupils flared. “He would rather die.”

“He will die,” the oracle said. “But first, he will beg.”

Her hand—trembling and wrong in its angles—rose and pressed to her own throat. “You will fuck him where gods once prayed. He will choke on your name.”

Heat coiled low in Tae’s stomach. A rare thing. Dangerous.

“And after?”

“After,” she whispered, “you will break the world for him.”

The fire dimmed. The walls of the temple grew closer—tight, oppressive, hungry.

“And what of me?” Tae asked. “Do I get to survive?”

“No,” she said. “But you will matter.”

A silence bloomed, vast and terrible.

He moved closer.

When Tae touched her, her skin was fevered—too hot, too alive. Her lips opened wider, and not all the teeth inside were human. Still, he kissed her. A gift. A threat. A promise to come true. A prayer meant for ruin.

When he pulled away, his mouth was not his anymore.

It tasted of wolves.

He staggered back.

The oracle laughed softly, almost kindly. “Your tongue will remember him, long after your name has turned to ash.”

“And his?” Tae asked, licking blood from his lips.

“He will carry your madness in his marrow,” she said. “And long after your corpse stops bleeding, he will still love you wrong.”

Behind her veil, the oracle smiled. Her sewn eyes leaked black ichor down her cheeks.

“There is no fate,” she whispered. “Only desire that refuses to die.”

Then she reached into her own mouth, pulled free a single fang—elongated, dark as obsidian—and placed it in his hand.

“Give him this when the stars go silent,” she said. “He’ll know what it means.”

Tae bowed once, not out of reverence.

But because a part of him—the part not yet monstrous—was afraid.