“It is hunger,” Simon replies.
“No,” I correct him slowly. “It is imbalance.”
The carvings show the spiraled symbol expanding too rapidly before the sealing, warping the trees and cracking the land, and wolves being thrown backward not by claws but by energy that had no containment structure.
The predator was a necessary containment.
Not because it was wicked.
Because it was overwhelming.
“Then breaking the seal fully would have been catastrophic,” Atticus says carefully, and his voice carries no accusation but grim understanding.
“Yes,” I answer.
The rising was unstable at the time.
The red wolves had no infrastructure and no distributed bloodlines to buffer the force.
So they chose containment.
They chose exile.
They chose to let history remember them as traitors rather than
