Ivor Dragonheart: Hound of Alastor
6th Day of December, the Year of Our Source 2025
There are nights when the air itself seems to hold its breath, when shadow feels thick enough to cup in the palm, when the weight of what is happening folds itself into the bone. Tonight was one of those nights, and I watched it all with a stillness I have only ever learned beside Morrigan.
The Hounds’ ritual chamber answered the summoning before any of us did. Blue flame curled up the altar blade like a living creature stretching awake. Pandi’s robes moved the way ink flows across vellum, and when she lifted her hands, the old names of Sutekh rippled through the stone. It struck me how long it has been since we allowed ourselves something like ritual instead of our usual improvisational brutality. And how deeply I have missed it.
Ivor knelt like a man who understood exactly what he was offering and exactly what he was becoming. Not boastful, not overeager, not trembling. Just ready. Sutekh knows, there is something exquisite in readiness. I could feel Morrigan recognizing it too, in that way she has of assessing a soul as if she is testing its metal with her teeth.
Kitty spoke next, and her voice carried that sharp, flinty affection she reserves for those she has nearly broken in training and then shaped back stronger. To hear her call him tempered was to hear truth struck like a bell. She did not coddle him. She spoke of fire, shadow, press, and endurance. It was not an accolade. It was an acknowledgment of fact. The chamber felt different after her words, as if the stone approved her assessment.
But Morrigan… my fierce, terrible beloved. When she placed her hand on the sword, the flame rose up as if greeting an equal. She looked at Ivor with a warrior’s sight, not a mentor’s, and when she told him the blade itself was calling to him, I believed her. There are moments when Morrigan is less a woman and more a force of nature disguised in leathers and scars. Tonight she was that entirely.
His blood fell into the basin and the blue fire curled around him without burning. The ritual accepted him long before any of us spoke the words.
I felt something then. A shift. A tightening of the circle. The old ways of Alastor waking.
Morrigan marked his face with his own blood, the right cheek claimed by her as Blood Regent, the left taken by Kitty as Lead Instructor. Twin streaks. Twin witnesses. Twin authorities. And then his voice joined theirs, vow by vow, each one spoken without hesitation.
When he repeated the final line, the one that promises death at Morrigan’s hand should he betray his oath, he did not flinch. He met her eyes and accepted the cost of belonging. That is what loyalty looks like in its rawest form. Not theatrics. Not swelling speeches. Just a simple, steady readiness to be held to one’s word.
The sword touched his shoulders like a blessing made of fire. Morrigan’s voice rang through the chamber, binding him to Hunt, bloodline, and purpose.
“Rise, Caomhnóir.”
And he did.
The Priestess sealed the induction with that quiet gravity only she can conjure, and then the room erupted in howls. Our family does so love its noise. Ivor’s voice joined them, blood still wet on his cheeks, and for a moment I saw not the man who first wandered into our orbit, but the warrior he has become.
This was our first formal ceremony for the Hounds of Alastor.
It will not be our last. Something awakened tonight. Something old, something proud, something that has waited far too long to breathe again. The Hounds now have their rites, their forging flame, their beginning.
And Ivor Dragonheart stands at that beginning as the first to bear the mark.
Not bad for a night’s work.
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