🦋ALTHEA
Escape was impossible. Hours had passed like a blink, yet warped into an eternity. But I stood panting exactly where I started after running for so long. My lungs ached, my eyes straining to see in the drowning darkness. Yet, despite all I tried, there was nothing in the nothingness in which I found myself.
My heart jumped into a painful sprint that jolted . Had I died? Was this the realm of the dead where I would spend all of eternity?
The questions swirled around in my head—none of them would ever be answered because I was trapped here.
My mind had begun to ache with fear, dread weaving through until there was only the suffocating emptiness and desolation.
I had no mory of what had happened. Each ti I tried to grasp at the last thing I rembered, it evaded , slipping past like smoke.
The inevitable madness had begun to creep up on . Having been trapped and caged many tis before, yet I was not prepared for the impenetrable cell in which I now found myself.
I could feel the iron bars, but I could not even touch them.
Cold accompanied the darkness in unraveling my mind. The kind of cold that seeped into your bones and settled in your marrow like death.
I floated in it, weightless and heavy all at once, my body both present and absent. Distant screams echoed sowhere far away.
Where was I?
Then I heard it—my ears twitched and strained.
A whimper. Soft, broken, wrapped in a desperation that lanced through like a sharp poke to my chest.
My eyes—or did I even have eyes here? Still, they searched the darkness that had refused to yield before. I forced back a happy gasp as shapes began to form. Shadows coalescing into sothing solid.
Plants sprang up from nowhere, grass spread on ground I did not know could exist. A forest rose before my still-adapting eyes.
I took one hesitant step towards the still-forming place and then another. Then I stopped when sothing moved in the periphery, and turned as slowly as possible towards whatever I had seen.
A wolf.
She was magnificent and yet so terrifying. I was not sure whether to run or to dare a step closer for a better look.
Dark purple-black fur shimred like starlight, but even with light it seed to have captured its beautiful hide—it was matted, clinging to a fra far too thin. Ribs pressed against her skin; silver, shallow, and deep scars crisscrossed her flank.
Her slanted, feline eyes glowed faint purple, blue, and a hypnotizing array of others, like she held the galaxy in her gaze. They flickered like dying embers. Both lined with a shimring black, that could have resembled kohl.
No wolf looked like this and if there were, I had never seen any.
She was hunched over sothing. It was small—I had barely noticed it.
My breath hitched as I stepped closer.
A pup.
Tiny, gray-furred, and utterly still where it laid at her feet. She nudged it with her snout, gentle and so painfully careful.
"Please," she seed to whimper.
Grief sparked in my chest, my throat tightening as sothing familiar gripped my heart like a vice.
The pup did not move.
I had seen this pup before. It was the one I found myself following in my last dream.
She nudged it again, harder this ti, a desperate whine rising from her throat.
"Wake up, wake up, wake up."
But the pup remained motionless. It was gone, and nothing would change that.
The wolf’s whine shattered into a howl—raw and guttural, filled with anguish; it felt like claws raking at from within. Like I shared her grief.
"No," I whispered, my voice barely rising.
The wolf’s head snapped up, glowing, cosmic eyes latching onto .
And in that instant, I knew for certain...
That was my wolf.
That was my pup.
The baby I had lost and the wolf that my mother poisoned to keep powerless.
"You."
The word ca out as a growl, but there was sothing else beneath it. Sothing raw. Sothing that sounded almost like understanding.
I stumbled back anyway, my legs moving without thought. "I didn’t—I didn’t know—"
"I know you didn’t." Her voice was still rough, still edged with pain, but the venom was gone. Replaced by sothing worse. Sothing that I recognized, and it was grief.
She lowered her head, nudging the pup one more ti. Gentle. Tender. Heartbroken. "You feel it too, don’t you?"
The question hit like a physical blow because, yes.
Yes.
The hollow ache in my chest. The wrongness. The sense that sothing vital had been ripped away.
"The grief," she continued, her glowing eyes never leaving the pup. "It’s not just mine. It’s ours. We share it. We’ve always shared everything—the pain, the poison, the breaking."
She finally looked up at , and the anguish in those cosmic eyes nearly brought to my knees.
"But you never knew I was there to share it with."
"I’m sorry," I whispered, tears streaming down my face. "I’m so sorry—"
"I know." She rose to her full height, and I saw the way she trembled, but not entirely with rage. It was sothing else that weighed down her soul, sothing that had wedged itself into her body. I knew because I felt it too.
It was exhaustion.
"Twenty-two years, Althea. Twenty-two years I’ve been drowning in an abyss of wolfsbane. Screaming. Clawing. Dying. And you couldn’t hear ."
Her voice cracked. "But he did."
I stopped, taken aback. "What?"
"Our mate." The word ca out with sothing almost like wonder. "Thorne. When his hand touched your skin—when the bond snapped—I felt it."
The light particles around her began to swirl faster, brighter. "His contact—it rusted the shackles. Made the wolfsbane wither. For the first ti in two decades, I could breathe." Her eyes blazed. "He pulled out of the abyss. Just enough. Just barely."
She looked back at the pup, her ears flattening against her head.
"Only to find this. Our child. Snuffed out like it was nothing." Her lips curled back, revealing those crystalline teeth. "By its own father. Our mate. Because of its bloodline. Because we were born wrong." She looked down at herself, like she was aware of how marvellously odd she appeared.
"It wasn’t—" I started, but she cut off.
"What did we do?" Her voice rose, desperate and furious all at once. "What did we—you and I—ever do to deserve this?"
She began to pace, agitated, her massive form moving in tight circles around the pup’s body.
"You tried to be small. Quiet and good. You obeyed every command. Endured every punishnt. And they still broke you."
Her pacing grew faster.
"I tried to protect you. All this ti—all I could give you were the silver moths. My only gift. The only power I could push through the poison."
Silver moths began to rise from her fur like living smoke. One. Then three. Then dozens.
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