Secrets Beneath the Skin
1212 Words
Rain fell softer now.
Not gone. Not finished. Just quieter. The way an argument slips into silence before the breaking point.
Isabella walked back through the woods like a ghost wearing her own skin wrong. Mud clung to her hem. Her boots made no sound. The trees didn’t part for her—they watched. Ancient, judgmental, silent. Marella followed behind, close enough to catch her if she broke—but not close enough to stop her if she chose to run again.
Branches scraped her shoulders like claws too slow to reach her. A squirrel chattered once, then stopped mid-breath. Even the wind seemed wary.
When they reached the motel, Kael was gone from the hallway. The tea had gone cold. The pendant—his proof—sat on the counter beside her cup, still pulsing faintly like a wound that refused to scab over.
She didn’t touch it.
Not yet.
Instead, she went upstairs, into the small room behind the linen closet—the one no guests knew about. The one Marella had once called a “shelter.”
It wasn’t. Not really.
Just a space with thick stone walls, no windows, and a mirror that didn’t always reflect what stood before it.
She locked the door behind her.
And stared.
The mirror gave her back her glamor: long brown hair, dull green eyes, a body softened by labor and late nights and too many lies. She looked human.
She wasn’t.
Isabella placed her palm flat against the glass.
Her reflection didn’t move.
Then it blinked.
And the glamor shattered like frost touched by sun.
The hair turned black—raven-dark and curling. The eyes glowed gold, then deeper still, until they burned like dusk behind autumn leaves. The freckles across her nose vanished. Her skin took on a sheen—too smooth, too still. Her limbs held tension like an animal not yet leashed.
She looked like her mother.
And something else.
She didn’t weep.
She didn’t scream.
She simply whispered, “I remember.”
Because she did. Not everything. But enough.
Enough to understand that the boy in the forest long ago—the one with claws that hadn’t known how to hold kindness without hurting it—had been Kael. That the song that hummed in the river each spring had been calling her back. That the dreams—those flickers of fire and fur and wings that pressed against her chest like a second heartbeat—had never been dreams at all.
They’d been warnings.
And now the world was listening again.
A soft knock came at the door.
Not Marella.
She knew that before the second knock. Marella would have spoken first.
“Isabella.” Kael’s voice, low and wrapped in caution. “I didn’t mean to chase you. But I had to show you.”
She opened the door.
He didn’t flinch at what he saw.
Neither did she.
She met his eyes—those storm-grey irises that had haunted her even when she’d tried to forget—and saw no apology in them. Only recognition. The quiet kind. The kind that said, I see you. I always have.
He took a step back, respectful. “You remember?”
“I remember your howl,” she said. “The first time you used it. You tried to scare the hunters away.”
He nodded slowly. “Did it work?”
“No.” Her voice didn’t tremble. “But you stayed anyway.”
“I always would.”
Silence again.
Then Kael reached into his coat and took out something worn and faded.
A ribbon.
Frayed at one end. Dyed a pale shade of violet that had long since faded into a muted ghost of its original hue.
“I gave this to a girl once,” he said. “She tied it to a hawthorn branch and told me that if it ever fell, it meant she was gone.”
Isabella took it with fingers that didn’t shake this time.
“It fell the night the Wild Court burned,” she said. “I thought it meant you were dead.”
“I was. For a while.”
There was a weight to that statement that neither of them tried to unpack. Some truths didn’t need unearthing. They just needed to be acknowledged.
They didn’t speak again for a long moment. Somewhere beyond the walls, a bird sang. One clear note. Then two.
“Will you come with me?” Kael asked softly. “Back to the edge of the wood. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
Her brow furrowed. “Who?”
“Someone like us.”
That should’ve frightened her.
It didn’t.
Instead, Isabella took the ribbon and tied it into her hair. Not to hide. Not to pretend.
To remember.
To root herself in something that didn’t lie.
When they stepped outside, the clouds had broken just enough to let one weak thread of sunlight through. It didn’t warm the world.
But it lit the path.
And when Kael took her hand, she let him.
They walked.
Through the winding edge of Duskend’s forgotten streets. Past the shrine carved into a dying oak, where wilted offerings whispered beneath their breath. Beyond the fence stitched with rusted sigils and bones of birds that had died singing.
The further they went, the quieter the world became.
Not with dread—but with reverence.
Until they reached the edge of a clearing choked in fog.
The mist clung low and thick, swirling as if stirred by breath rather than breeze. Roots curled along the perimeter like sleeping snakes. And there, at the center of it all, stood a figure.
Not a man. Not a beast.
Something liminal.
Cloaked in bark and bone and red cloth sewn with runes Isabella couldn’t read—but somehow understood.
He didn’t move.
But he saw her.
And when she stepped forward, the fog seemed to recoil like it had touched something sacred.
The figure lifted a hand and pointed to her chest.
To the heartbeat.
To the truth.
“Daughter of root and ruin,” he said. His voice sounded like soil breaking open. Like seeds waking. “The court will wake. The thorns will remember.”
Isabella didn’t look away.
“Let them,” she said.
And the world stirred.
A pulse of air. A shift beneath the leaves.
The trees bent ever so slightly toward her, as if bowing. The earth sighed, old and aching and relieved.
The figure moved closer—not with menace, but with purpose—and opened one hand.
Inside it lay a seed.
Black. Shimmering faintly with veins of gold.
“For the Hollow Crown,” he said. “When the time comes, plant it where no light dares grow.”
Isabella reached out.
Took it.
Held it like a promise.
Kael didn’t speak, but she felt the tension in his grip loosen, as if some old fear had finally exhaled. He looked at her not like a savior, but like a witness.
And Isabella—half fairy, half lycan, child of courts long buried—stood beneath the watching trees and the whispering fog, the ribbon in her hair fluttering like a banner.
Not lost.
Not broken.
Becoming.
- Writer
