Chapter 6
1052 Words
After that incident, nothing felt the same. Not the air, not the people, not even my own body. It was as if something inside me had been forcefully torn apart… and in its grow something un familiar, something I couldn’t name, something that refused to stay quiet.
The first night after the rejection, I told myself I would sleep. I needed to. My body was exhausted, my mind overwhelmed, and yet the moment I closed my eyes, the darkness didn’t bring rest. It brought something else Dreams. No not dreams. They felt too real for that.
I stood in a place I had never seen before, yet somehow it felt ancient and familiar at the same time. The sky above me was not the sky I knew it shimmered in shades of deep violet and silver, swirling like it was alive. The ground beneath my feet glowed faintly, covered in strange markings that pulsed like a heartbeat.
I wasn’t alone I could feel them even before I heard them Voices. Whispers at first, soft and distant, like echoes carried by the wind. I turned slowly, trying to find the source, but there was no one there only shadows stretching and shifting around me.
“Awaken…”
The word brushed against my mind like a breath I froze. My heart began to race, not out of fear alone, but because something inside me responded to that voice. “What… is this?” I whispered, my own voice sounding to my ears. The shadows moved closer. The whispers grew louder “You were never meant to be weak…”
A sharp pulse shot through my chest, forcing me to gasp. My hand flew to my heart, the same place that had burned when Xander rejected me, but this pain was different. It wasn’t tearing me apart It was building.
“You were never meant to be human…” “No,” I said quickly, shaking my head as panic rose in my throat. “That’s not true.” but even as I said it, doubt crept in because deep down…Something felt right, something about those words settled into me like a forgotten truth.
The ground beneath me cracked suddenly, light bursting through the fractures as the symbols around my feet began to glow brighter, faster, as if reacting to me or awakening because of me. The voices rose together now, no longer whispers but a chorus that echoed through the space.
“She awakens…”
“She remembers…”
“She returns…”
“Stop!” I shouted, covering my ears as the sound became overwhelming. “I don’t understand!”
The light surged upward, wrapping around me like flames that didn’t burn but consumed everything else. My body tensed as a flood of emotions crashed into me all at once anger, grief, power, loss, rage so intense it felt like I was drowning in it and then I saw him.
Not Xander. Someone else.
A figure standing in the distance, tall and unmoving, his presence darker, older… far more dangerous. His eyes glowed faintly in the shadows, fixed directly on me Watching, Waiting.
“Find me…”
The voice was different this time, deeper, commanding, Unfamiliar… yet terrifyingly important before I could move, before I could speak, before I could even breathe everything shattered.
I woke up gasping my body jerked upright in bed, my chest heaving as if I had just run for miles. Sweat clung to my skin, my hands trembling as I tried to steady my breathing.
“It was just a dream…” I whispered to myself but the words felt like a lie because the feeling hadn’t disappeared. It was still there that energy, that presence, that… something.
I pressed my hand against my chest again, expecting pain, but instead I felt a faint warmth pulsing beneath my skin, steady and alive not broken, not empty alive.
A knock on the door broke through my thoughts.
“Ariana?” Ryan’s voice came from the other side. “You okay?” I swallowed, forcing my voice to sound normal. “Yeah. Just… a bad dream.” There was a pause, like she didn’t fully believe me, but eventually she said, “Get some rest.”
Rest.
I almost laughed because I knew the truth now sleep wasn’t going to bring peace anymore it was going to bring answers or something far worse.
The days that followed didn’t make things easier. If anything, they made everything more complicated. The whispers didn’t stop when I woke up. They lingered, Faint, Subtle, always there sometimes I would be sitting in class, trying to focus, and suddenly a wave of emotion would hit me out of nowhere anger so sharp it made my hands clench, sadness so deep it made it hard to breathe, or something darker… something powerful that made my pulse quicken in a way that didn’t feel entirely human and every time it happened I felt like I was losing control.
Selena noticed of course she did. “You’re not okay,” she said one afternoon, her eyes filled with concern as we sat together under the large oak tree behind the school. I stared ahead, my jaw tightening slightly. “I said I’m fine.”
She didn’t respond immediately, just studied me in that quiet, knowing way of hers. “That’s the third time today your mood has completely shifted for no reason,” she said gently. “And your eyes…” My heart skipped. “What about them?”
“They change,” she said softly “Just for a second but I see it.”
A chill ran down my spine. “That’s not possible.” Selena leaned in slightly, her voice lowering. “Ariana… whatever happened during that rejection… it didn’t just break something.” I finally looked at her. “It changed something.”
Her words echoed in my mind long after she said them because deep down I knew she was right and somewhere far away…unknown to me…
Xander felt it too.
The bond he thought he destroyed…Wasn’t gone it was evolving, twisting into something neither of us understood. Something that didn’t follow the rules, something far more dangerous than a simple mate bond and whatever was awakening inside me It wasn’t done yet.
- Writer
