17
1272 Words
At first, it was small.
A flicker in the blackness.
Like flame trying to remember how to burn.
Then I saw someone in a mirror that wasn’t there before. Everything in front of me was just a reflection of what lay behind me.
She was me.
But not.
She stood barefoot on nothing, draped in shadow and starlight.
Her hair floated like it was underwater.
Her eyes glowed gold, not like fire, but like suns.
Her mouth moved, but no sound came.
Only a pulse.
Thump.
It echoed in my chest.
Thump.
I turned to run.
But the space wasn’t space, it folded in on itself, collapsing around me like fabric pulled tight.
No up. No down. No escape.
I raised my hand to shield the blinding light and a symbol burned bright on my wrist skin scorching like it was etched in lightning.
A wolf howling, surrounded by three crescent moons.
It pulsed in time with my heart, pain tore through me.
I screamed.
I was awake again
Somehow my eyes flew open this time.
A room. Strange. Dim.
Not a hospital. Not home.
Two figures
A man and a woman hunched over a table cluttered with books and scrolls.
They looked like doctors, but something in the air was… wrong. Too still. Too sharp.
Then the heat struck.
A flush so sudden and searing it felt like pins shooting through my skin, racing down my spine like punishment.
I screamed again.
The man and woman snapped to attention, whirling toward me, alarmed.
And I knew I hadn’t woken up to familiarise with my environment, I need to leave
I screamed, raw and guttural as a pain like fire laced with broken glass ripped down my spine. My back arched off the table involuntarily, muscles seizing like I’d been struck by lightning. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Just-
Crack.
The sound came from inside me.
Another.
Crack. Crack. Pop.
My bones were shifting. Snapping. Reforming.
I tried to curl into myself, but my limbs wouldn’t obey. My fingers clawed the sheets beneath me. My eyes rolled back as pain bloomed through my skull, my ribs, my hips. Something inside me was breaking to make room for something else.
Then, burning.
A searing white-hot pain erupted in my right hand.
I jerked it up. My wrist glowed like metal fresh from the forge.
The symbol.
From the dream.
A wolf howling, encircled by three crescent moons.
It was etched into my skin like it had been carved by a branding iron. The lines blazed, pulsed, spread outward like veins of molten light crawling up my arm.
“No, no, no—” I choked.
“What the hell is happening to me?!”
The man and woman spun toward me, startled papers scattering, a candle clattering to the floor.
The man’s eyes glinted. Cold and calculating. The woman clutched a strange object looked like a dagger, but not any kind I’d seen before. It shimmered, almost humming.
“This isn’t right,” the woman hissed. “She’s accelerating.”
“She’s resisting,” the man said, voice clinical. “The seal they tried to put on her activated everything too early. Her blood’s rejecting containment.”
Books lay open to diagrams of celestial bodies, blood rituals, ancient runes.
Occultism.
This wasn’t a hospital.
This wasn’t safe.
And whatever had they done to me
My skin rippled. Something sharp itched beneath my scalp, pushing outward. I clutched my temples, screaming as pain licked down my spine, sharp and sudden. I arched, gasping something twitched at the base of her back. A ripple beneath my skin.
Like i was growing an extra limb, my sine snapped
Not again.
Please not again.
A crackling at my temples, my skull was splitting open from the inside. A pressure building. I gasped as heat bloomed under my scalp then something pushed through. Not hair. Bone. She reached up with trembling hands.
Horns. Curved, ridged. Real.
I screamed even louder trying to up from the bed only to fall
I screamed louder, trying to rise from the bed only to fall.
“We need to sedate her,” the woman barked.
But the door burst open
And that was the last thing I heard before I slipped, once again, into the blackness.
————
The pain hit me like a blade to the chest.
Sharp. Sudden.
Blinding.
I staggered mid-step, hand pressed to my sternum.
“What was that?” one of the Seers asked, their voice laced with alarm.
But I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe.
The pain pulsed like a heartbeat. It was hers.
Twisted. Fractured. Terrified.
She was in pain.
Lilith. My mate.
I had never felt anything like it. Not even when my pack was ambushed. Not even when I lost my father.
This was different. This wasn’t mine.
It was hers.
And I knew, with a certainty that echoed in my bones she needed me.
My claws burst through my fingertips. My bones cracked, tendons snapping as I partially shifted, just enough to run. The Seers barely flinched.
“Alpha, wait—”
“She’s awakening—!”
I didn’t care.
They’d just arrived and already the world was unraveling.
But nothing mattered but getting to her.
My mate.
Mine.
I launched forward, dirt and wind blurring beneath me.
The Pack House loomed ahead, quiet but I could smell it.
Jasmine. Blood. Fear.
I didn’t slow.
I didn’t think.
I burst through the door, splinters flying, just in time to hear her final scream and see her body fall
The door shattered beneath my shoulder.
The scent hit me first, blood, burned air, jasmine and rain so thick it choked.
She lay writhing on the floor, sweat-drenched and glowing like a dying star.
Her scream clawed through the air like it was tearing her throat raw.
And gods help me, she was shifting.
Her back arched as something pushed beneath her skin. Her body twisted, trembling.
I moved on instinct, snarling Emric and his mate in the room.
“What the f**k have you done to her?” I barked, half-wolf, teeth bared.
They didn’t answer.
But in that moment she turned her head.
And I saw it.
The horn.
Curved. Ridged. Pale bone cutting through her scalp like a crown being born.
My heart stopped.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
My chest seized like the mate bond had lashed me to her pain.
And it wasn’t just physical.
It was becoming.
She wasn’t just hurt but was awakening into something the world hadn’t seen in centuries.
Then the mark on her wrist flared. Light blazed like fire across her skin, crawling like vines of molten gold. She screamed again, convulsed
“ENOUGH.”
The voice didn’t come from me.
It came from nowhere.
From everywhere.
Three hooded figures stepped into the room as if they had always been there. The Seers.
Their robes shimmered like fabric woven from moonlight and secrets. Their eyes glowed white.
The moment they appeared, the air changed.
The agony shifted.
They moved in a slow triangle around her. Hands raised. Speaking in a tongue older than wolves, older than kings.
The pain in her body rippled, surged once more
Then fell still.
Lilith’s body collapsed against the floor, limp. Chest heaving. The glow faded slightly, though the horn remained, the faintest tip of a tail now visible behind her.
One of the Seers turned to me.
“She woke too soon,” they said, their voice neither male nor female. “The blood remembers. The vessel strains.”
I carried her and placed her on the bed.
- Writer
