WHERE ARE WE?
861 Words
Vespera's Pov
I woke up with rough rope biting into my wrists and ankles.
The pain registered first—sharp and immediate where the fibers dug into my skin. Then came the cold, seeping up from the stone beneath me. My body ached in ways I didn't know were possible. Every breath felt like knives in my ribs. My head throbbed with a dull, persistent agony that made it hard to think.
I forced my eyes open.
Rocky ceiling overhead, uneven and dark. Crude shelters made of scavenged wood and animal hides clustered around me. Firelight flickered across rough stone walls, casting dancing shadows that made everything look surreal. The air smelled of smoke and unwashed bodies and something else—the sharp, metallic scent of old blood and older wounds.
I tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. My damaged ribs screamed protest and I fell back with a gasp that turned into a cough. Water came up, burning my throat. River water. Still in my lungs after everything.
*Easy,* Nyx whispered weakly. *We're hurt. We need to move slowly.*
"Where are we?" I managed to croak, though I wasn't sure if I was asking her or myself.
Movement to my left caught my attention. I turned my head—carefully, because even that hurt—and saw them.
Wolves. Dozens of them, maybe more. They moved between the fires and shelters with the casual ease of people who'd made this place home. But these weren't like any pack wolves I'd ever seen.
A man walked past carrying firewood. He was missing three fingers on his left hand, the stumps healed but ugly, the scarring suggesting they'd been torn off rather than cut clean. A woman tended one of the fires, her face half-melted by old burns, one eye socket empty and puckered. Another man sat sharpening a blade—his right ear was completely gone, just twisted scar tissue remaining.
Everywhere I looked, I saw damage.
Missing pieces. Broken bodies. Scars that told stories of violence and survival in equal measure. Some limped. Others moved with the careful deliberation of people managing constant pain. A few had the clouded eyes of partial blindness. One woman's arm hung useless at her side, the bones having healed wrong and never been reset.
These were the Broken Wolves. The castoffs. The ones deemed too damaged to keep.
The ones thrown away.
My throat tightened with something that might have been recognition. Kinship, maybe. I'd been thrown away too. Cast aside as worthless because I couldn't shift, couldn't breed, couldn't be what Julian needed me to be.
*We're not worthless,* Nyx said fiercely, reading my thoughts. *We survived. That makes us stronger than all of them.*
But looking at these wolves—scarred and broken and still breathing despite everything that had tried to kill them—I wasn't sure I believed that anymore. Maybe survival was just stubbornness. Maybe strength was just refusing to die when dying would be easier.
The camp was carved into a rocky hillside, I realized, looking around more carefully. The entrance was hidden behind a natural outcropping, camouflaged with vines and brush. Someone would have to know exactly where to look to find it. Inside, the space opened up into a surprisingly large cavern, with smaller alcoves branching off like rooms. Fires burned in carefully placed pits, the smoke venting through natural chimneys in the rock.
It was crude. Rough. But it was also defensible. Hidden. Safe in a way that spoke of careful planning and hard-won experience.
These wolves had been surviving here for a long time.
I tested the ropes around my wrists, pulling gently. They held firm, the knots expertly tied. Not tight enough to cut off circulation—whoever had bound me knew what they were doing—but secure enough that I had no chance of working free. My ankles were the same.
I was trapped. Helpless. At the mercy of people who had no reason to show me any.
The sound of uneven footsteps made me freeze.
Someone was approaching. The limp was pronounced, deliberate, each step accompanied by a soft drag of weight. I turned my head toward the sound and saw her.
The woman from the riverbank.
She was maybe forty, though the hardness in her eyes made her seem both younger and older at the same time. Gray streaked through dark hair pulled back in a severe braid. Her face was lean, almost gaunt, with prominent cheekbones and a sharp jaw. But it was the way she moved that caught my attention—the heavy limp, the careful distribution of weight, the slight grimace that crossed her features with every step.
Her right leg was damaged. Badly. The kind of injury that never fully healed.
She stopped a few feet away, looking down at me with an expression I couldn't read. Not hostile, exactly. But not friendly either. Just... assessing. Like I was a problem she was trying to solve.
"You're awake," she said. Her voice was rough, scratchy, like she'd spent too many years breathing smoke and shouting orders. "Good. Saves me the trouble of waiting."
- Writer
