CHAPTER TEN: THE ROCK AND WHAT IT GAVE BACK
1248 Words
She didn't reach for it right away.
She stood in front of the rock and let herself be still for a moment. The cold came up through the ground into the soles of her feet. The circle of sky above the hollow was pale grey and not moving. The pull in her chest had gone almost silent, not because it had stopped but because it had arrived. There was nothing left to follow. She was already here.
Her wolf stood tall inside her. Not pressing, not pulling. Just there, the way it had been in the chamber, that deep steady certainty that didn't ask her to do anything except not run from it.
She thought about Oakwood. The mud on her knees and the rain on her face and Dravion turning away. The sound the gate made when it closed. She thought about Mayra's smile in the chamber, quiet and satisfied, the smile of someone who had decided a long time ago that another person's pain was a fair price for what they wanted.
She thought about what Edric had said.
Stop carrying a story that was never yours.
She looked at the rock.
Then she reached out and put her hand on it.
The world didn't crack open this time. In the chamber the power had come at her like a wave breaking, enormous and sudden, more than her body could hold. This was nothing like that. This was slow. Patient. Like a fire that has been burning a long time and doesn't need to prove anything.
It moved through her from the palm up, deep and even, working its way through her chest and her throat and the backs of her hands. Her wolf didn't roar. It breathed. Long and slow, the first full breath it had taken in years, and she felt it all the way down to her feet on the cold ground.
It didn't hurt.
What she felt was not power the way she had expected power to feel, heavy or loud or commanding. It was simpler than that. It was like seeing clearly after years of bad light. Not a new thing. Just the old thing, finally visible. She was the same person she had always been. She just understood now what that person actually was, under everything she had been told she wasn't.
She stayed with her hand on the rock until the warmth finished moving through her.
When she lifted her hand the cold came back into her palm immediately and she curled her fingers closed.
She turned.
Darius was still at the tree line, leaning against the largest oak with his arms crossed. He had not moved. She had not been worried that he would leave but seeing him standing there still did something to her chest that she didn't have a name for.
She walked back through the hollow, dry leaves quiet under her feet.
She stopped a few feet away.
"Your turn," she said.
Something changed in his face. Not surprise. He had known this was coming. What moved in his face was something else, the look of a man who has been carrying something a long time and has finally reached the place where he can set it down.
"You know," he said.
"I've known for a while," she said. "I just needed to understand myself first before I said it out loud."
He was quiet. The forest around them was still and close. The circle of sky above the hollow had shifted from grey to a thin pale blue.
"I didn't want you to find out like this," he said. "Out here, before I had explained it right."
"Explain it now," she said.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he pushed off the tree and walked past her into the hollow and stood in front of the rock and went still. That stillness of his, deep and chosen.
Then he put his hand on it.
It was different from what had happened with her. No gentleness in it. The moment his palm touched the stone the air in the hollow changed, a pressure that wasn't wind, and the grey light lifted briefly and the ground under Selena's feet gave one low steady pulse, felt in the bones more than heard with the ears.
Darius stood with his hand on the rock and his eyes closed and his face was the most open she had ever seen it. All the careful distance he kept between himself and the world was gone, just a man standing in front of something that had known him since before he could remember and letting it.
He lifted his hand.
The light settled back.
The ground went still.
He turned.
"Dravion took what was yours," she said.
"Yes."
"He took it when you were too young to stop him."
"I was seven," he said. "When my father died. Dravion moved fast. I was gone before anyone could object."
"But not exiled."
"No. Someone made sure of that." He said it the way you say something you have made peace with over a long time. "They hid what I was and sent me away. Close enough to watch over. Far enough that Dravion couldn't feel me."
"Edric," she said.
"Edric. Among others."
She looked at him in the hollow, the old trees around him, the pale sky above, the rock behind him. She thought about the first night in the forest, this man appearing at the exact border of her exile with a horse and one name and nothing else. She thought about the way Wildmount's wolves had stepped back at the gate. The way Calla looked at him. The way the world settled differently around him without him asking it to.
She had known for a while. She just hadn't spoken it.
"You are the rightful Alpha of Oakwood," she said.
"Yes," he said.
The word sat between them in the cold air, plain and enormous and completely still.
"And you were sent to find me because whoever sent you knew you couldn't go back alone."
He held her eyes. "Yes."
She thought about that.
She thought about the sword in the chamber pulsing for her while Dravion stood there afraid. She thought about Edric's pale eyes. About what a true Luna was, not chosen by a bond or given as a gift, recognized by something older than any of it.
She thought about her wolf, standing at full height inside her for the first time in her life, steady and done apologizing.
She looked at Darius.
"So what do we do now?" she asked.
He looked back at her, and for the first time since the forest and the rain and the night she had climbed up behind him on that horse, his face didn't hold anything back.
"We go back," he said. "When you're ready."
She looked up at the sky above the hollow. Pale blue, deepening at the edges as the morning came in.
She was not ready yet. She knew that. There were things still to learn and she had never once walked toward something this size without someone telling her she wasn't the right person for it.
But she didn't believe that anymore.
She looked back at him.
"Not yet," she said. "But soon."
He nodded.
They stood in the hollow with the old trees around them and the morning coming on, and neither of them felt the need to say anything else.
- Writer
