The Rejected Luna

Chapter 2

Kael

I wasn't sleeping, I never use to to be honest. This wasn't new. Sleep had been a negotiation since I took the Alpha chain, my father had warned me about this actually, one of the few useful things he said before he handed it over. You don’t rest just because the empire is at rest. I'd made some kind of peace with that concept years ago.

But tonight was different. Tonight I was standing in front of my study window doing nothing, which wasn't like me, watching the training grounds. It was oddly empty tonight, the dark covered the whole space and I just stared, not even pretending to think about anything productive. The fire behind me had burned down to almost nothing, I hadn't called for more wood. I didn't want more fire nor did I want the heat. I didn't know what I wanted.

The door opened.

"She knows." Crassus. His voice echoed in my room, his voice was always like that flat, no softness in it at all. I used to think that meant strength, now I just thought it meant he'd decided warmth was a waste of his time, " and it doesn’t matter how she found out. She knows someone came." "I know." "Then you know we can't keep stalling." I heard him come further into the room. "The council is done with delays Alpha. The child" "Is allegedly mine," I said.

"The blood seers from the oracle confirmed it this morning." "And we called for you but there wasn’t a response from you”. The child is yours Alpha, and there is nothing that can change that". I watched what was left of the fire turn into dust and ashes. Alleged, no Confirmed.

I'd been carrying those words around for weeks like if I held them long enough they'd stop meaning what they meant, but they didn't. There was still a gap in my memory from that night. I attended the state banquet that day, a glass of wine was offered to me by one of the servants. Taking a large gulp of the wine that hit wrong and fast. That day felt like a blur and for the longest of times I had been trying to find the edges of it, trying to get back what I'd lost. I couldn't, Turns out it didn't matter anymore, because the missing piece of that day had decided to come back but this time with an uninvited guest.

"Lyra Vesper." Strange to say her name out loud. "Strong family, strong wolf. One of the best in the north. She would be a great Lu.." "Don't," I turned around. "Don’t you dare say what you have in mind to say." He looked at me without any particular expression, he wasn't scared of me. Never had been, and I had come to terms with it.

"It has to be said by someone Alpha. The empire needs an heir. Sloan cannot give the empire and you one, a child is already on the way. The path is clear." "Nothing about this is clear Alpha ."

"It's painful, I fully understand you, but this has to be done," he said. Kael said angrily, “ You don’t understand me and you most definitely can understand how I feel right now." Finishing my statement, I looked at him and then at the fire and then at my hands. The same hands that built the eastern coalition, signed every alliance in the last six years, held Sloan's face once in the beginning of all this and said things I meant with all my heart. I still meant it, that was the problem. I still meant it and it didn't matter.

"Call the meeting," I said. He left as I stayed at the window for a long time, the fire finished dying and I let it. She was in the garden, I knew she would be there. The bench under the silver-leaf tree, knees up, watching the fountain the way she watched things when she was thinking hard and didn't want anyone to know, her hair was let down, which she rarely did inside the palace, and it caught the moonlight and she looked onto the stars above, she looked like herself tonight. That was the thing about Sloan, even now with everything going on all she did was to stay calm and stare in space with an unreadable expression. She heard me coming, she always did. "You've decided," she said. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. "The meeting is tomorrow, but yeah." I sat down next to her, with a distance between us that we always kept. "Sloan," "don’t apologise," she said. Not in a harsh way, just tired, she sounded tired, so we just sat there. It had gotten cold without me noticing, that October cold that always arrives fast and a little harsher than normal.

Out of no where Sloan started speaking,"When I was twelve," "there was a sister who used to say the Goddess had a plan for everything. That you couldn't see the shape of it from the inside, only from further away." She paused. "I stopped believing that around nineteen. But sometimes" she looked at the water, "sometimes at night I want to believe it again, not because I think it's true, but because it would make it" "Easier. she said, she sounded different today and it was very noticeable. I looked at her. The mark on her collarbone in the moonlight, the moon-shape. I had looked at that mark probably a hundred times and I never knew how to feel the birth mark and it’s meaning, I have tried to search for it’s meaning, but to no avail.

"I love you," I said. "I need you to know that,” She didn't say anything for a long time. "I know you do," she said finally. "And I know it doesn't fix it and I know all this isn’t your fault." She pulled her knees towards herself after saying that. "I've known all of it for a long time, Kael. I didn't know what to say after what she said,so I didn't say anything, sometimes words can’t fix what has already been broken.We stayed in silence until she got too cold, she went inside without saying anything, no goodbye, which wasn't unkind, it just felt wrong to put a word on it.I stayed a bit longer outside until the cold eventually got to me.