Exile
922 Words
I learned early that the forest does not care whether you are innocent or not.
It does not soften its thorn for grief or quiet down the beasts because you are scared. It only waits. Patient— ancient, either you learn how to survive or you don't.
The elders called it mercy when they had pushed me past the border stones
and slammed the gates shut in my face.
“You belong there. Not with us.”
Their mercy, to me their mercy was a death sentence.
“Do not return back to us until the wolf answers you.”
These were the last words my clan leader had said before turning his back on me. No ceremony. No farewell. Just his staff thudding on the stones and the understanding that I; Chryse, am no longer Eldridian.
I was twenty years old and still, I had not claimed my wolf form.
I stood at the edge of the woods with nothing but my clothes on my back and my breath fudging in the cold air. Dry branches crunch underneath my bartered boots. Behind me, stood everything I had ever known; my parents' graves, the garden where I had learned to braid my hair, the moonlit quadrangle where children had learned to shift— the place my life began to fall apart.
Ahead of me waited darkness.
I did not cry.
Crying was for those who believed someone would come back for them.
I took one step forward, then another, forcing my legs to move even as something sharp twisted in my chest.
I turned around, the walls had now faded in the distance. Just like that, I was alone.
The forest swallowed me whole.
‘The shadowy woods’, they all called it. It earned its name quickly. Sunlight struggled to reach the ground, tangled in thick canopies of gigantic ancient trees. Every sound felt too loud. The snap of twigs underneath my boots, the distant cry of something hunting — or something being hunted.
I kept walking.
If I stopped, I would think.
If I thought, I would remember.
And if I remembered, I would break.
My parents had died during a stampede. Trampled by our own people by our own people during a panic that I didn’t fully understand. One moment, they were there, hands steady on my shoulders, promising everything was going to be alright. The next minute, blood and screams and bodies crushed beneath fear.
After that, the whispers began.
She’s cursed.
She is not even a wolf.
She would doom us all.
The Moon rejected her.
By the time I reached adulthood without shifting, exile was inevitable.
I reached for the familiar pressure inside my chest— the place my wolf was supposed to be. But instead, all I felt was the same burning emptiness that hunted me for years. Power stirred there. Restless and wild, I felt it, but it never answered.
“Come on,” I muttered to myself. “Just this once.”
Nothing happened.
I laughed bitterly and kept moving.
By nightfall, exhaustion dragged at my limbs. I found a shallow hollow beneath a twisted oak and collapsed there, pulling my knees to my chest. The forest sang around me — insects chirring, leaves whispering, something large moving just beyond sight.
I didn’t sleep.
Every time my eyes closed, I saw crushed bodies and silver eyes staring at me with disappointment.
At some point before dawn, the smell hit me.
Rot.
I froze.
The air shifted, thick and foul, like death left too long in the sun. My heart began to pound as a low growl echoed between the trees — wrong, hollow, empty of life.
I knew that sound.
Lycan.
But not the living kind.
A shape stumbled into view between the trees, its movements unnatural. Moonlight revealed grey flesh stretched too tight over bone, eyes glowing with a sickly hue. Its jaw loose, teeth bared in a mockery of a snarl.
A dead one.
My breath caught. The elders had warned us in hushed tones about sightings beyond the borders. Risen wolves. Abominations. Stories meant to scare children into obedience.
They hadn’t been stories.
The creature’s head snapped toward me.
It smelled me.
I scrambled to my feet and ran.
Branches tore at my arms, roots sent me stumbling, lungs burning as I pushed deeper into the woods. The sound of pursuit followed — heavy, relentless, unyielding. I could hear more now. Multiple snarls. Too many.
“Please,” I gasped, not sure who I was begging. “Please—”
The pressure in my chest flared, sudden and violent, knocking the air from my lungs. I stumbled, collapsing to my knees as heat surged through my veins.
Not now, I thought wildly. Don’t do this now.
The Lycans burst into the clearing, circling me slowly. Their eyes gleamed with hunger, with recognition — as if they knew something about me that I didn’t.
I tried to rise.
My body betrayed me.
Pain exploded through my spine, white-hot and unbearable. I screamed as something inside me twisted, stretched, tore itself free. Bones cracked. Skin burned. Power flooded my senses, drowning out fear, drowning out thought.
I didn’t understand what was happening.
Only that I was no longer running.
I was becoming.
The last thing I saw before the world dissolved into fire and instinct was moonlight reflecting off blood-stained ground — and the shocked, almost reverent expressions on the dead wolves’ faces.
As if they had found what they were looking for.
- Writer
