Reborned
1095 Words
The dungeon was cold.
Not the comfortable cold of winter nights under heavy blankets. This cold was alive. It seeped into my bones, my lungs, the hollow space where my wolf should have been.
Days blurred. There were no windows. No clocks. No difference between morning and night.
Just silence. Darkness. The weight of fifteen years pressing down on my chest before the first day even ended.
On my first day serving my sentence, Lily's wolves found me in the yard. They came for me at sunset.
I knew it was sunset because the guards changed shifts, and for a few minutes the door at the end of the corridor opened, letting in a narrow slice of orange light.
Then the light vanished. Footsteps echoed.
Three of them.
Wolves. Strong. Confidence. Their scents reached me before their faces, expensive perfume, leather, sharp.
Lily's perfume.
"Fresh meat," one of them laughed. "Didn't think the wolfless heiress would actually last a day."
"Wolfless, worthless, and now a murderer." Another voice, female, cruel. "Quite the fall from grace."
I pressed my back against the wall. My heart slammed against my ribs.
"Please..I didn't do it. I didn't kill anyone.."
"We know."
The female wolf crouched in front of me. Pretty. Blonde. Her smile didn't reach her eyes.
"Lily sends her regards."
They dragged me to the yard.
Not the training yard. Not somewhere public. A small, forgotten courtyard behind the dungeons, used for waste disposal and nothing else. The ground was concrete, cracked and stained.
No one could see us here.
No one would hear.
"Any last words, heiress?"
I opened my mouth.
A hand closed around my throat.
"Didn't think so."
The first blow knocked the breath from my lungs.
The second sent me to my knees.
Third, I stopped counting.
Pain exploded across my ribs, my face, my back. I curled into myself, arms over my head, trying to protect what little of me was left.
Fifteen years, I thought. Fifteen years of this.
I won't survive fifteen days.
"Look at me."
A hand grabbed my hair, yanked my head back. The blonde wolf's face swam in my vision, distorted through tears.
"You should have stayed in the countryside, wolfless. You were never meant to come home."
She released my hair.
I collapsed forward. My palms hit concrete.
Behind me, footsteps. Retreating.
I thought it was over.
Then a hand pressed against my back. Not a punch. Not a grab.
A shove. They shove me. My head snapped forward. I hit my head on the concrete. My skull cracked open like an egg.
Warmth spread across my temple, my cheek, the cold ground beneath me. Red bloomed in my vision, thick and fast.
I'm bleeding.
I'm bleeding too much.
I'm…
The footsteps faded.
The cold seeped in.
I lay on the concrete and watched my blood pool beneath my cheek, spreading slow and steady like spilled wine. The sky above was grey. Featureless. Indifferent.
Twelve years of hoping. Fifteen years of prison. One day of surviving. And this is how it ends.
My fingers twitched. My grandmother's bracelet, still wrapped in cloth, still in my pocket. I couldn't feel it anymore.
I couldn't feel anything.
Mother…
Father…
Dixon…
Lily…
I didn't do anything wrong. I just wanted to come home.
The grey sky darkened. Tunneled. Became a single point of light, shrinking, shrinking, shrinking..
This is death…
This is what death feels like…
Cold. Quiet. Alone..
I always thought it would hurt more.
The light dimmed. I died.
Wolfless, worthless, disposable me.
No one asked questions.
No one defended me.
Then, from somewhere deeper than where my wolf had slept my entire life..
The Moon Goddess spoke.
A voice.
"Open your eyes, daughter."
Warmth.
Not the tentative warmth of sunlight. Not the desperate warmth of hope. This was ancient. Deep. A fire that had been burning since before wolves walked the earth.
"Open your eyes."
I didn't have eyes anymore. Didn't have a body. Didn't have anything but darkness and the echo of that voice.
But I tried.
And somehow, impossibly..
My eyes opened.
I opened them. I realized I had been reborn.
Light.
Golden. Everywhere. Not the grey indifferent sky of the prison yard. This light was alive.
I was standing.
Not lying. Not bleeding. Standing.
Before me, a figure. Woman-shaped, but more. Her robes shimmered like moonlight on water. Her hair fell in silver waves past her waist. Her eyes..
Her eyes held every wolf that had ever lived, ever died, ever run beneath the full moon.
"You have walked through darkness," she said. "You have been betrayed by those who should have protected you. You have died alone, forgotten, believing yourself worthless."
Her voice was not unkind. It was simply... true.
"And yet."
She reached out. Her fingers, cool and luminous, touched my chest.
"You did not break."
Something stirred beneath her palm.
Not silence. Not emptiness.
"You did not become them."
A heartbeat. Steady. Strong.
"You did not stop hoping."
Teeth. Claws. Fur.
"Rise, daughter."
Eyes of molten silver.
"You were never wolfless."
"I was just waiting."
I gasped.
Air flooded my lungs, cold, real, alive. My chest heaved. My fingers clenched around something solid.
A suitcase handle.
Sunlight warmed my face. Not golden and divine. Ordinary. Late afternoon. The kind of light that made dust motes dance.
I had been reborned to the day I turned eighteen and returned home.
I was standing.
Not in a dungeon. Not on concrete. Not bleeding out.
I was standing on a gravel path, worn suitcase in my hand, heart pounding so hard I could taste it.
Before me, rising against the blue sky..
The estate gates.
I stared at them.
The iron scrollwork. The Bloodmoon crest centered between the bars. The intercom box where, twelve years ago, a six-year-old girl had pressed her tear-streaked face to the glass and begged to stay.
I'm eighteen. I just returned home.
My suitcase is in my hand. The estate gates are rising before me.
My reflection shimmered in the polished brass. Young. Whole. No blood matting my hair, no c***k splitting my skull.
Eighteen years old.
The day I came home.
I was reborn.
Something shifted in my chest.
Not silence.
Warmth. Pressure. A presence that hadn't been there before, sleeping and waiting and hungry.
"We're home," my wolf whispered.
Her voice was rough from disuse. Quiet. But she was there, real and fierce and mine.
Yes, I thought. “Yes, we are.”
The gates began to open.
I gripped my suitcase handle and stepped forward.
- Writer
