Reborn Ugly, Rising Lethal

Chapter Two: Between

There was no tunnel of light. No voice welcoming her home. No mercy, and no explanation.

There was only falling silent, endless, weightless through a dark with no bottom and no walls, one thought looping like a scream with no throat left to carry it: he killed me, he killed me, he killed me.

Something pulled at her. Not gently. A hook through the center of her chest, dragging her sideways through the nothing fast enough that it should have torn her apart, if she'd still had a body left to tear.

She fought it anyway. She didn't know how, or with what she had no hands, no wolf, no crown left to command but every scrap of will she had left clawed against whatever was reeling her in like a fish on a line. It didn't matter. The pull was older than her, stronger than her, and it hadn't asked permission to take her anywhere.

A scream cut through the dark. Not hers. Someone else's thin, high, terrified and it was coming from close. From inside.

Then there was skin. Bone. A heartbeat that wasn't hers, hammering too fast, too weak, too human to belong to any wolf she'd ever known. Lungs burning like they'd forgotten how to work. A small, starved body collapsing under the sudden weight of two souls trying to fit into a space built for one.

She didn't understand what was happening. She only understood that she was somewhere again. Not the throne room. Not the dark. Somewhere small, and cold, and smelling of mud, old straw, and blood that wasn't fresh enough to be hers.

Elyra opened eyes that weren't hers, and the world came into focus in broken pieces, a low ceiling of rough wooden beams, water stained and cracked. The murmur of a crowd somewhere past thin walls. Laughter drifting through them, careless and cruel, the kind aimed at someone who couldn't hit back.

She tried to lift a hand and it obeyed a half second too slow, like the signal had to travel farther than it used to. Thin fingers. Small wrist. Old white scars crossing over each other in deliberate, ugly patterns, like something had been carved into this skin on purpose, more than once.

She tried to speak, and a stranger's voice cracked out of her throat instead of her own, hoarse from disuse, nothing like the voice that had once silenced war councils with a single word.

What am I in.

Somewhere close by, a fist hit a door hard enough to rattle it in its frame, and a girl's voice, young, sharp, dripping with the particular contempt only family could manage shouted through the wood.

"Runa! Get out here before Father sees you've hidden again!"

Elyra didn't answer. Couldn't, not yet, not with lungs this weak and a name this unfamiliar landing on ears that had never once, in any life, been called anything but Queen.

She sat very still in the dark, one scarred hand pressed flat against a heartbeat too fast and too fragile to be her own, and let the truth settle instead of fighting it, because fighting it wouldn't change a single thing.

She had died a Queen.

She had woken up wearing someone else's nightmare.

Fine, she thought, and for the first time since the blade, something colder than grief moved through her patient, sharp, and already, quietly, starting to plan.