Chapter 3: Exiled
775 Words
# Chapter 3: Exiled
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I woke to hands on my arms.
Rough hands. Pulling me. Dragging me across the ground, and I couldn't—I couldn't make my body work. My legs wouldn't move. My arms wouldn't push. Everything was heavy and wrong and *cold*, so impossibly cold.
"Get her up."
"Is she dead?"
"Worse. She's Wolf-less."
Laughter. Close to my ear. The kind of laughter I'd heard my whole life.
I tried to speak. Tried to tell them I could walk, I could do it myself, I didn't need their help. But my throat was full of copper and my tongue wouldn't form words.
They dragged me through the mud. Past the training yard. Past the kitchens. Past the homes of people I'd known my entire life, people who stood at their windows and watched and did nothing.
The gate.
They stopped at the territory gate.
And they dropped me.
I hit the ground face-first. My nose crunched against frozen dirt. Pain flared—distant, like it belonged to someone else.
"Alpha says you're no longer part of Blood Moon Pack," a voice said above me. "You're banished."
*Banished.*
The word rolled through my head like a stone.
"You don't have a wolf. You were never really one of us anyway. Consider this a mercy."
A mercy.
They called it a mercy.
The gate creaked open behind me, and a blast of cold air hit my back. I heard the snow before I felt it—a soft hissing, like the world itself was whispering. Winter's first blizzard.
"Get up," someone said.
I tried.
I really tried.
But my arms buckled under my weight. My chest was still bleeding—not outside, not anymore. But inside. Something had torn loose, and it was bleeding into the spaces where my wolf should have been, and I didn't think it would stop.
"If she won't walk—"
"She walks, or she freezes. Her choice."
A boot connected with my ribs.
I gasped. Rolled. The sky spun above me—grey and endless and full of falling snow.
"Move."
I moved.
I don't know how. I crawled. On my hands and knees through the gate, past the border stones, into the white emptiness that stretched beyond the territory. The snow was already piling up, covering the ground, covering the tracks, covering everything.
Behind me, the gate slammed shut.
I kept crawling.
The wind picked up. Snow stuck to my hair, my eyelashes, the blood drying on my chin. Each breath was a knife. Each movement was a lifetime.
*This is it,* I thought. *This is how I die.*
I'd always imagined I'd go quietly. That's what Wolf-less girls did, wasn't it? They faded. They became nothing. They scrubbed pots and slept in cold rooms and eventually, one day, they stopped waking up.
But this—
This was worse.
This was being told, with absolute certainty, that I had never mattered. That my entire existence was a mistake. That the Moon Goddess had looked at me and decided I wasn't worth giving a wolf to.
I stopped crawling.
The snow was up to my elbows now. The cold had stopped hurting. That was bad, I knew. That meant I was dying. But somehow, I couldn't bring myself to care.
I rolled onto my back and stared up at the sky.
The clouds were thick. Grey. Heavy with snow.
*Moon Goddess.*
I spoke to her in my head. I'd never done that before—prayer was for wolves who believed she was listening. But I had nothing left.
*Moon Goddess, why did you make me?*
No answer. Of course there was no answer.
*Why did you give me a bond I couldn't keep? Why did you let me hope?*
Snowflakes landed on my eyes. I didn't blink them away.
*If I was never meant to be anything, why did you let me be born?*
The wind howled across the open plain.
I closed my eyes.
And then—
A warmth.
Not in my body. Not in the air. *Inside.* Deep inside my chest, where the broken bond had left a gaping hole. Something was stirring there. Something that felt like—like a heartbeat I'd never heard before. Like a voice I'd never recognized. Like a presence that had been sleeping my whole life, and was finally, finally waking up.
The snow above me parted.
Moonlight broke through the clouds.
A single beam of silver light, cutting through the storm like a blade, landing directly on my chest.
And for the first time in eighteen years—
I felt my wolf.
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**End of Chapter 3**
- Writer
