The Ashes of The Rejected Queen

Chapter 7 — Nyx

Training started that same morning and it nearly killed me.

Not literally. But there were moments in that first week where the distinction felt academic.

Mara was not gentle. I want to be clear about that before I describe what she put me through, because she looked like someone's grandmother and moved like someone's grandmother and made tea like someone's grandmother, and absolutely none of that was relevant once she stepped onto the training ground.

"Again," she said.

I picked myself up off the dirt for the seventh time.

"You said shift," I managed. My hands were on my knees. Every muscle I owned was announcing itself in the specific way that means they are extremely unhappy with recent decisions.

"I said shift. You threw yourself at the ground."

"I tried to shift and lost my balance."

"Because you are fighting Nyx instead of moving with her." Mara circled me slowly. "You have spent eighteen years holding her back. Your instinct is still to resist. That needs to change."

"I wasn't holding her back. She was hiding."

"She was waiting. You were resisting. Both things were true simultaneously." She stopped in front of me. "You cannot shift if you and Nyx are pulling in opposite directions. The shift requires complete surrender to each other. You go to her and she comes to you and there is no space between those two movements."

I straightened up. Breathed. Turned my attention inward.

Nyx was there. She was always there now that constant warm presence that I was only beginning to understand was not separate from me but was, in some fundamental way, the truest version of me. She pressed against my awareness the way a large dog presses against your leg. Solid. Warm. Patient in a way that felt ancient.

Help me, I thought at her. Show me how.

What she sent back was not an instruction. It was a feeling a particular kind of letting go, like unclenching a fist you hadn't known was closed.

I let go.

The shift hit me like a wave.

It was nothing like what I had expected the stories I'd heard from other wolves described shifting as painful at first, disorienting, a body fighting its own redesign. What I felt was the opposite. It felt like something clicking into the shape it had always been meant to take. Like a word you've been mispronouncing your whole life and then someone says it correctly and suddenly everything makes sense.

When I opened my eyes I was looking at the world from a different height, through different eyes, and the world was so much more than it had been a moment ago. Every smell was a story. Every sound had direction and depth and meaning. The trees were breathing. The earth had a pulse.

I was Nyx.

Not I was gone and Nyx had taken over. Not I had lost myself inside the wolf. Both of us, fully present, occupying the same body, seeing through the same eyes. Two things and one thing at the same time.

I was enormous.

I knew, in the abstract, that I was large. Mara had told me. The rogues' reaction had suggested it. But knowing a thing and standing inside it are different experiences entirely, and standing inside Nyx's body my body I understood for the first time what the rogues had seen when my eyes changed.

I turned my head and looked at Mara.

She was looking back at me with an expression that was very still and very controlled, but her eyes were bright in a way she couldn't completely hide.

"Good morning, Nyx," she said quietly.

Nyx made a sound in my chest. Low. Rumbling. Not threatening greeting. Like a purr from something that could bring down a tree.

"Good morning, Sera," she added. To me. Because she knew we were both there.

I shifted back.

It was easier than the first time. Like the path had been cleared something that had been thick with overgrowth was suddenly open.

I stood on the training ground in human form, breathing normally, and I looked at my hands, and they looked exactly the same as they always had.

But I was not the same.

"How often can I do that?" I asked.

"As often as you like. You will tire less than other wolves. The Black Luna's body is built for both forms equally."

"And Nyx—" I hesitated. "She will always be there? I won't lose her after a shift?"

Mara's expression softened slightly. "She chose you. She is not going anywhere."

Something released in my chest at that. Something I hadn't known was tight.

"Okay," I said. "What's next?"

"Speed," Mara said. "I want to see how fast you are."

"And then?"

She almost smiled. "And then we find out what else you can do that you don't know about yet." She tilted her head. "Your mother's letter mentioned that the ones who came before you were full of surprises."

I thought about that. About surprises. About a girl who had been told her whole life she was nothing and was just now beginning to understand that the people doing the telling were simply the wrong people to ask.

"One question," I said. "Before we keep going."

"Yes?"

"Zane's bond sickness. The rejection you said it would start affecting him too. How long?"

Mara considered me carefully. "You are asking how long until he feels it."

"I'm asking how long until he understands what he threw away."

She studied my face for a moment. Whatever she saw there made her nod once.

"It has already started," she said. "The morning after a true bond rejection, the Alpha begins to feel it. Faintly at first. Like a headache that doesn't respond to sleep." A pause. "It will get worse every month."

I turned that over. Felt something inside me that was not quite satisfaction and not quite cruelty but lived in the neighborhood of both.

"Good," I said.

Then I rolled my shoulders back and looked at the training ground.

"Show me the speed."

What I didn't know yet was that three hundred miles away, Zane Carter had woken up that morning with a pain in his chest that his pack doctor couldn't explain. I didn't know that he had sat on the edge of his bed in the early morning dark and pressed his fist against his sternum and thought of me for the first time since the rejection thought of the way I had looked at him when I walked up to that platform, and the way he had looked away.

I didn't know that the thought made the pain worse.

I didn't know any of that yet. But I would. And when I found out, I planned to feel absolutely nothing about it.

I was almost certain I would succeed.