The Ancient Moon

Chapter 6: The Voice Under the Skin

POV Beatrice

When they were gone, I stood alone in the clearing, the silence loud enough to split bone. The trees didn’t move. The wind didn’t blow. Everything around me held its breath, like the forest was waiting for me to decide what came next.

My legs trembled, but I didn’t fall. Not this time.

I thought I would feel powerful after standing between them — Dorian with his fury barely contained, Zane with that quiet loyalty pressed too close. But what I really felt… was hollow. Not broken. Just scraped out. Like something inside me had been scooped up and replaced with something else. Something old. Something cold. Something glowing.

I didn’t go back to campus.

I couldn’t.

Instead, I walked. Past the trail. Past the signs. Deeper into the woods than I’d ever dared to go.

Every step whispered: Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

And still I kept going.

Because deep down, I needed to know what I was becoming.

I didn’t feel human anymore.

I didn’t feel safe anymore.

But the part that scared me the most?

I didn’t want to.

—

The deeper I went, the quieter everything became.

No birds. No insects. No life.

Just the crunch of dead leaves under my shoes and the pulse pounding behind my eyes.

I should’ve turned back.

I didn’t.

I reached a small, strange hollow. A circle of stone and root and silence. It wasn’t natural — it felt made. Like a place carved out of reality by something that didn’t care about gravity or time.

The air shifted.

And then the pain came.

It wasn’t sharp. It was deep. Rolling. Like my blood had started boiling beneath my skin, like every part of me that ever belonged to gravity was being ripped upward toward something invisible.

I dropped to my knees.

My fingers dug into the dirt.

I tried to scream, but the sound never left my mouth.

Then everything went black.

—

But it wasn’t unconsciousness.

It was something else.

A dream. A vision. A memory.

I stood in the center of a vast, endless plain under a pitch-black sky. The moon above me wasn’t white — it was red. Bleeding. Watching.

And I wasn’t alone.

Figures surrounded me, cloaked in smoke and shadow. No faces. No voices.

Except one.

A whisper that slid straight into my bones.

You are not what they think.

I spun, trying to find the source. “Who are you?”

You are not what you think.

“Then what am I?”

Silence.

Then, one sentence — burned into me.

You are not who you were born to be.

And then I was falling.

Through shadow. Through cold. Through memory.

—

I woke up on the forest floor.

My cheek was pressed to the earth. My hands were shaking. My eyes were wet.

The moon above was pale and perfect again. The red was gone.

But something inside me wasn’t.

I stood slowly. My knees nearly buckled. I felt weak — but not empty. More like… overwritten. Like a different version of myself had taken root and was now stretching upward through my skin.

I looked down at my hands. No glow. No fire.

But I still felt it. Waiting. Watching.

Something inside me had opened.

And I wasn’t sure I wanted to close it.

***

By the time I reached the edge of campus, the sun was just starting to peel away the night. Pale gold bled into the clouds. My clothes were damp with morning dew, my hair a mess of twigs and cold sweat, and my legs ached like I’d walked for days. I looked like I’d crawled out of some horror movie. And maybe I had.

People passed me, too tired or too polite to comment. But I saw the looks. I felt their stares stick to my skin like static. I wasn’t sure if they saw the dirt, the shadows under my eyes, or something else — something worse.

I made it to the dorm and took the stairs two at a time, not even thinking. I just needed to get to my room. To breathe. To wash away whatever the hell just happened. But when I opened the door — she was there.

Aunt Lena.

Sitting on my bed like she’d been waiting for hours. Hair pulled into a tight braid. Her usual calm expression — gone.

“You look like hell,” she said.

I blinked. “What are you doing here?”

“I called. You didn’t answer.”

“I was… out.”

She stood. “In the forest?”

I froze.

“What?”

Her voice didn’t rise. It never did. That was the scary part.

“I asked if you were in the forest.”

“I—” I tried to lie. “No.”

Her eyes narrowed. “It started in the forest with your mother too.”

The floor vanished under my feet.

“What did you say?”

She exhaled, like someone who’d held a secret so long it had become part of her lungs.

“I never told you much about her. Thought it would protect you. But I was wrong. I see that now.”

My mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“She used to disappear. At night. Said the moon was calling her. I thought it was grief. Delusion. But then I saw her hands glow. Just once.”

I stepped back.

“No.”

“She had the mark, Bea. Same place as yours. I didn’t understand it back then. I still don’t. But I know this: whatever she had, it’s woken up in you.”

“You said she died in an accident.”

“She did. At least… that’s what the report said. But her body—” Her voice caught for the first time. “There wasn’t much left to bury.”

My breath stopped.

She stepped forward.

“I think it’s time you learned who you really are.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

—

When she left, I collapsed onto the floor, back pressed against the closet door, heart pounding. My skin felt tight again. Like it was holding something that didn’t belong to it.

Everything I thought I knew — my name, my past, my family — was unraveling. And worse?

It felt right.

I pulled my laptop onto my knees and typed the words that echoed in my skull since the forest:

“Lunar Conduit”

At first — nothing.

Then an old archive. A blurry page scanned from some folklore journal.

"It is said that once in a generation, the Moon does not choose a wolf, but a vessel. A being born not of claw, but of blood — carrying light, chaos, memory. They are not leaders. They are not beasts. They are Bridges. They are Power incarnate, and with their awakening, the balance breaks."

I closed the laptop slowly.

My hands were shaking again.

I didn’t know what I was.

But I knew this: I was done pretending to be just a girl.

The Moon had called.

And I was starting to listen.