The Abyss That Answered Back
Aria did not scream as she fell.
The darkness swallowed sound, light, and sense alike, wrapping around her like a living thing. The ground vanished beneath her feet, the sky folding inward as if the world itself had decided she no longer belonged on its surface.
The mark on her collarbone burned.
Then it opened.
Pain exploded—not sharp, not sudden, but vast. Ancient. Endless. It was the kind of pain that did not belong to a single body but to a lineage, a history soaked in blood and betrayal.
She hit something.
Not ground.
Memory.
She was standing in a stone hall older than any pack territory, its pillars carved with sigils that pulsed faintly like dying stars. Wolves knelt in rows—hundreds of them—Alphas and Betas alike, their heads bowed in submissio
