Rejected by the Alpha, Crowned by the Moon

I woke with someone else's sorrow in my throat.

The taste was copper and lavender—a combination that made no sense, belonged to no memory I could claim. My fingernails were packed with earth, crescents of dirt that spoke of midnight digging I couldn't recall. Dorian sat across the dead fire, sharpening his knife with movements too precise to be casual.

He hadn't touched me since the shard flared its jealousy. Hadn't come within arm's reach except when necessity demanded. The distance ached in ways I couldn't name, like losing something I'd never been allowed to have.

"You were crying," he said without looking up. "In a language I don't know."

I wanted to ask what I'd said. Wanted to reach across the space between us and feel something real, something that wasn't silver fire or divine whispers. But when I shifted forward, the shard pulsed hot beneath my ribs—not warning, exactly. More like a cat arching its back when another creature approached its chosen human.

Mine, it hummed. Not in words anymore. In bone-deep certainty.

So I stayed where I was, tasting someone else's grief, wearing dirt I didn't remember gathering.

"We should move," Dorian said. Still not looking at me. "The Inquisitor—"

"I know." My voice came out wrong. Older. Tired in ways that twenty-one summers couldn't explain. "Three nights now."

He finally met my eyes, and I saw the question there. The careful distance wasn't just about the shard's jealousy. It was about what he saw when he looked at me now. What was changing too fast to track.

We packed in silence. Moved in silence. The forest felt different today—not hostile, but expectant. Like it was holding its breath for something I should remember but couldn't.

Then I saw the stones.

A circle of them, each carved with crescents so old the edges had worn soft. They emerged from the undergrowth like bones from skin, and my feet stopped without my permission.

"We don't go there," Dorian said from behind me. "No one does."

But I was already moving. The shard wasn't pulling me—this was something else. Something in my muscles that remembered a path my mind had never walked.

The grave lay at the circle's heart.

No marker. No grand inscription. Just a mound of earth that had settled over time, ringed by those crescent stones like a crown of moon-phases. And beside it, half-buried in moss, a comb carved from bone.

My hands found it before thought could stop them. The bone was smooth, warm despite the morning chill. And there, etched so faint I almost missed it, a name that turned my blood to starlight:

Miralys.

The world tilted.

"Miralys, my starlight, remember who you are when the world tries to make you small."

My mother's voice. But no—that was wrong. My mother called me Aria. Had always called me Aria. Hadn't she?

"The flame chooses its own name," the voice continued, and now I couldn't tell if it was memory or vision or something bleeding between. "But names are just clothes we wear until we outgrow them."

I was on my knees without remembering the fall. The comb pressed against my chest where the shard pulsed, and between them I felt something crack. Not breaking—unfolding. Like a flower that had been forced to bloom as a different species finally remembering its true shape.

"That's not my name," I whispered. But the words tasted like lies and lavender.

More memories—not memories—came flooding:

Standing in this circle, silver fire crowning me while wolves knelt. But my hair was darker, my scars different, my voice speaking oaths in tongues the modern world had forgotten.

The same hands—my hands—but wearing different lives. Different griefs. Different names.

Always ending here. Always ending in flame.

"Aria." Dorian's voice, sharp with something that might have been fear. "Whatever you're seeing—"

"Am I becoming," I asked the bones beneath the earth, "or being overwritten?"

The shard hummed its lullaby against my ribs. Not answering. Just singing me toward something that felt like home and tasted like endings.

I tried to stand. Failed. Tried to remember my mother's face and saw three different women, all calling me by names that rhymed with fate. The comb grew heavier in my hand, its weight all out of proportion to its size.

So I did what I'd always done when the world stopped making sense.

I called the flame.

It came wrong. Not the silver fire I'd grown used to, but something older. Deeper. The color of moon-shadows and forgetting. It crawled up my arms like a lover's touch, and where it passed, my scars shifted. Moved. Rearranged themselves into patterns I'd worn before.

No.

I tried to stop it. Tried to pull back the power that had always answered to my will. But this wasn't my power anymore. This belonged to—

Us, the shard crooned. We've done this dance before, you and I. Different faces, same yearning. Different names, same ending.

The flame wouldn't die. Wouldn't obey. I pressed my palms against the earth, trying to ground myself, but the soil remembered my hands. Welcomed them. Whispered secrets about the last time I'd dug here, burying a girl named Miralys who'd trusted the wrong wolf, loved the wrong dream, died the wrong death.

Or was that me? Was that yesterday? Was that tomorrow?

I screamed. Not in pain—the flame didn't hurt anymore. Screamed in the kind of grief that came from losing yourself one memory at a time. From watching your name become just another coat you'd worn until it grew too small.

The flame died. Not because I controlled it, but because it had finished showing me what I needed to see.

I knelt there in the circle of crescent stones, comb clutched in one hand, dirt under my nails, tears that tasted of copper and lavender tracking down cheeks that might have been mine.

"I don't know who I am anymore."

The words came out broken. True. Dorian still hadn't moved from the circle's edge, held back by old superstition or new wisdom. But I could feel his wanting. The urge to come closer, to offer comfort that the shard would punish us both for accepting.

"You're who you choose to be," he said finally. "Names are just—"

"Clothes we wear until we outgrow them." I finished the quote he couldn't have known. Stood on legs that felt borrowed. "She said that. My mother. Or her mother. Or—"

I stopped. The memories were tangling, past and present and possible bleeding together like watercolors in rain.

The shard hummed its satisfaction. Remember me, it seemed to say. Remember us. Remember what we almost achieved before flesh failed us.

Visions pressed against my eyes: Miralys standing in silver fire, wolves bowing not from fear but recognition. A crown of threads floating above her head, each one leading to a heart that beat in time with hers. The black wolf from the Book beside her, no longer trapped but freed.

Beautiful. Terrible. Inevitable.

But in every vision, Dorian wasn't there.

"Where is he?" I asked the shard, the bones, the sky that suddenly felt too close. "In your perfect future, where is—"

Irrelevant.

The answer came not as word but as absence. A blank space where his thread should have been. A future where I'd grown too large for mere mortal love, where the only bond that mattered was the one between divine and vessel.

"No." The word came out stronger than I felt. "No, that's not—"

Something crashed through the underbrush. Dorian spun, knife ready, but I already knew this wasn't an attack.

The child couldn't have been more than eight summers. Wild-raised from the look of her—naked save for mud and scars, moving on all fours with the fluid grace of something that had never learned shame. Her thread was severed, the edges still raw enough to weep silver at the edges.

But it was her eyes that stopped my heart.

She looked at me like she knew me. Like she'd been waiting.

Without hesitation, she crawled forward. Past Dorian, who stood frozen with blade half-raised. Past the crescent stones that should have held old ward magic. Right to my feet, where she pressed her forehead to the ground in a bow so deep her spine curved like a crescent moon.

And there, on the nape of her neck where baby-soft hair gave way to skin, a mark that matched mine. Not similar—identical. Down to the angle, the depth, the way it pulsed with borrowed light.

"No," Dorian breathed, and I heard the horror in it. "That's not possible. The mark is unique, it can't be—"

The child raised her head. Spoke in a voice like broken bells:

"Mother-Who-Burns. We heard you calling. We came."

We.

The word hung in the air like a promise. Like a threat. Like a future I hadn't chosen but might not be able to avoid.

Behind us, in the forest that had gone too quiet, something howled. Not one voice. Dozens. All young. All thread-broken. All coming.

The shard sang its triumph against my ribs, and I understood with the kind of clarity that felt like drowning:

I wasn't becoming something new.

I was remembering something that had already been.

And it was calling its children home.