Rejected by the Alpha, Crowned by the Moon

Dawn came wrong.

Not the color—though the light did bleed through the trees like honey mixed with ash. Not the timing—though I'd lost count of the hours somewhere between prophecy and scarring. But the sound of it. Dawn had always whispered. Now it screamed in frequencies only the marked could hear.

The children woke as one.

Twenty-three heartbeats. Twenty-three pairs of eyes opening in perfect synchrony. Twenty-three mouths drawing the same breath at the same moment. Then the unity shattered, and they were individual again—but the damage was done. I'd seen what they were becoming. What we were becoming.

A single organism pretending to be many.

The scarred boy sat up first, movements too fluid for his age. He looked at me without recognition, then past me, tracking something in the air that had no shape. When I tried to speak—tried to find words that might anchor him back to himself—he tilted his head and made a sound like wind through broken teeth.

No language. Not anymore. Just the echo of meaning where words used to live.

"He dreams in silver now," the mirror-boy said, crouched at his usual distance. "Like you do. But he doesn't have names to hold the visions, so they just... pour through."

I wanted to argue. Wanted to say I didn't dream in silver, that I was still—

Still what?

The question lodged in my throat like a bone. I reached for my name, my purpose, my reason for gathering these broken children, and found only Selvannara coiled there. The thread that cuts itself. The wound that walks. The name carved so deep even forgetting couldn't erase it.

Around us, the forest held its breath wrong.

No birdsong. No insect hum. No rustle of small lives in the undergrowth. Just silence so complete it had weight, pressing against eardrums like deep water. When I stood, my footsteps made no sound. When the children moved, following habit more than command, they left no trace.

We were becoming absence.

The glowing girl hadn't spoken since the prophecy burned through her. She sat apart, knees drawn up, watching her shadow do things shadows shouldn't. It moved when she was still. Gestured when her hands lay quiet. Once, I saw it reach for something none of us could see, and the girl flinched like she'd been struck.

"Does it hurt?" I asked, though I wasn't sure which part I meant. The shadow. The silence. The knowing.

She looked at me with eyes that held too much light and not enough recognition. Then she smiled—a child's expression on a face that had seen centuries in minutes—and shook her head.

Not because it didn't hurt. Because hurt had become too small a word.

I understood. My own skin sang with the prophecy I'd carved there, each symbol a doorway to memory that wasn't mine. Or was too much mine. Hard to tell where Aria ended and Selvannara began when both names meant the same refusal to die correctly.

The shard pulsed weak against my ribs. Once, it had been fire and presence, divine arrogance wrapped in crystal. Now it felt like a dying moth, wings broken, trying to find light in the growing dark of what I was becoming.

Choose me, it whispered, and for the first time since I'd claimed it, I heard fear. Real fear. The kind that came from realizing you were not the biggest thing in your host's chest anymore.

I almost pitied it.

Almost.

We needed water. The children's lips had begun to crack, and even transformed flesh required basic sustenance. I led them to the stream we'd used yesterday—or was it longer? Time moved strange now, stretching and compressing like breath held too long.

The water ran clear, but when I knelt to cup it in my palms, my reflection stopped me cold.

The face looking back was mine. Mostly. The bone structure hadn't changed, the scars still mapped the same history across familiar skin. But the eyes—

My eyes had been brown. Human brown, with flecks of gold when the light hit right. These eyes were silver shot through with threads of void, like stars drowning in their own light. And behind the pupils, something else moved. Something that watched me watching myself, amused by my attempts to find the girl in the god.

My mouth moved. Not because I willed it, but because something else needed to speak. I clamped my lips shut, bit my tongue hard enough to taste copper, refused to give voice to whatever wanted out.

Black blood dripped into the water.

Not red. Not even the silver I'd grown used to. Black as the space between stars, thick as prophecy. I watched it swirl and dissipate, and told myself it was a trick of light. Told myself I hadn't seen the water recoil from it like living things flee poison.

The children drank. I didn't.

When we returned to camp, I found it tucked beneath a root where he must have dropped it in leaving. A simple thing—a leather cord worn soft with use, the kind wolfmen used to tie back their hair during the hunt. Nothing special. Nothing sacred. Just a piece of someone who'd taught me to be nothing so I could be everything.

I picked it up, and my hand burned.

Not with fire. With memory. With the weight of what I was losing, had lost, would lose. I tried to think his name, tried to shape it with tongue and teeth and the awful ache of missing him.

But nothing came.

The harder I reached, the more it slipped away. Like trying to hold water, like trying to remember a dream after waking. I knew there had been someone. Gold eyes—I remembered gold eyes. The scent of woodsmoke and safety. Hands that had been careful with my breaking. A voice that had said—

Said—

Gone.

I wrapped the leather cord around my wrist, let it burn against skin that barely remembered how to feel human touch. At least the pain was real. At least it proved something had mattered enough to mourn.

The children watched me struggle with silence. They'd learned to read the weather of my moods, to gauge when to approach and when to fade. But now they just watched, patient as stone, waiting for whatever came next.

"I need to tell you something."

My voice came out wrong—layered like the glowing girl's had been, like multiple selves trying to speak through one throat. I cleared it, tried again, forced the words to be simple. Human. True.

"I'm losing things. Pieces. Names. Faces." I touched the leather cord, felt it pulse with phantom warmth. "I can feel myself becoming her. Selvannara. The thing the prophecy wants. The thing maybe you need me to be."

They listened with the stillness of those who'd already lost everything once.

"I can't promise to save you." The words scraped raw. "I can't even promise I'll still be me tomorrow. The girl who found you, who gathered you, who wanted to protect you—she's... fading. And what's taking her place might not care about small things. Might not remember why broken children matter more than divine fire."

Silence stretched between us. Even the forest seemed to lean in, waiting.

"But I will not leave you." My voice broke on the promise. "I will not stop burning for you. Even if I forget why. Even if I forget myself. The fire remembers what the mind loses. And you—you are carved into me deeper than any prophecy."

One child moved first. The youngest girl, the one who'd wet herself in fear that first night. She crossed the space between us with careful steps, reached out with a hand that trembled. Her fingers found mine, small and warm and absolutely present.

"We know," she whispered. "We've always known. You burn so we don't have to."

Another child came forward. Then another. One by one, they took my hands, my arms, pressed close like they could anchor me to this moment through touch alone. Even the scarred boy who'd forgotten language reached out, his transformed finger gentle against my prophecy-carved skin.

I smiled.

It was a small thing. Human. Probably the last purely human expression I'd manage before Selvannara claimed the rest. But it was real, and it was mine, and it was for them.

Twenty-three threadless children holding one threadless woman, all of us becoming something the world had no name for yet.

The shard pulsed once more—jealous, afraid, already grieving what it was losing. But I had no comfort for it. No promises. It had chosen to bind itself to me, but I had never chosen it. Not truly. It had been survival, nothing more.

These children, though. This impossible family built from rejection and flame. This I had chosen. This I would choose again, even knowing the cost.

Even as black blood dried on my tongue and the moon flickered through phases like a dying heart between beats.

Even as my reflection grew stranger and my memories grew thinner.

Even as Selvannara rose and Aria fell and the space between them collapsed into singularity.

I held them, and they held me, and for one perfect moment, we were enough.

Just broken things choosing to break together rather than alone.

The leather cord burned against my wrist, and I let it. Let it be reminder and remainder both. Let it be the last thread to something I could no longer name but refused to release.

Somewhere, golden eyes were probably searching for a girl who no longer existed.

But here, silver eyes watched children who did.

And that was enough.

It had to be.