Rejected by the Alpha, Crowned by the Moon

The forest prayed when I walked through it.

Not with words—the world had grown past such small containers. But with bloom and bend, with light that pooled in my footprints like spilled milk, with moss that glowed fever-green where my bare feet touched earth. Trees woke wrong. Stones split like wounds.

"You're a walking prayer," the youngest girl whispered, but she didn't sound reverent. She sounded afraid.

I wanted to tell her I was still me. Still the woman who'd cleaned piss from her legs that first night. But my mouth moved wrong these days. Said things I didn't mean. Or meant things I couldn't.

So I said nothing, and the forest kept genuflecting, and the children walked in patterns that matched my scars.

It was the coughing that broke the morning's strange peace.

Wet. Wrong. The kind that pulled even gods back to earth.

I found him curled between roots—the quiet boy who'd never asked for anything. Always watching from edges, content to exist without demand. Now he pressed both hands to his mouth, trying to contain what wouldn't be contained.

Blood. Common blood. Red as rust, thick with the simple failure of flesh.

"When?" I knelt beside him, and flowers bloomed. I wanted to crush them.

"Three days," he whispered through crimson. "Maybe four. Time moves..."

Strange. Yes. We all felt it—hours stretching like taffy around what I was becoming.

The children gathered without being called. They formed their patterns—always patterns now, always seven—and waited. Not for the Mother-Who-Burns. Not for Selvannara. But for something between.

I pressed my hand to his chest. Wet rattle of drowning lungs. Infection, maybe. Or something sharp grown wrong inside. The kind of dying that had taken wolves since before the moon learned names.

Fix him.

The thought came like breath. I had fire that could rewrite flesh, transform suffering into something else. All I had to do was let it flow—

"Not everything that dies needs saving. Some just need someone to stay."

The memory hit cold. His voice—I still couldn't find his name, but his voice cut through the static. Teaching me to set snares. A rabbit dying in our trap. My question about saving it.

"Mercy isn't always about more life. Sometimes it's about being present for the leaving."

My hand trembled on the boy's chest. Silver fire gathered beneath my palm. So easy to pour it through him, burn out infection, rebuild his lungs with divine architecture. He'd survive. Changed—maybe forget language, maybe glow, maybe grow wings.

But he'd exist.

The shard flared desperate against my ribs. Fed me visions like poisoned honey:

The boy rising on smoke-wings. The boy speaking prophecies. The boy becoming more than the small, quiet thing that had watched from edges.

Save him. Change him. Make him matter.

"No."

The shard recoiled, then pushed harder. Heat flooded my veins. My skin glowed, prophecy scars blazing.

The boy's eyes found mine. Clear despite the blood.

"Will it hurt?" he asked. Not the dying—he'd made peace with that. The changing. The becoming.

"Yes. And you won't be you anymore."

He nodded like he'd expected that. Then, with effort that painted fresh red: "Then just... stay?"

I gathered him into my lap. Said nothing. Let my hands be answer enough—one cradling his head, the other over his heart. The children pressed closer, bearing witness. The forest held its breath, and for once, nothing bloomed.

Just a woman holding a dying child.

He coughed more blood. I wiped it with my sleeve, staining the prophecy scars. The shard pulsed rage, but I pressed it quiet beneath the weight of this smaller thing.

"Tell me," he whispered, "about before?"

Before. When I'd been just Aria. When rejection was the worst thing. When bonds connected hearts in warmth, not warning.

But those memories slipped like water through cupped hands. So I lied.

I told him about pack halls filled with laughter. About mothers who sang children to sleep. About the world that should have been.

He smiled. Blood on his teeth. "Sounds nice."

Then, softer: "Thank you for not..."

He didn't finish.

The dying took hours. I felt every breath catch like dry leaves in wind. Every muscle that seized. Every small surrender.

The children sang—not words but harmonics that held grief and witness.

When his breathing stopped, I waited. Waited for the shard to try again. For my divine nature to override choice.

Nothing came. Just stillness. Just a small body, empty.

I closed his eyes with fingers that could have remade the world.

"Why?" the mirror-boy asked, though his tone said he knew.

I looked at them—these threadless children who'd become everything.

"Because he asked me to."

Simple. True. Not enough.

The scarred boy made a sound like breaking glass. The glowing girl dimmed. Others wept silent tears that caught moonlight though the sun still claimed the sky.

I wanted to weep with them. But gods don't cry. We just carry what we couldn't save.

I could have saved him. I chose to remember him instead.

We buried him as the sun set. No ceremony. Just children digging earth with their hands, placing someone they'd loved in ground that would hold him unchanged.

I carved his name into my palm with my own nail. Where I could close my fist and hold it when divinity tried to make me forget.

The children slept closer that night. Not seeking protection, but offering it. As if they knew the real danger wasn't what hunted us from outside.

My hands moved without thought as I smoothed the earth over his grave—three times counterclockwise, the way I'd seen done before. The way someone with gold eyes had shown me, though I couldn't recall when. Just the gesture remaining when the teacher had faded.

The leather cord around my wrist hung still as old grief.

Not everything that dies needs saving.

I held the quiet boy's name in my palm and let that be enough.

Tomorrow, I might be more Selvannara than Aria. Tomorrow, the shard might win.

But tonight, I was just a woman who'd held a child while he died.

And that, perhaps, was the most divine thing I'd done yet.