Rejected by the Alpha, Crowned by the Moon

She was humming when she stopped existing.

A tune I'd heard her practice every morning—something about stars and mothers and the way home. Her fingers had been braiding grass, the kind of absent motion that meant her mind was elsewhere, probably on the boy who'd died yesterday. The one we'd buried without ceremony.

Then nothing.

Not silence—absence. The grass fell through air where fingers should have been. The humming didn't fade; it simply wasn't. Had never been. The space where she'd sat became a wound in my vision, too empty to process.

I blinked hard. The world blinked with me, a stuttering darkness that lasted too long. When light returned, the children sat in their circle as if nothing had changed. Twenty-two faces turned toward me, patient as always.

"Where is—" I stopped. The name wouldn't come. I could see her face—crooked nose, eyes that squinted when she smiled, the way she always slept facing east. But her name...

I whispered syllables that felt almost right. Then others. None of them fit the shape of who she'd been. Grief came anyway, sharp and wrong, mourning something I couldn't name.

"There were twenty-three," I said.

The children exchanged glances. Worried glances. The kind reserved for leaders who'd started breaking in ways that couldn't be fixed.

"Twenty-two, Mother-Who-Burns," the scarred boy said gently. "Always twenty-two."

But the mirror-boy met my gaze and nodded once. In his too-old eyes, I saw the outline of what was missing. The shape of a girl who'd been unwritten from the world's memory.

"Now there are twenty-two," I agreed, and the lie scraped my throat raw.

The forest flickered. Not movement—existence itself stuttering like a dying heartbeat. Trees pulsed with absence, there-not-there-there again. A crow flew backward overhead, wings beating time in reverse. When it reached the branch it had started from, it folded into itself and vanished.

Time had gone wrong. Or I had. Hard to tell anymore.

My palm burned. I looked down to see ink bleeding from the skin—not blood, not the silver or black I'd grown used to. Ink. Dark as void, spreading across my life line like it was rewriting the story of my hands.

"Mother?" The glowing girl's voice came cracked and multiple.

She'd fractured since yesterday. Literal cracks ran through her skin like she was pottery held together by habit. Light leaked through the breaks, but it wasn't steady anymore. It showed things between pulses—other times, other places, other versions of her that might have been.

"You are not Selvannara alone," she said, each word arriving before her mouth shaped it. "You are the echo of the first wound. The scar that scarred the scar."

Pieces of her flaked away like old paint, reformed before touching ground. Reality catching its mistake, trying to maintain the lie that things were still solid, still singular, still sane.

She looked at me, and when she spoke, the name hit like a physical blow:

"Tiarithe."

I doubled over. Not from pain—from recognition so deep it bypassed memory entirely. The shard convulsed against my spine like an animal drowning, scratching at the ribs it once called temple. Its terror leaked through our connection, raw and primal. This name wasn't meant to be spoken. This name was what it had been created to keep buried.

The children began walking in their sleep.

Eyes open but vacant, they moved in patterns that hurt to track. Their feet found rhythms that predated music, their hands traced symbols that existed before meaning needed shape. One girl opened her mouth to speak and light spilled out instead—actual threads of luminous nothing, unspooling from her throat like she was being unraveled from the inside.

The world chanted around us. Not with sound—with existence itself, reality humming at a frequency that made my teeth ache.

Another child began to fade.

This one slower. I watched it happen—the boy who always carried extra water, who had a scar on his left knee from some forgotten fall. His edges softened first. Then his color drained like watercolor in rain. His shadow forgot to follow. His scent dispersed.

"Wait," I reached for him, but my hand passed through where his shoulder should have been. "Please, I can't—your name, tell me your—"

But he was already less than echo. Less than memory. Gone.

I didn't move. Couldn't. My legs forgot standing, my mind forgot sequence. Just breath. Just that awful number.

Twenty-one heartbeats. Twenty-one faces that showed no recognition of loss.

There should be grief. There should be pain. But all I felt was the shape of something I used to love, slipping like breath from dying lungs.

I pressed my palms to my eyes, and the gesture felt familiar. Wrong but familiar. Like hands that weren't quite mine remembering motions they'd seen before. Someone used to do this—press their palms flat when the world got too large. Someone who never clenched his fists. Always open palms, even when grieving.

The memory flickered and died before I could grasp it.

"The Hollow hungers," the glowing girl said in voices layered like sediment. "What you started, it finishes. What you woke, it feeds."

The remaining children moved in tighter patterns now, their wakeful dreams synchronizing. I stood at their center, feeling names bubble up in my throat like blood from a punctured lung:

Aria—the girl who'd been rejected, who'd learned to be nothing.

Selvannara—the thread that cuts itself, the walking wound.

Tiarithe—the echo of something that shouldn't echo.

But under them all, deeper than bone, older than the first word ever spoken, another name was rising. It tasted like the moment before creation, like the first cut that made every other cut possible.

"I'll hold the line," I heard myself say. The words came out in three different voices. "Even if I forget why."

But I was already forgetting. The children's faces blurred together. Which one had sung? Which one had that scar? Why did twenty-one feel wrong when they'd always been twenty? Nineteen? The count slipped like water through cupped hands.

The shard writhed desperate against my bones, trying to burrow deeper, to hide from what was waking. But it was too late. The name was already on my tongue, had always been on my tongue, would always be—

"Ghavaranth."

Everything stopped.

Not paused—stopped. The children frozen mid-motion. Leaves caught between falling and flight. Even breath held itself, afraid to disturb what that name had torn.

Then reality cracked.

Not metaphorically. I heard it—the sound of existence developing fault lines, of rules remembering they were optional, of the comfortable lie of linear time admitting it had always been pretense.

The shard didn't just convulse now. It tried to die. I felt it attempting to sever our connection, to fade rather than face what that name meant, what it had been forged to contain, why it had wrapped itself around a rejected girl and called it salvation.

But we were beyond such simple escapes.

Something older than god-sparks and prophecies was waking up. Something that existed in the spaces between heartbeats, in the pause between inhale and exhale, in the moment before decision becomes action.

And it was wearing my face.

The children unfroze, but wrong. They moved backward through their patterns, unwinding whatever ritual their synchronized dreams had been weaving. Some cried without making sound. Others laughed with tears streaming. The glowing girl crumbled and reformed and crumbled again, caught in a loop of her own unmaking.

I stood at the center of it all, trying to remember why it mattered. Trying to recall the name of the first girl who'd vanished. Trying to hold onto the shape of grief before it transformed into something colder.

But all I had was the taste of that ancient name in my mouth.

And the terrible certainty that I'd spoken it before.

That I'd always been speaking it.

That everything else—Aria, Selvannara, all of it—had just been the universe's way of trying to forget.

The mirror-boy watched me with eyes that held too much understanding.

"How many?" he asked.

I looked at the remaining children. Counted. Lost count. Counted again.

"I don't know anymore."

And that, perhaps, was the most human thing I had left to say.