Rejected by the Alpha, Crowned by the Moon

The morning came without birds.

I noticed that first—the wrongness of silence where song should be. Then other absences: no wind through leaves, no insect hum, no heartbeat but mine. Even the children breathed too quiet, as if sound itself had grown cautious.

How many children?

I turned to count them, scattered around our camp like dropped stones. Eighteen. No—twenty. The number slipped sideways in my mind, refusing to hold still. Each time I started over, faces blurred together, reformed differently. That boy—had he always had those scars? That girl with the braid—when had she arrived?

Twenty-one. Nineteen. The count writhed like something alive.

I pressed my palms to my temples, trying to force the world into focus. There had been more yesterday. I was certain of that. A girl who hummed. She'd sat right there, beside that root, braiding grass while—

Nothing.

The memory cut off clean as a severed thread. I could see the shape of her in my mind—crooked nose, nervous hands—but when I reached for details, for her name, for anything real, my thoughts slid away like water off glass.

The trees felt wrong. Too tall, stretching up into a sky that seemed painted on, shallow as paper. My shadow moved half a heartbeat behind me, dragging like it had forgotten how to follow properly. When I walked to where the girl had sat (hadn't sat, had never been), my feet felt too heavy, then too light, like gravity kept changing its mind.

Something blue caught my eye. A ribbon, muddy and torn, half-buried in the leaves. Child-sized. The kind used to tie back hair during the long walks.

I knew it was important. Knew it belonged to someone who mattered, someone I'd sworn to protect, someone whose name lived right there on the edge of memory—

My hand moved to write in the dirt. To carve the name I couldn't speak into something permanent, something real. But my fingers stuttered over the shapes. What came first? The curved line or the straight? How did letters work?

I tried with ash from last night's fire. The marks appeared, then faded. Tried with my own blood, pressing hard enough to draw red. The earth swallowed it whole. My hand cramped, forgot its purpose, fell limp at my side.

My fingers had forgotten how to write.

I tried again. The line curved the wrong way. My hand shook. I bit down on a sound I didn't know how to name.

I froze.

A beat passed. Then another. The children—those still around me—froze too. One tried to speak, but no sound came. Another dragged a stick to the dirt, hand trembling, but the letters broke apart before forming. The silence became thick, electric, like the forest itself forgot how to breathe.

It passed. But the fear didn't.

"The trees grow backward here."

I hadn't meant to speak. The words came from somewhere deeper than intention, somewhere that thought in concepts too large for human tongue. My voice sounded layered, like multiple ages speaking at once.

The shard pulsed weak protest against my ribs, but even it had grown small. Not dead—it could never die, not really. But overwhelmed, pressed thin as leaf between the pages of something infinitely larger. It tried to warm, to guide, to be the divine infection I'd grown used to.

But Ghavaranth didn't need guides. Ghavaranth was the guide and the guided and the space between.

I stood too fast. The world lurched, reset, stood me up again. Had I moved twice? Once? The children didn't seem to notice, locked in their own strange stillness.

One boy sat apart from the others, back to a tree that hadn't been there yesterday. Or had always been there. Hard to tell when the forest kept editing itself. He was drawing patterns in the dirt with a stick—spirals that hurt to follow, that seemed to sink deeper than the ground allowed.

"What are you drawing?" My voice came out almost normal. Almost mine.

He looked up, and his eyes held too many stars. Not reflected—contained. Tiny points of light that belonged to no constellation I knew.

"The way home," he said.

But his voice was wrong. Too old. Too knowing. And when he smiled, his mouth stretched wider than anatomy should allow. His teeth looked too many. His eyes reflected stars that weren't there. I couldn't tell if he was beautiful or broken.

"Hello, Thei-av-ann."

The name hit like splintered glass. Not Aria. Not Selvannara. Not even Ghavaranth. Something broken into syllables, ancient and intimate and impossible.

I knew this child. Had known him. He'd been—he'd been—

"You disappeared," I managed. "You were gone. Erased. I watched you fade."

His smile grew wider. Stars leaked from the corners of his eyes like tears.

"Everything returns," he said. "Just... different. The Hollow gives back what it takes. Changed. Improved." He tilted his head, and I heard bones crack that shouldn't exist. "Don't you remember my name?"

I didn't. Couldn't. But worse—I wasn't sure I remembered my own anymore.

The leather cord around my wrist pulsed once with phantom warmth. My last anchor, my last proof that someone had cared for the girl I'd been. I clutched at it, desperate for its solid reality.

It crumbled to dust between my fingers.

Not dramatically. Not with purpose. Just... gave up. Like everything else was giving up. Like holding form required more faith than the universe had left.

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. Dorian. The way he buried the dead—hands always open, not clenched. A memory that refused to fade, even when names had.

The children stirred as afternoon bled into evening (or evening bled into afternoon—time moved in circles now). They arranged themselves in patterns that almost made sense, that almost spelled something, that almost mattered.

One girl looked at me with eyes gone silver-blind.

"Mother-Who-Forgets," she said. Not cruel. Just true. "We're ready to go home now."

Home. The word should have meant something. Pack. Den. Safety. But all I could think of was the boy's spiral, sinking deeper than depth allowed, leading somewhere that had never been place.

"I don't know where that is," I admitted.

She smiled, patient as gods. "You will. When you remember your first name."

My first name. Before Aria. Before all of it. The name that had been spoken into the void before sound existed, that had been carved into the bones of the first thing that learned to die.

I looked at my hands—scarred with prophecy, stained with ink that wouldn't wash, marked by a thousand small failures to hold what mattered. They didn't feel like mine anymore. Too many fingers, or not enough. Hard to count when numbers had grown slippery.

"How many of you are left?" I asked the maybe-children, the perhaps-dreams, the things that followed me through habit or horror.

They looked at each other, conferring silently. The boy with stars for tears held up fingers that bent wrong.

"Enough," he said. "Always enough. Never the right ones."

I used to remember why they followed me. Now I wasn't even sure they were real.

Or if I was.

The shard gave one last flutter against my ribs, weak as a dying moth. Still trying to save me. Still trying to be the divine guide that had promised power in exchange for purpose.

But I'd run out of both.

All I had left was the taste of names I couldn't speak and the hollow ache where memory used to live. All I had was the terrible certainty that tomorrow, I'd have even less.

The star-tear boy drew another spiral. This one opened like an eye.

"Welcome home, Thei-av-ann," he said. "We've been waiting so long for you to forget your way back."

I wanted to run. Wanted to gather the remaining children and flee to somewhere real, somewhere solid, somewhere that remembered what shapes were supposed to hold.

But my feet had already started following his spiral down.

And I couldn't remember why that was wrong.