Rejected by the Alpha, Crowned by the Moon

I had a body again.

The knowledge came slowly, like waking from a dream of being water. First the weight—bones and meat and the strange burden of having edges. Then breath, borrowed and uncertain, moving through lungs that had forgotten their purpose. My chest rose. Fell. Rose again. Each motion felt like betrayal.

The ground beneath me was warm. Too warm. Not with sun but with something older, as if the earth itself had fever. My skin—was it mine?—prickled with sensation. Light had texture. Sound had temperature. Everything touched me, and I didn't know how to not be touched.

I tried to sit up. The body knew how, even if I'd forgotten. Muscles moved in sequence, joints bent at angles that seemed both natural and impossible. But when I looked down at my hands—these hands that had planted names, that had spoken forgotten things—they seemed like strangers' hands. Too solid. Too real.

A bruise bloomed purple on my left thigh. When had that happened? In the spiral? In the garden? The pain of it felt distant but insistent, like someone calling my name from another room. My stomach made a sound—hollow, demanding. Hunger. The word came back slowly, and with it the memory of needing, of emptiness that could be filled.

But I'd been the emptiness. How could I also be the thing that needed filling?

I stood on legs that shook like new branches. The world tilted, settled, tilted again. My body knew balance, but I'd forgotten how to trust it. Each step felt like falling that never quite completed.

Water. The sound of it pulled me forward—not because I was thirsty (was I thirsty?) but because it promised reflection. Promised to show me what I'd become when I'd stopped being voice and wound and garden.

The creek ran clear over stones that might have been teeth. I knelt at its edge, leaned over, and saw—

Not me. Not anyone. Just fragments: an eye here, a mouth there, pieces of face that wouldn't assemble into meaning. The water showed me truly—I was still learning how to have a shape. Still remembering how to be singular.

My hands moved without permission. Touched my mouth—fuller than I remembered, or maybe I'd forgotten what lips were for. Touched my neck—the pulse there too fast, too mortal. Touched the curve of hip where divine had been forced back into flesh.

And that's when I smelled it.

Smoke. Pine. Earth after rain. Male scent that bypassed thought and went straight to the body's memory. My knees weakened—not with fear but with something worse. Recognition. The body knew this scent, had been marked by it in ways the garden-self couldn't comprehend.

Dorian.

The name came like lightning, and with it, image: hands always open, never reaching. The patience of someone who knew how to wait. How to want without taking.

Heat pooled low in my belly. Foreign. Familiar. My thighs clenched without my permission, and the sensation that shot through me was so sharp, so purely physical, I gasped.

What was this? Memory? Desire? The body rebelling against all the time I'd spent as rootless voice?

A shadow fell across the water. Not mine—I could see my own shadow, still learning its shape. This was warmer, broader. A hand touched my back, just between the shoulder blades. Not pressing. Just... there. Like it had always been there, waiting for me to remember I had a back to be touched.

I turned, but the bank was empty. Just trees and stones and the warm ground that remembered everything. But my skin held the imprint—five points of heat that spread like starlight through my spine.

Another flash: those same hands washing blood from my hair. Gentle. Careful. Never lingering longer than necessary. The memory was so vivid I could taste it—copper and river water and the salt of tears I hadn't known I was crying.

My body shuddered. Not with cold, though the air had teeth. This was something else—all the want I'd forgotten how to feel, crashing back like a tide. The garden-self hadn't needed. The voice-self hadn't wanted. But this body, this terrible gift of flesh and nerve and blood—it remembered everything.

Shame flooded me. Or I thought it was shame. The heat in my face, the tightness in my chest, the way I wanted to cover myself though I was already clothed. But as I sat with it, let it move through me like the strange new breath, I realized—

Not shame. Desire. But desire that came from memory, not from now. My body wanting something my mind couldn't quite grasp. Someone whose name I could speak but whose face kept shifting like water.

I pressed my palms to my eyes—when had I started crying?—and tried to push the feeling down. But bodies don't forget. They hold every touch, every almost-touch, every moment of want denied or fulfilled. And mine was remembering all at once, a flood of sensation that threatened to drown this new, uncertain self.

The shadow touched me again. This time along my jaw, thumb ghosting over cheekbone. I leaned into it without meaning to, body overriding whatever was left of divine will. The touch vanished, but the want remained. Grew. Became a living thing under my skin.

I looked at my hands—these traitor hands that had forgotten how to write but remembered how to reach. They trembled, caught between what they'd been (weapons, gardens, speakers of forbidden names) and what they were becoming (just hands, human hands, hands that wanted to touch and be touched).

"If I touch," I whispered to the creek, to the absent shadow, to the body that was teaching me how to hurt in human ways again, "will it burn again?"

The water didn't answer. But my skin did—flushed and fever-warm and alive in ways that terrified me. Because burning was simple. Burning was pure. But this? This melting from the inside out, this slow dissolution into want and memory and the terrible promise of touch?

This was harder than being a god.

This was being human again, and I'd forgotten how much humans carried in their skin. How much they remembered in the space between heartbeats. How much they wanted, even when wanting was the cruelest thing.

I stood on unsteady legs. Somewhere, in this world that was neither garden nor spiral, someone waited. Someone whose scent made my body remember things my mind had tried to forget. Someone whose hands had stayed open even when I'd become too large to hold.

The thought of finding him—of being found—sent another wave of heat through me. Fear and want tangled so tight I couldn't tell them apart.

"Or will I melt this time?" I asked my reflection, but it had finally assembled into something like a face. My face. Older. Stranger. Marked by journeys I could only half-remember.

But human. Terribly, beautifully human.

And hungry for something names couldn't satisfy.