Calla and Darian's POV
CALLA
My own face.
Carved into stone. Over and over and over.
I stood there with my hand on the wall and I could not move. The woman in the carvings had my eyes. My nose. The same small scar above my left brow that I got when I was nine and fell from the fence behind the pack house.
The same scar. On a carving that was older than I was born.
"How," I said.
It wasn't really a question. I didn't know what it was.
Kael stood behind me. I heard him breathe out slowly like someone who had been holding something heavy for a long time and had finally been allowed to put it down.
"Sit down," he said. "Please."
I turned around. My voice was very calm. I was surprised by how calm it was.
"Tell me what this is."
He pulled out one of the two chairs at the table and sat. He folded his hands in front of him and looked at me the way you look at someone before you say something that will change them.
"Your name before this life," he said, "was Selene."
I waited.
"She was not just a woman. She was the one the moon answered to. The one who gave wolves their shift, their bond, their pack laws. Everything your kind is built on came from her."
"From me," I said slowly.
"From who you were. Yes."
I sat down in the other chair because my legs had decided they were done standing.
"You are saying I am a goddess."
"I am saying you carry what she carried. Her soul. Her power." He paused. "Someone sealed it inside you when you were born. Locked it away so it would not wake up."
"Who."
"Someone who was afraid of what you would do when you remembered."
I looked at the wall of carvings. All those faces. My face. Looking back at me across years I had not lived yet.
"You carved those," I said.
"Yes."
"All of them."
"Over a long time. Yes."
I thought about what that meant. A man alone in a stone room carving the same face into a wall. Year after year. Waiting for a girl who had not been born yet.
I didn't know if it was the saddest thing I had ever heard or the strangest. Maybe both.
"You said my power was sealed," I said. "Can it be unsealed."
"Yes. But not today." He looked at me carefully. "It will take time. And it will not be easy."
"And the bond," I said. "You said I had a bond. To who."
Something shifted in his face. Just for a second.
"One thing at a time," he said quietly.
I let it go. For now.
I stood up and walked to the door. The morning light was coming through the gap at the bottom. Pale and thin.
"I need air," I said.
"Of course."
I pushed the door open and stepped outside.
— DARIAN —
I did not sleep.
I sat on the edge of my bed all night with my boots still on and the window open and I listened to the pack settle into quiet and I thought about Calla's face.
Not the moment she walked away. Before that. The moment I said the words and she looked at me and said my name. Just my name. One word. Like she was giving me one last chance to be the person she thought I was.
I was not that person. I chose that in front of everyone.
I stood up at first light. My body was tired but my head would not stop. I splashed water on my face and went downstairs and my father was already in his chair like he had not moved all night either.
"You need to eat," he said.
"I need to find her."
He looked up.
"She went into the forest," I said. "Alone. At night."
"She is wolfless, Darian. She—"
"I know what I said about her." My voice came out harder than I meant it to. "I was there. I said it." I looked at him. "And she still went into that forest alone because there was nowhere else to go. Because we left her nowhere else to go."
My father's face went very still.
"We did what had to be done," he said.
"Did we."
He stood up. He was still larger than me, my father. Still the kind of man who filled a room.
"The Elder advised—"
"I don't want to hear about the Elder." I grabbed my jacket from the hook by the door. "I'm going after her."
"The forest will kill you."
"Then it kills me." I opened the door. "Send a search party. Tell them to stay at the tree line if they're afraid. But I'm going in."
I left before he could say anything else.
Outside the air was cold and sharp. A few pack members were already up. They looked at me and then looked away fast. They had all been there last night. They had all heard what I said.
I walked through the pack ground without stopping.
At the edge of the trees I stopped.
The Forbidden Forest looked the same as it always did. Dark. Still. The black-bark trees standing so close together you could barely see between them.
I had been afraid of this place my whole life.
I thought about Calla walking in here alone in a white dress with no wolf and no protection and nowhere else to go.
I stepped between the trees.
— CALLA —
The air outside the compound was cold and clean and I breathed it in and tried to put my thoughts in some kind of order.
A goddess. A sealed power. A man who had been waiting for centuries.
My face on a stone wall.
I pressed my hands to my eyes for a moment. Then I dropped them and looked at the trees around me. The black-bark ones. They were very tall this close. Their roots came up out of the ground in long curved shapes like fingers.
I thought about what Kael had said. About the forest being sacred ground.
I thought about how it had felt when I first walked in. Like it knew me.
I needed to think somewhere that wasn't inside those four stone walls. Somewhere away from that wall of carvings and Kael's careful eyes.
I started walking.
The trees were thick but there was always a gap between them. Always just enough space to move through. I walked for a while and the air smelled of cold water and old earth and something faintly warm underneath.
After a bit I turned around to go back.
And stopped.
The path I had walked was gone.
Not hidden. Not overgrown. Gone. The trees behind me stood close together with no gap between them at all. Solid. Like they had always been that way.
I turned left. Trees.
I turned right. Trees.
I looked up. The canopy above was so thick no sky came through.
I was not afraid. That surprised me. I should have been afraid.
I put my hand on the nearest trunk.
The bark was warm.
And then, very slowly, the tree leaned toward me.