The stones tore at her knees as they dragged her.
Aria's fingers clawed at nothing, seeking purchase on the smooth ceremonial stones while Beta Roth and his guards hauled her from the Throne Hollow like a carcass. Her undershift—all they'd left her—rode up her thighs, exposing skin to the cold bite of granite.
"Get up, Omega." Roth's voice held all the warmth of winter steel. "Walk, or we'll drag you the whole way."
She tried. Goddess help her, she tried to find her feet, but the phantom pain in her chest stole her breath with every heartbeat. Where the thread had lived, only fire remained. Not the silver light she'd felt for that brief moment, but something worse—the burn of absence, of a wound that would never heal because it existed in a place deeper than flesh.
Her legs found purchase. Barely. She stumbled upright between the guards, aware of the crowd following like carrion birds. They kept their distance but close enough that their whispers carried on the wind.
"Did you see how she just stood there?"
"Omega trash. She probably begged him in private first."
"My sister heard she tried to seduce him in the kitchens last week. Pathetic creature."
Lies. All lies. She'd never spoken to Lucien beyond the required greetings. Had never dared approach the male whose very presence made her thread sing with painful longing. But truth didn't matter now. The story was already being written, and she was its villain—the grasping Omega who'd tried to trap an Alpha King.
They marched her through the pack grounds, past the healing halls where she'd scrubbed floors since her fourteenth winter, past the warrior barracks where she'd never been allowed to enter, past everything that had once been home. Her bare feet left bloody prints on the cobblestones. No one offered cloth for her wounds.
At the eastern gate, more guards waited with torches. Beyond them, the tree line loomed like a wall of shadow.
"The rogue lands," Roth announced, loud enough for the trailing crowd to hear. "By the Alpha's mercy, you're granted exile rather than execution. Count yourself fortunate."
Fortunate. The word sat like ash on her tongue.
One of the younger guards—a Gamma named Marcus who'd once smiled at her in the kitchens—stepped forward with a small bundle. "Some supplies," he murmured, not meeting her eyes. "Water. Dried meat. A blanket."
Roth backhanded the bundle from Marcus's hands. The waterskin split against stone, its contents spreading in a dark puddle. "Rejected wolves get nothing from the pack. You know the law."
Marcus's jaw tightened, but he stepped back into line.
"Move."
They walked for three hours. Through the buffer zone between pack lands and true wilderness, where patrol routes grew sparse and the neat order of civilization crumbled into ancient growth. The moon tracked their progress, her silver face half-hidden behind clouds that hadn't been there during the ceremony.
Aria's world narrowed to the next step. The next breath. The burn in her chest had spread—a fever beneath her skin that made her shake despite the cold. Twice she stumbled. Twice Roth yanked her upright by her hair, tearing copper strands from her scalp.
"You were born for dirt," he said the second time, close enough that his breath warmed her ear. "Should've known your place. Should've refused the bond yourself when it manifested. Saved us all this trouble."
She wanted to tell him the truth—that she'd tried. That she'd gone to Elder Malrick the day after her first blood moon, begged him to sever the connection before anyone discovered that an Omega had been thread-bound to their King. The Elder had laughed. Told her the Goddess didn't make mistakes, that surely the bond would fade when Lucien found his true mate.
But her throat was too raw for words. And what was the point? The story was written. She was the Omega who'd reached too high.
The trees changed as they climbed higher into the foothills. Silverwoods gave way to blackpine and thornash, species that thrived in soil too poor for anything else. The neat patrol paths became deer trails, then nothing at all. Here, the forest floor was carpeted in old bones—remnants of wolves who'd challenged the wild and lost.
"Far enough." Roth raised his fist, bringing the guards to a halt.
They stood at the edge of a ravine, where civilization's last border stone jutted from the earth like a broken tooth. Beyond it, fog curled between the trees, thick and unnatural. The rogue lands. Where banished wolves either died or became something worse than death.
"Any last words, Omega?"
Aria lifted her head. The movement sent fresh fire through her chest, but she held Roth's gaze. Her voice, when it came, was barely a whisper—but it carried.
"I begged no one."
Something flickered in Roth's eyes. Uncertainty, perhaps. Or fear. Then his boot connected with her spine, and she was falling.
The ravine wasn't deep—maybe ten feet—but she hit hard. Her shoulder struck a root, spinning her sideways before she slammed into the muddy bottom. Pain exploded along her ribs. Her vision went white, then black, then settled into a gray haze that pulsed with her heartbeat.
Above, she heard the guards retreating. Their voices faded quickly, swallowed by the fog that seemed to press closer with each passing moment.
Alone.
Thread-severed.
Dying.
She lay there in the mud and tried to breathe through the fire in her chest. The cold seeped through her torn shift, numbing her limbs even as her core burned. This was how rejected wolves died—not from the severing itself, but from the slow consumption that followed. The body eating itself in the absence of its other half.
Good, she thought. Let it end.
But her mother's voice rose from memory, sharp as winter wind: Even Omegas can carry grace, my starlight.
"Grace," Aria whispered to the uncaring fog. A broken laugh bubbled up, tasting of copper. What grace was there in dying alone in the mud? What dignity in being thrown away like refuse?
The forest held its breath around her.
And then—a whisper. Not in her ears, but deeper. In the marrow of her bones, in the space where her thread used to anchor.
Rise, flame-born.
Aria's eyes snapped open. The fog swirled above her, shapes moving in its depths that weren't quite wind. For a moment—just a moment—she could have sworn she saw a woman's face in the mist. Ancient. Terrible. Beautiful.
Rise.
"I can't." The words came out cracked, bloody. "I'm nothing. I'm—"
The scar on her back—the old wound from the night her mother died—suddenly blazed with heat. Not the fevered burn of her chest, but something else. Something that felt like...
Silver light pulsed beneath her skin. Just once. Just enough to illuminate the veins in her arms before fading.
The fog recoiled.
Aria dragged herself to sitting, then to her knees. Mud squelched between her fingers as she crawled to the ravine wall, found a root, pulled herself up. Each movement was agony. Each breath was war.
But she moved.
By the time she hauled herself over the edge, the moon had fully emerged from the clouds. Its light found her there—bloody, mud-caked, more dead than alive—and for a moment, just a moment, Aria could have sworn the celestial face looked... pleased.
She crawled into the shelter of a thornash tree, its bark scraping her raw back. No blanket. No water. No food. Just the cold and the dark and the knowledge that dawn might not find her breathing.
But as her eyes drifted closed, as consciousness fled like smoke between her fingers, something strange happened.
The ground beneath her hands began to shimmer.
Silver light—faint as breath, delicate as frost—spread from her fingertips into the earth. The mud crystallized, transformed, became something altogether different. Where her blood had fallen, tiny flames of moonlight danced without heat, without consumption.
And deep in the rogue lands, where ancient things slumbered and waited, something felt that light.
Something ancient just opened its eyes.