Consciousness returned like drowning in reverse.
Aria clawed her way up from the dark, each breath a knife between her ribs. Mud caked her mouth, gritty and foul. Her shoulder screamed where she'd struck the root, and the gashes on her feet had gone numb—a mercy that wouldn't last.
But worse than any physical wound was the hollow ache in her chest. The place where her thread had lived pulsed with each heartbeat, empty and raw as a tooth socket. She'd heard rejected wolves describe it as heartbreak. They were wrong. This was amputation without anesthetic, performed on something that had no name in any healer's text.
Get up.
The thought came unbidden, sharp as her mother's voice had been in life. Aria's fingers dug into bark—thornash, she realized dimly. Its sap would poison her wounds if she stayed pressed against it much longer. But moving meant acknowledging she was still alive. Still here. Still breathing in a world that had spit her out like rotten meat.
Get. Up.
She peeled herself from the tree, biting down on the scream that wanted to tear free. Every joint protested. Every muscle had locked during her brief unconsciousness, turning her body into a cage of pain. But she moved. Inch by inch. Breath by breath.
The fog had thickened while she'd been under. It pressed against her skin like wet wool, carrying scents that made her hindbrain scream warnings. Death. Old death and new death and the particular wrongness that clung to places where natural law had been twisted past breaking.
Somewhere in the mist, a branch snapped.
Aria froze. Her pupils dilated, trying to pierce the gray shroud that had swallowed the world beyond arm's reach. Another sound—wet breathing, like air through a torn throat. The scent hit her then, carried on a wind that shouldn't exist in fog this thick.
Corruption.
Not the clean rot of carrion or the honest decay of forest floor. This was something else. Something that crawled up her nostrils and coated the back of her throat with the taste of spoiled honey and burning hair.
Rogue, her mind supplied. But no. Rogues smelled of wildness, of wolves who'd chosen freedom over submission. This was... wrong. Twisted. Like someone had taken a wolf and turned it inside out, then forced it to keep living.
Red eyes materialized in the fog.
Not the amber-red of an Alpha's rage or the crimson of fresh blood. These were the color of infected wounds, of fever dreams, of the moment infection wins and flesh begins to die. They fixed on her with an intensity that transcended hunger.
The thing stepped into view, and Aria's gorge rose.
It had been a wolf once. Male, from the size. But something had happened to it—some fundamental breaking that went beyond body into soul. Its fur hung in patches, revealing skin that writhed with subcutaneous movement, as if worms made of shadow lived beneath. Its muzzle was too long, jaw unhinged like a snake's. And from its chest, where a heart should beat, black threads writhed in the air—the remnants of a bond that had been severed wrong. Severed and infected and left to fester.
This is what happens, some distant part of her mind whispered. When the pain wins. When you let it hollow you out until only hunger remains.
The creature's nostrils flared. When it spoke—because of course it could still speak, of course the Goddess would allow that cruelty—its voice was layers of ruin.
"Fresssssh," it hissed. "Fresh seversssed. Fresh pain. I can tasssste the placcce where love usssed to live."
Aria ran.
Not away—her back was still to the thornash. But sideways, diving into the undergrowth as the creature lunged. Its claws raked the air where her head had been, close enough that she felt the wind of their passing. She hit the ground hard, rolled, came up running on legs that screamed protest with every step.
The forest became a blur of gray and shadow. Branches tore at her shift, at her skin, at her hair. Her bare feet found every sharp stone, every hidden root. Behind her, the creature crashed through the undergrowth with the patience of something that had forgotten how to tire.
"Run, little ssssevered. Run and bleed and sssscream. Your pain callsss to me. Your hollow place sssingsss."
She couldn't outrun it. Not wounded, not thread-sick, not in terrain she didn't know. But she ran anyway, because the alternative was to lie down and let it take her. To become another cautionary tale about what happened to rejected wolves who couldn't let go.
No.
The thought came fierce and sudden as lightning. She'd been thrown away. Discarded. Humiliated. But she'd stood in that circle and refused to beg. She'd looked her would-be mate in the eye and kept her dignity even as he carved her heart from her chest.
She'd be damned if she'd give it up now to some misbegotten nightmare in the dark.
A root caught her foot. She went down hard, felt something in her ankle give way. The creature was on her before she could rise, its weight crushing her into the mulch. Its breath—Goddess, its breath was sweet rot and old copper and the particular stench of mortification.
"Yessss," it crooned, pressing her down with one twisted paw. "Give me your pain, little ssssevered. Feed me the place where he usssed to live. I'll fill it with sssomething better. Something that never leavesss."
Its maw opened wider than any wolf's should, revealing rows of teeth that belonged in no natural mouth. Aria saw her death in that darkness. Saw herself torn apart and devoured, her pain feeding this thing that had once been someone like her. Someone who'd been severed and couldn't find their way back from the break.
No.
Her hand found a stone. She drove it into the creature's eye with all the strength left in her. It reared back, howling, and she rolled away. But not far enough. Its claws caught her shoulder, tore through shift and skin and muscle like paper. The pain was white-hot, absolute. She screamed—she couldn't help it.
But she also fought.
When it lunged again, she met it with nails and teeth and the kind of rage that only comes from having nothing left to lose. She bit down on its leg, tasted corruption and didn't let go even when it shook her like a rabbit. She clawed at its remaining eye, at the writhing threads protruding from its chest, at anything she could reach.
It threw her. She hit a tree hard enough to drive all air from her lungs, slid down to sprawl in the roots. The creature stalked forward, half-blind now but still grinning with too many teeth.
"Ssstubborn," it said. "Good. Your pain will tasste better for the fight."
It pinned her again. This time she had no stone, no strength, nothing but the fury that burned in her chest where her thread used to live. Its teeth found her throat, began to close—
I am not nothing.
The thought blazed through her like wildfire. She was not nothing. She was not trash to be discarded. She was not a mistake the Goddess needed to correct. She was Aria Nightbloom, daughter of a woman who'd died protecting what she loved, and she would not—would not—die whimpering in the dark.
The scar on her back exploded with heat.
Not the fever-burn of infection or the sharp fire of injury. This was something else. Something that started in the old wound and spread like liquid starlight through her veins. It reached her chest, found the hollow where her thread had been, and filled it.
Silver light erupted from her skin.
The creature shrieked, jerking back as if burned. Where the light had touched it, its corrupted flesh smoked and withered. It scrambled away, all pretense of hunt forgotten in the face of something it couldn't understand.
"What—what are you?" No hiss now. Just terror.
Aria didn't know. Couldn't answer. The light pulsed once more, fainter this time, then died. She lay there gasping, watching the creature retreat into the fog with something like grief in its ruined eyes. The forest held its breath around her, as if even the trees were afraid to move.
She tried to stand. Failed. Tried again. Her ankle was definitely broken, her shoulder a mess of torn meat. But she crawled, dragged herself to a cluster of boulders that formed a natural shelter. It took everything she had left to wedge herself into the space between them.
The silver light was gone, leaving her colder than before. Whatever had saved her, it wasn't answering her desperate mental calls now. She was alone again, bleeding out in a hole while the fog pressed close.
Her eyes were drifting closed when she heard it.
A growl. Low. Curious. Not the twisted sound of the corrupted thing, but something deep and wild and anciently amused. She couldn't see the source—her vision had tunneled to pinpoints—but she felt its presence like pressure against her mind.
"You burned," a voice said. Male. Rough as raw granite. "But you're not fire yet."
The last thing Aria saw before darkness claimed her was a pair of eyes in the fog. Not red. Not corrupted.
Gold as the thread she'd lost.
Gold as the dawn she might not live to see.