Dawn found her still as stone, dew gathered on her skin like a second baptism.
Aria opened her eyes to find Dorian crouched an arm's length away, studying her with the intensity of a wolf examining strange tracks. She hadn't heard him approach. Hadn't sensed him at all until her eyes confirmed what her other senses had missed.
"You lived." Not praise. Just acknowledgment.
She sat up slowly, every joint stiff from a night of perfect stillness. The leather strip he'd given her had left marks on her wrist, but the strange warmth in it had faded with the sunrise. Around them, the forest was waking—birds calling territory, small things rustling through undergrowth, the world returning to its daytime rhythms.
He rose without sound, turned, began walking. No invitation. No explanation. Just the expectation that she would follow.
Aria levered herself up, winced as her ankle protested, and limped after him.
They moved deeper into the Ashfang wilds, where the trees grew so thick that noon might as well be twilight. Fog clung to everything here, turning the world into suggestions and shadows. The ground was carpeted in decades of fallen leaves, the kind of forest floor that should announce every footstep like drums.
Dorian moved through it like smoke.
Aria tried to copy his steps, his rhythm, the way he seemed to flow between obstacles rather than through them. But where his passage left no trace, hers sounded like a wounded bear crashing through underbrush. Every few minutes, he would stop, cock his head, wait for her to catch up. Never speaking. Never showing frustration. Just waiting with the patience of stone.
They walked for an hour before he finally stopped in a small clearing where the fog hung especially thick.
"The first skill of the hunted is to listen," he said, his voice barely louder than the mist. "The first skill of the hunter is to disappear."
He pointed to a ridge of moss-covered stones twenty paces away. "Walk from here to there. If I hear you once, we start again."
Simple. Direct. Impossible.
Aria studied the path—fallen branches, dried leaves, patches of mud that would squelch under weight. In the pack, she'd been taught to walk quietly in halls, to serve without disturbing. But this was different. This was asking her to move through a living world without leaving a ripple.
She took her first step. Slow. Careful. Placed her foot between leaves—
Crack.
A twig she hadn't seen. Dorian said nothing, just pointed back to the starting position.
Again.
This time she made it three steps before her bad ankle made her shift weight too quickly. Leaves rustled like gossip.
Again.
Five steps. Her breathing too loud in the still air, harsh against the forest's subtle rhythm.
Again.
By the tenth attempt, her jaw ached from clenching. By the twentieth, she wanted to scream. Her ankle throbbed. Her shoulder had started bleeding again beneath its moss packing. And still Dorian watched with those gold eyes, patient as winter.
"This is impossible," she finally said, hating how young she sounded.
"For a pack wolf, yes." He tilted his head, considering her. "You still walk like you own the ground. Like it should move aside for you. Like your presence matters."
"I'm trying to be quiet—"
"You're trying to be strong while quiet. There's a difference." He moved closer, circled her slowly. "In the pack, silence is submission. So when you try for stealth, you fight it. You want to be quiet but still there. Still taking up space. Still mattering."
She opened her mouth to argue, but he was already moving. "Try again."
This time, she made it seven steps. Good progress. She was starting to understand the rhythm, the way to roll her weight, the—
Something hit her from behind.
Not hard—just a tap between her shoulder blades—but she hadn't heard it coming. Hadn't sensed anything until the touch sent her stumbling forward, heart hammering.
Dorian stood where she'd been, having covered the distance in perfect silence while she was focused on her own movement.
"You're still loud," he said. "Not just your feet. Your presence. You want to be feared, even in silence. But fear is the tool of Alphas, of those who rule through dominance." His gold eyes held hers. "You are not that anymore."
The words hit harder than his ambush. Because he was right. Even trying to be silent, she'd been... performing. Look how quietly I can move. See how I master this lesson. Watch me become dangerous in a new way.
Still trying to matter. Still trying to be seen, even while learning to be unseen.
"Then what am I?" The question came out raw.
"Sit."
Not an answer, but she sat anyway. The fog swirled around them, and for a moment, she could pretend they were the only living things in the world.
"Close your eyes. Listen."
She did. At first, all she heard was her own breathing, her heartbeat still quick from the surprise. But slowly, as her panic faded, the forest revealed itself. The drip of dew from leaves. The whisper of fog moving through branches. A beetle climbing bark ten feet away. The careful steps of something small and prey-like in the underbrush.
"The forest has a rhythm," Dorian's voice came soft as mist. "Everything that lives here is part of it. The hunter and the hunted, the growing and the dying. When you walk like a pack wolf—proud, separate, important—you break that rhythm. The forest hears you because you're not part of its song."
"Then how—"
"Stop trying to be. Just... be."
Cryptic. Frustrating. But something in his tone made her stay silent, stay listening. The beetle continued its climb. The small thing in the underbrush moved closer, no longer alarmed. Even her own breathing had slowed to match the forest's pulse.
"When you were nothing last night," he continued, "when you were just another shadow among shadows, the forest accepted you. Not because you were strong or clever or chosen. Because you weren't trying to be anything at all."
Understanding came slow as dawn through thick canopy. All her life, she'd fought to be something. To matter despite her low birth. To serve perfectly despite her status. To be worthy of a bond she never asked for. Even after rejection, she'd tried to be strong in her suffering, dignified in her exile.
But the forest didn't care about any of that.
"Now," Dorian said. "Walk."
Aria opened her eyes, rose. But this time, she didn't study the path. Didn't plan her steps. Didn't think about how to move.
She just moved.
Her first step found solid ground without her searching for it. The second flowed from the first like water finding its course. She wasn't Aria walking through the forest—she was just another piece of it, no more important than the fog, no more noticeable than the shadows between trees.
Ten steps. Fifteen. Twenty.
She reached the ridge and turned to find Dorian watching with something that might have been approval in those gold eyes.
"Again. Further this time."
They spent the day like that. Not training in any way the pack would recognize, but dissolving the boundaries between self and surrounding. By afternoon, she could cross the clearing without disturbing a single leaf. By evening, she could move through the densest undergrowth like mist.
The crescent mark behind her ear pulsed occasionally—not with power, but with recognition. As if the Goddess herself was watching this transformation from pack wolf to something altogether other.
As darkness began to fall, Dorian led her to the edge of a different clearing. There, in the last light of day, a deer grazed on tender shoots. It was alert—ears swiveling, nose testing the wind—but calm.
"Approach it," Dorian whispered. "Don't hunt. Don't stalk. Just... exist in the same space."
The old Aria would have asked why. Would have wanted to understand the purpose, the goal, the lesson. But that Aria had been loud even in her silence.
This Aria simply moved.
She entered the clearing like evening itself—inevitable, unnoticed, part of the world's rhythm. The deer's ear twitched once as she passed, but it didn't look up. Didn't flee. She moved closer, close enough to see the delicate veins in its ears, the way its jaw worked as it chewed.
Close enough to touch, if she wanted.
She didn't. Just stood there, invisible by choice rather than circumstance, and felt something fundamental shift inside her chest. The hollow where her thread had lived was still there, would always be there. But it no longer defined her.
She was not nothing because she'd been rejected.
She was nothing because she chose to be.
And in that nothing, there was a kind of power the pack had never taught.
The deer moved on eventually, wandering deeper into the forest. Aria stayed where she was, feeling the night settle around her like a familiar cloak.
"Tomorrow," Dorian's voice came from somewhere she couldn't pinpoint, "we learn what nothing can become when it chooses to be everything."
But tonight, she was content to be invisible. To be silence itself.
The forest didn't notice her anymore.
That meant she had finally arrived.