Chapter 8:what am I ??

Then after a while Elder Mira finally spoke .I need to tell you a story," she said. "And I need you to listen to all of it before you ask questions. Can you do that?"

"Yes," I said.

She looked at me for a moment longer. Then she folded her hands in her lap and looked into the fire and began.

"Two hundred years ago," she said, "there were no pack Alphas."

I opened my mouth.

She held up one finger.

I closed it.

"There were wolves," she continued. "Many of them. Living in territories, yes. Forming communities, yes. But the rigid hierarchy you know Alpha, Beta, omega, the ranking system, the dominance structure none of that existed. Wolves lived differently then." She paused. "And alongside the wolves lived another kind entirely. Not wolves. Not human. Something older than both."

The fire popped softly.

"The Moon Witches," she said.

The words landed in the quiet of the lodge like stones dropped into still water.

I felt Selene go very still inside me.

"They were the first children of the moon," Mira said. "Before the wolves, before anything, the moon chose certain women and gave them her power directly. The ability to heal, To see,To speak to animals and read the weather and feel the threads of fate the way you and I feel wind on our skin." She paused. "And the ability to gift power to others. The Moon Witches were the ones who gave wolves their shift. Their enhanced strength. Their mates bond." Another pause. "Everything your kind has everything we are came from them."

I was very still.

"What happened to them?" I asked. Even though I already knew the shape of the answer. Even though Selene's silence was already telling me.

Mira's expression didn't change.

"The wolves grew powerful," she said simply. "As things that are given power often do. And powerful things have a way of deciding they do not want to share. The Alphas the strongest wolves, the ones the Moon Witches had gifted with the most power they looked at the women who had given them everything and they felt one thing."

She stopped.

"Fear," I said softly.

Mira nodded once.

"They hunted them," she said. "Over twenty years they hunted every Moon Witch bloodline they could find. Killed the women. Destroyed the children. Burned the records so that future generations would never know what had been taken from them or who had taken it." Her voice was even throughout all of it. The evenness of someone who has carried a grief so long it has simply become part of how they breathe. "They told their packs it was a war. That the Moon Witches had been dangerous. That it had been necessary."

"Was it?" I asked.

"No," Mira said. "It was murder. Dressed up in the language of necessity."

The fire crackled.

I sat with that for a moment.

"They didn't get all of them," I said slowly.

yes," Mira agreed. "They didn't get all of them." She looked at me steadily. "One bloodline survived. One woman very young, very frightened, very powerful was hidden by a wolf who loved her. Smuggled out of the southern territories and brought north. Her power was sealed. Buried so deep that even she forgot it was there. And she was told to live quietly. To never draw attention. To raise her children to do the same."

The lodge was very quiet.

I could hear my own heartbeat.

"That woman's name," Mira said softly, "was Aela Ashveil."

The name hit me like cold water.

Ashveil.

My name.

"She was my I couldn't finish the sentence.

"Your great great grandmother," Mira said. "Yes."

I stood up.

I don't remember deciding to stand. My legs just did it pushed me upright because sitting felt impossible with what was moving through my chest right now. I walked to the window and pressed my palm flat against the cold wood of the wall and looked out at the dark.

"So I am !!I started.

"The last," Mira said. "The very last of the Moon Witch bloodline. Every generation since Aela the power has been passed down and sealed. Sleeping. Waiting." A pause. "The seal was designed to hold until the right moment. Until the vessel was ready."

"I'm not ready," I said. My voice cracked on the last word. "I'm twenty one years old and I scrub floors and I have no father and I just got rejected in front of my entire pack. I am the least ready person in the world."

"And yet," Mira said quietly, "the seal broke."

I turned around.

She was watching me from her chair with those ancient steady eyes.

"Why?" I asked. "Why last night? Why the rejection?"

"Because the seal was tied to your heart," she said simply. "It was designed that way on purpose. It could only be cracked by a pain so complete that it reached all the way down to the deepest part of you." She paused. "Damien Voss rejecting you was the worst pain you have ever felt. Wasn't it."

It wasn't a question.

"Yes," I said quietly.

"That is why." Her voice was gentle. "It was not an accident Lyra. It was not random. The moon does not do random." She leaned forward slightly. "Damien rejecting you was always going to happen. It was written into the design. Because you needed to be broken open. Because what is inside you could not emerge any other way."

I stared at her.

Something enormous and complicated was moving through me. Too many things at once to name. Anger and grief and something underneath those that I wasn't ready to look at yet.

"Are you telling me," I said slowly, carefully, "that the moon planned for him to hurt me?"

Mira held my gaze.

"I am telling you," she said, "that the moon needed you to become what you are. And that sometimes the thing that breaks us open is also the thing that sets us free." A pause. "What Damien did was his choice. His weakness. His failure. The moon did not make him cruel. She simply knew he would be."

The fire burned between us.

I thought about Kael.

About amber eyes and cedar and deep water and a voice that said it was about his weakness not your worth.

Two, the moon had whispered.

"The second mate," I said.

Mira's eyes sharpened.

"You know?" she said.

"I felt it," I said. "Last night. In the forest. Someone" I stopped. "Someone found me."

Mira was very still now.

"Who?" she asked carefully.

"Kael Dawnridge," I said. "Alpha of the eastern

Mira made a sound.

Sharp and sudden and completely unlike anything I had heard from her before. She pressed one hand over her mouth and her black eyes went wide and for the first time in twenty one years of watching Elder Mira be unshakeable

She looked like she was going to cry.

"Mira," I said, alarmed. "What is it? What does that mean? 

"It means," she said, and her voice was barely a sound, "that the moon is not just waking you up Lyra." She lowered her hand. Her eyes were bright. "She is restoring everything that was taken. Everything the Alphas destroyed two hundred years ago." A breath. "Kael Dawnridge's bloodline his ancestors they were the wolves who hid Aela. Who saved her. Who gave up everything to protect the last Moon Witch." She looked at me with those ancient bright eyes. "His bloodline and yours have been circling each other for two hundred years waiting to find their way back."

The room felt very small suddenly.

"So he is

"The other half of what the moon started two centuries ago," Mira said softly. "Yes."

I sat back down in the chair.

I had to.

My legs weren't going to hold me anymore.

Selene was pressed against my ribs not painfully. Warmly. The way she pressed when she was trying to comfort me.

I told you,* she said softly. I told you we were not nobody.*

Outside the lodge the celebration was still going.

Damien was in there somewhere. With Nadia on his arm and Rex tearing him apart from the inside and his own cold careful choices settling around him like a trap he had built himself.

And I was in here.

Finding out that I was the last of an ancient bloodline the wolves had tried to erase.

That the man who had destroyed me last night had been, without knowing it, the key that unlocked me.

And that the man who had sat with me in the dark warm and steady and patient had been looking for me across two hundred years of history without either of them knowing it.

I pressed my hand to my collarbone.

My scar pulsed.

Steady and warm and certain.

Like a second heartbeat that had been waiting a very long time to be heard.

"What do I do now?" I asked.

Mira looked at me.

And for the first time all night she smiled. Small and real and full of something that looked very much like hope.

"Now," she said, "you learn what you are capable of."

"And if the people who hunted my bloodline find out I exist?"

Her smile faded.

"Then God help them," she said quietly. "Because you are not Aela. You are not hiding. And what is waking up inside you makes everything they feared two centuries ago look like a candle next to the sun."

The fire burned.

The moon outside was no longer red.

She was silver.

Full and bright and blazing and when I looked up at her through the small window of Mira's lodge she felt, for the first time in my life, like something that was mine.

Like she had always been mine.

Like she had just been waiting for me to claim her