Before the Queen: 1

Lira (POV)

I can feel the silver in my blood now. Not just burning—but grinding, like microscopic shrapnel chewing through my veins, slicing every time my heart dares to beat. It hisses against my bones and ignites my nerves like a fire, threading itself through my muscles like barbed wire soaked in acid.

It’s in everything. The chains digging into my wrists, fused with iron and blessed by cowardly priests. The collar locked tight around my throat, humming with old magic. And the carved symbols—cut into the skin just below my ribs—that pulse and weep with every breath I take. The skin there is flayed, blackened around the edges with dried wolfsbane, etched into me like a sigil of ownership. Like I’m livestock branded for slaughter. 

I’m suspended like meat left to rot—arms stretched above me, feet barely brushing the blood-slick floor of this makeshift stone coffin that they call a dungeon. The air is wet with old screams, thick with rust and rot and piss. The stone walls bleed condensation, the way meat sweats just before it turns. I breathe in, and it tastes like mildew and iron. I breathe out, and something inside me frays further.

Sometimes, I think I hear my mother’s voice whispering from the cracks in the stone. She just breathes, long and slow, like she’s waiting for me to finally give in. Like she’s tired of fighting for me when I won’t do it myself.

During the last cleansing, they carved deeper than usual. The blade wasn’t sharp, and it tore more than it cut. There was chanting this time—low, droning, and wrong. A priest with silver eyes traced each symbol in my blood and smiled as I screamed.

My wolf stirs weakly like a dying flame under wet ash. She doesn’t snarl anymore but whimpers. I think she’s ashamed I let this happen; I would be, too.

My mother once told me, “Pain can be endured, Lira. But silence will hollow you out.” She used to say it after training when I’d stumble home with split lips and cracked ribs, but was too proud to cry. Now, those words echo louder than any scream.

I’ve come to realize it’s how they mute you, and every time my mind begins to claw its way back, when I start to be able to fight back, they jam another syringe full of thick, vicious wolfsbane into my neck. Wolfsbane: thick and cold like syrup mixed with broken glass. It moves through me like ice venom, seizing my lungs, curling my spine inward like I might snap in half. It paralyzes the wolf inside and binds her in silence. 

I can’t shift either; the wolfsbane keeps me in this human shape, caging my wolf beneath my skin, and the longer I’m trapped, the more I wonder if the beast will ever come back or if this agony is all I’ll ever be again.

I used to run under the blood moon, all fang and fury, with fur slick from battle. My paws could crush bones. Now, I’m reduced to a whimper, a shell. I used to be a queen of claws. Now I’m a girl chained to rot.

Now, I can barely   breathe, and that’s what they want. Not death. Just silence.

The guards call this place the Pit as if the name alone weren’t enough to make one’s skin crawl. It’s a stone womb six levels beneath the Alpha Hall. The walls are slick with centuries of blood—some of it fresh, but most of it congealed into a dark crust that flakes when you scream loud enough. Moss creeps over everything, not the soft green kind but the black, damp kind, reeking of decay, rot, and wet teeth.