Chapter 6 - Mother’s Lessons

••• Seleste’s POV •••

Because of the lesson tomorrow that kept swimming in my head, I wasn’t able to sleep. No matter how many times I adjusted my pillow or pulled the heavy blankets over my shoulders, my mind refused to settle. 

Instead, it drifted helplessly backward through time, escaping the cold stone walls of the academy to a time when I was still with my mother. The mother who had died far too soon, leaving me helpless, isolated, and entirely confused about my true powers for years.

I remembered I was barely twelve years old at that time. I was sitting in the hidden forest clearing behind our house. My mom was hunched over a small, crackling fire, carefully concocting some kind of aromatic potion. 

My mom was an extraordinarily beautiful, warm, and gentle woman with long, sun-kissed blonde hair and striking lavender eyes, a distinct trait that I had directly inherited from her bloodline. 

When I was young, I honestly didn't understand why a magical being like her chose to stay with a traditional werewolf like my father. It wasn't that my father was abusive or anything, but they lived with entirely different visions of the world. 

My father was rigid, thinking like the rest of the patriarchal werewolf community, believing that only a male child could ever possess the structural authority to become a true pack Alpha. 

My mom, however, thought the absolute opposite. She firmly believed that even females could become great Alphas, as long as they knew how to lead a pack with absolute honor and were physically strong enough to protect their borders.

But then, thinking about it now as an adult, I finally understood why they were drawn together. That was the unyielding, primal pull of fated mates for you. 

They loved each other fiercely despite their massive differences in ideology, bridging the gap between magic and claw. And yet, if anyone outside of our pack had ever found out about their forbidden love story, the world would have been merciless. 

They would have branded my mother a corrupting influence, and killed them both, or written it off as a tragic love story full of pointless sacrifices. 

It was honestly a miracle that not many wolves outside our inner circle knew the true details of their courtship, or my father would not have survived the political fallout until now. 

Instead, my mom passed away quietly from a sickness that left only me and my dad to carry the grief.

When Mom passed away, Dad changed completely. No, he still wasn't abusive, but a heavy, silent wall built up between us. He seemed entirely unable to look at my face for a long time, his eyes darting away whenever I entered a room. 

Maybe it was because the more I grew up, the more I looked exactly like an image of the woman he had loved and lost. 

Since then, he buried his grief in pack politics, focusing all his energy on rebuilding our fractured territory after the wars, and he didn't care much about my well-being anymore, completely unlike the days when Mom was still alive.

I violently shook my head against the pillow, forcing myself to let go of the sad, heavy memories, and instead focused back on the warm, comforting memory of the way my mom had called my name to come closer that afternoon in the woods.

“Seleste, come here, sweetheart,” she had said in her tender, melodic voice, beckoning me to sit beside her.

“Do you know what type of herbs these are, sweetheart?” she asked, holding out two distinct bundles.

I looked down at her gentle hands and nodded proudly, eager to show off my knowledge.

I pointed directly to her left hand and smiled. “Lavender.”

Then I pointed toward her right hand. “Sage.”

“Very good, sweetheart.” She smiled warmly, her lavender eyes crinkling with a proud light that instantly made me feel invincible. 

She was always proud of me, no matter how small or insignificant my so-called achievements were. That unconditional warmth was the exact reason why I loved her so deeply, and why her absence felt like a permanent hollow space in my chest.

My mom carefully demonstrated the perfect, delicate balance between the lavender and the sage, crushing the leaves between her palms before she dropped them into the bubbling liquid of the small cauldron she was using. 

“This is a highly specialized potion on how to mask your genetic scent profile,” she explained softly, her gentle hands guiding my smaller ones to stir the mixture in a rhythmic, clockwise circle. “It dampens your witch pheromones entirely, ensuring that only your standard werewolf scent is prominent to everyone.”

“But wouldn't the pack elders or the high Alphas know when we use magic like this?” I asked, my brow furrowing with childhood anxiety.

She laughed softly, a clear, beautiful sound that echoed through the clearing, and playfully bopped the tip of my nose with her forefinger. “Do you truly think your mom’s signature magic is so easily detectable by a few brute wolves, Seleste?”

I grinned, my pride flaring because I knew she was incredibly powerful, but then my expression grew solemn as the reality of our hiding place set in.

“I hate that we have to pretend that we are something else,” I sulked, crossing my arms over my chest as I stared into the bubbling potion. “I hate that we have to hide our true power from the world, like we're monsters.”

Mom’s expression softened with a deep, maternal sorrow. She reached out, gently tucking a stray lock of blonde hair behind my ear, her touch warm against my skin. “Listen to me, sweetheart. I know it feels incredibly hard, and I know it is unfair. But you must understand that sometimes, in a world ruled by fear and teeth, survival means we need part of us to become completely invisible.”

“I know, but I still hate it,” I mumbled, staring down at my boots.

“I know, sweetheart. I know,” she responded in that soothing, motherly tone that always managed to quiet the storms inside me. “But until the world changes, this is the path we must walk.”

I turned restlessly on bed, the memory shifting as the next, more profound lesson hit my consciousness. It was still so terrifyingly vivid even after all these years of separation. 

I could still clearly visualize my mother’s lavender eyes glowing with a brilliant, raw magic as she taught me how to pull my internal witch power inward, forcing the volatile energy to become completely dormant, cold, and entirely undetectable to anyone attempting to read my aura.

We had even spent days concocting a highly complex potion designed to alter our lavender eye to a standard, unremarkable blue. 

Once again, I had hated the change because I loved the unique color we shared, but we both knew the harsh truth—lavender eyes only belonged to witches, and displaying them in the werewolf society was equivalent to a death warrant.

I could still vividly remember the gravity in her voice when she warned me about the brutal reality of the world we lived in.

“Remember, sweetheart, the werewolf society will never accept the way you are born. They will never accept who you truly are. To them, being different means you are an anomaly that must be hunted, contained, and killed. You must never forget that, do you understand?”

I had nodded slowly, the terrifying weight of her words sinking deep into my childhood mind. I had known about the danger for a long time, ever since I was around five years old when my internal witch power first awakened. My mom and dad had drilled that warning into my head so many times that the necessity of hiding had been permanently ingrained into my heart and mind forever.

That was the exact reason why I had meticulously prepared the scent-masking potions and the eye-color elixirs before I packed my bags to enter the Ravenwood Academy. 

“Strength doesn’t always come from aggressively showing your power, sweetheart,” my mom had continued that day, her gaze locking onto mine with an intensity I would never forget. “True strength comes from knowing exactly when to hide it.”

At twelve years old, I hadn't truly understood the profound weight of what she meant by those words. I had thought she was just telling me to be quiet. 

But now, navigating the dangerous hierarchy of this all-male academy, I understood it perfectly. 

Sometimes, when I was burning with anger during a sparring match, I could feel the magic stirring violently inside my gut like a living, breathing entity. 

My hybrid magic wanted to claw its way to the surface. It wanted to protect me, to answer every single physical threat with an explosion of crushing, elemental power. 

But I had learned to force it down, to lock it behind iron walls, to pretend it didn't exist at all. Maybe that was the ultimate survival tool Mom had truly been teaching me all along. She wasn't teaching me how to be weak; she was teaching me how to control the storm.

My chest tightened with a painful, longing ache as the memory of her peaceful smile flashed behind my eyelids. She had looked so serene that day, as though she possessed a hidden knowledge of the future that I couldn't see. As though she already knew that I would someday have to face the cruelty of the werewolf world completely without her guidance.

“No matter what happens in your future, Seleste,” her voice echoed inside my quiet memory, soft, warm, and entirely clear, “never allow the world to make you forget who you truly are. You may have to hide parts of yourself from the eyes of the world to survive, but you must never, ever hide them from your own heart.”

My eyes burned with a sudden, sharp heat, and I had to squeeze them shut to keep the tears from slipping down my cheeks. Even after all these years of silence, I could still hear the exact timbre of her voice advising me in the dark.

I turned onto my side, pulling the thin blanket closer around my shoulders, trying to absorb whatever phantom warmth the memory could offer. 

Tomorrow, I would have to survive an entirely different type of operational nightmare. 

The thought alone made my stomach twist into violent, agonizing knots. 

For the first time since arriving at Ravenwood, I desperately wished she were here sitting on the edge of my bed. I wished she could stroke my hair and tell me exactly how to bypass this trap. But she wasn't here. I was entirely alone in the dark.

And yet, as I stared at the shadows on the ceiling, I somehow knew exactly what her response would be. I could almost hear her gentle laugh echoing in the quiet room. “Figure it out, sweetheart… You are a hybrid of the Lighttail Banes Pack, and you are so much stronger than you think.”

A small, genuine smile touched my lips, the panic in my chest slowly beginning to ease as her residual strength anchored my mind. Finally, I closed my eyes as sleep slowly claimed me. 

My mother had been preparing me for this exact test my entire life without either of us knowing it.