Chapter thirty two: I don't know myself anymore

Freya’s POV

There is something burning inside me that isn’t mine.

It moves beneath my skin like a second heartbeat, it's dark, cold, and ancient. I feel it to my bone marrow, whispering behind my eyes, clawing at the edges of my mind. I can still hear Veyrix’s voice, smooth and low, like a river full of teeth.

“Let me in,” he says. “You’ve already opened the door.”

I don’t remember when it started. Maybe it was the night I touched the roots of the Moonstone Tree and saw the vision of the first Nightfang. Or maybe it was before that, when I survived the Shadow Trial and felt something else watching me and Smiling.

But I do remember the moment everything broke and shattered. It was tonight, I had left Finnick.

I didn’t want to,  never  wanted to. But I really had to. He looked at me with those warm, worried eyes and asked questions I couldn’t answer.

“Where are you going?”

“Why won’t you tell me what you saw?”

“Why are you pulling away from me, Freya?”

Because I’m scared.

Because every time I look at him, I feel this crushing fear that I’ll hurt him. That the thing inside me—the god, the curse, the wolf of rot and fire—will use me to break the only person I’ve ever truly loved.

So I walked away. Not because I didn’t love him.

But because I loved him too much.

I followed the call in my bones. It led me through the forest, through the rain, through the silence. My paws were bloodied from running over stones, but I didn’t stop.

Veyrix was calling me to the old place. The place buried beneath the earth. The place where it all began.

A deep cave in the mountain’s gut. Hidden behind a wall of tangled roots and forgotten bones.

As soon as I stepped into the darkness, the air turned heavy. My breath turned to frost. My legs trembled, not from fear—but from pressure. Like something unseen was pushing down on me.

There were carvings on the walls. Wolves with glowing eyes, snarling and screaming in silence. Some were burning. Some were worshipping something above them. Something with my face.

My knees gave out.

I dropped to the floor, shaking. My claws scraped against cold stone. And that’s when I saw it.

A pool. Still Black and  endless.

It wasn’t water. It was something else. Memory,  Shadow and Time.

And in the reflection—I didn’t see myself.

I saw her.

Me, but not me.

Eyes glowing like white fire. Fur darker than midnight. Fangs long and curved like sickles. She smiled at me through the pool, and my whole body turned cold.

Veyrix’s voice came again, from inside me this time.

“You are not a jailer. You are the gate.”

I screamed.

The sound was swallowed by the cave, by the darkness, by the truth.

I am the key. The vessel. The seal that kept him locked away.

And now, I am the crack in the prison wall.

I felt it—something tearing inside me. Like a tether snapping. Like a bridge burning.

The bond.

My link to Finnick.

Gone.

One moment, his warmth was there, soft and steady, like a quiet heartbeat in the back of my soul.

The next—it was empty.

No heat, No light, No him.

Gone.

My scream echoed through the cave. Not from pain.

From loss.

Something inside me broke.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. We were supposed to fight together. Side by side. He promised he wouldn’t leave me.

And now I was the one who’d left.

Now I was the one who broke it.

I curled up on the stone floor, claws digging into my arms, trying to feel something. Anything. Trying to hold on to the last piece of myself before Veyrix took it all.

The worst part wasn’t the fear.

It was the silence.

I had spent so many moons with Finnick beside me. In the camp. On the hunt. In the dark. He was always there. A steady hand. A quiet breath. A heartbeat against mine.

And now—nothing.

Just the cave. Just the cold.

Just me.

I don’t know how long I stayed there. Time lost meaning.

But when I finally stood, I knew something was different.

I was different.

My reflection in the pool shifted again.

She smiled.

And this time, I smiled back.

I stepped away from the water. Away from the place where the gods once died. And in the dark, I heard my own voice speak—but it wasn’t me.

It was deeper, Older, Tainted.

“It begins.”

Freya opens her eyes to find herself standing on a cliff at dawn, blood on her paws—and no memory of how she got there.