PACK DIRT

POV: ARAYA

The first thing I ever learned was how to survive pain.

Not the kind that left bruises.

Not the kind anyone apologised for.

The kind that lived in silence, sharpening its teeth inside my chest.

I learned it in winter.

I was barely a day old. Left at the edge of Blackthorn territory — naked, silent, and alone. Hidden beneath frost-laced roots of an old birch tree that had long since stopped blooming. My lips were blue by dawn. My breath barely stirred the cold.

The patrol that found me didn’t sound relieved. Their growls were low, wary.

“She smells like rogue blood.”

“Or a witch,” someone muttered.

“Her eyes — look at those eyes.”

“The Alpha won’t like this,” one said. “If she’s a witch, best we kill her now.”

But another voice cut in — colder.

“She could be useful.”

When the Alpha was told, he didn’t ask who I was.

He said,

“Keep it. Raise it. She might serve a purpose.”

Not loved.

Not claimed.

Just… kept.

That was my first trial survived — not through mercy, but through utility.

I wasn’t welcomed. I was stored. Not loved. Not safe. Just tolerated, like a crack in the wall no one bothered to seal.

She’s cursed.

Her mother must’ve been some hunter. Why else would she leave her to die?

Only a scarf — dusk-blue and silver — wrapped around my tiny form, stitched with a single name in delicate thread:

Araya.

That’s how they knew what to call me.

No one in the Blackthorn Pack knew who had left me.

Some whispered I was the spawn of a rogue woman from a foreign land. Others claimed I reeked of sorcery — something that didn’t belong beneath Selene’s moon.

They called me many things in those early years:

“The ghost baby.”

“The witch-born.”

“The pack’s mistake.”

No one called me daughter.

No one kissed my forehead.

No one asked if I had nightmares.

The scarf — the only proof someone had once wanted me — was tossed into a storage box with moth-eaten linens and forgotten relics. I’d heard of it, but never seen it. Never touched the thread that once whispered my name.

I slept in a corner of the kennels, wrapped in burlap and wolf stench. My lullaby was growls and gnawed bones.

If I ate, it was after the wolves.

If I cried, no one came.

By five, I knew better than to speak unless spoken to.

By seven, I knew how to dress wounds and scrub blood from stone.

By ten, I’d stopped asking why no one looked at me with warmth.

I was the silence between doorways.

The hands that cleaned vomit after ceremonies.

The shadow that carried pots and piss buckets.

When the moon rose high and the pack feasted above, I was below, scraping sacred floors clean of ash, blood, and entrails.

No one thanked me.

But they never forgot to remind me:

“Dirt doesn’t speak.”

“You were born from rot.”

“You should’ve died under that tree.”

The priestesses were no gentler.

One, half-drunk on divine incense, once called me:

“A sacred absence… the Moon’s rejection made flesh.”

It sounded poetic.

It meant cruelty dressed as faith.

Let her carry our sins, they said.

So we don’t have to.

By thirteen, I could skin a deer, stitch flesh, set a bone, and survive on crumbs.

My wolf?

Silent. Always silent.

They said I was wolfless — that my soul had been denied Selene’s gift of shifting. That even the Moon refused to claim me.

“If I were you,” a warrior once muttered, “I’d walk into the Hollow and never come back.”

I didn’t answer. I was too busy dragging buckets of blood down temple stairs, too numb to scream when my hands cracked open from frost.

The priestesses left me the filth no omega would touch — straw soaked in birthing fluids, scraps from stillborn litters, half-alive wolves who never shifted back and whose howls sounded like broken stars.

I cleaned them. Fed them.

Buried them.

No one noticed when I bled.

No one asked if my back still hurt from sleeping on straw.

---

Once, a priestess spilt sacred oil on my hands.

It sizzled.

Not like water on skin — but like fire meeting its rival.

I told no one.

Later, I swore I saw steam rise from my palms.

And it smelled — faintly — of smoke.

---

The mad priestess with the burnt veil once wandered too close in the kitchens.

She looked at me — really looked — and dropped her bowl of blood-soaked herbs.

“It sleeps inside her,” she whispered, eyes glassy with visions. “The fire that forgets mercy.”

They beat her for the outburst.

After that, she never entered the kitchens again.

Now, at eighteen, I stand barefoot in the back kitchen, dress clinging wet to my skin. My hands ache from boiling pots. My knuckles are raw.

The air reeks of smoke, old meat, and sweat. Laughter echoes down the halls — warriors boasting of hunts, mates whispering of moon ceremonies.

I move like a shadow.

Always just out of the way.

I mouth words to myself sometimes — imaginary conversations with no one, ghosts of kindness I invented just to keep my sanity.

That had always been enough.

Until Marra.

Luna Adira’s cousin.

Sharp-tongued. Beautiful. Vicious.

Today, she’s hunting prey.

“Out of my way, fleabag.”

The pot sloshes. I flinch — too late.

Marra sneers, knocking a tray of raw meat from my arms.

“Didn’t hear me, dog?”

I kneel silently, hands trembling.

She leans in, voice venom-slick.

“Oh wait. You’re not even a dog.”

“You don’t have a wolf.”

Laughter erupts behind her.

“Not even a mutt would claim you.”

“The Alpha’s only keeping you out of pity.”

“If I were you,” someone whispers, “I’d slit my own throat.”

I straighten, shoulders stiff. Not because it hurts — but because it doesn’t anymore.

A bucket of dishwater soaks my leg. I don’t move.

Don’t speak.

Marra circles like a bored lioness.

“You think this pack is your home?”

I say nothing.

She spits at my feet.

“Even the Moon turned her back on you.”

I once dared to ask a priestess if my wolf might be late.

> “Some don’t shift until sixteen,” I’d whispered.

She laughed until tears ran through her painted eyes.

“You weren’t born,” she said.

“You were discarded. The Moon gives nothing to trash.”

I never asked again.

Now they call me:

Araya the Empty.

The Pack’s Dirt.

The Mutt.

The Mistake.

I wear the names like armour.

If I cry, it is in silence.

If I bleed, it is in secret.

I am used as a training dummy.

New blades are tested on my skin.

Boiling water poured across my arms to see if wolfless flesh burns like theirs.

It does.

They laugh.

I don’t scream.

But beneath it all — the bruises, the ash, the silence — I store every memory like coal.

Not to forget.

But to remember.

Because one day, they will bow.

And when they do—

I will not forgive them.

I will watch them choke on the same silence they forced down my throat.

I will see their pride split open like flesh under a dull blade.

And I will burn every name they ever gave me… until the only one they remember is the one they whisper in fear.

Araya.