Relentless Novels & Stories

“You did not hide. You did not show fear. That is strength.” I looked down at my hands. “It did not feel like strength.” “What did it feel like?” I let out a breath I didn’t realise I had been holding. “Like I was held together by a thread.” Kael’s expression shifted slightly. Not pity. Understanding. “Strength is not the absence of strain. It is the refusal to break.” The fire crackled behind us, the sound warm and close. I lifted my gaze. “So what happens next?” He didn’t hesitate.

Herman and I were on our way home when he asked, "Are you upset?" I shook my head. "You know, in my last life, Elena was eaten away by the condition. I held her in my arms, and whenever I touched her, her skin would peel off with blood. She was too weak to even cry. "She just lay there like a kitten, whimpering until she stopped breathing. And you and I… We didn't have a good ending either. It was all the Reids' doing. Tell me, does our family have to carry this curse in every lifetime?"

A flicker of something that refuses, despite every rational justification, to go entirely out. Defiance is too strong a word for it. It isn't defiance. It's more like instinct. The dumb, cellular insistence of a living thing on continuing to be a living thing. It doesn't know my history. It doesn't know my bank balance or my failures or the jacket still hanging by the door. It just persists, the way a weed persists through pavement not beautiful, not triumphant, just relentlessly, stubbornly, stupidly alive.

Cruelly. By noon, Aria had collapsed six times. By evening, twelve. By nightfall, she'd lost count. Just running. Collapsing. Getting up. Running. An endless cycle of pain and exhaustion and pushing past what she thought possible. "Enough," Selene finally said. "That's day one. Tomorrow we do it again. And the next day. And the next. Until your body stops giving up. Until your mind stops limiting you. Until you—break through."

“Oh yeah, and insulting me is the only way to stop them from carrying on with it? No matter how hurtful it was, I put up with everything, but telling me that we are at war, telling me that my presence makes you sick, that was my last straw Shane, if I could endure anything, I will not endure that. Do you hear me? I will not endure that!” She beat his chest with her bag, “do you hear me? I will never endure that” She beat him more with the bag, adding her second fist to it.

One persistent effort at a time. Forever forward. Forever adapting. Forever trying. Three hundred years and counting. Three thousand years ahead. However long wolves endured. Always continuing. Always evolving. Always refusing to quit. Because that's what Aria had taught. Not through her successes but through her doubts. Not through her certainty but through her questions. Not through her perfection but through her persistence. That lesson endured. That mission continued. That legacy lived. Forever. THE END

What love meant. Not perfection. But persistence. Not flawlessness. But continuation. Not purity. But honest effort. Always. Eternally. Absolutely. Forever.