142

142
Maevryn's POV

Its been a month.

That’s how long it’s been since the battlefield turned white and everything I thought I was burned away. I became nothing but a shell of who I was, a shell of who I was before the prophecies, before I killed Deliliah.. Before everything..

I hardly recognize myself anymore still even after a month.

I used to stand tall, 5’8.. Tall enough to almost look Rowen in the eye when he teased me, Tall enough to make Brinley roll her gorgeous eyes when I slouched against her shoulder. Now, when I pass the mirror in my dorm, I flinch. 5’5. A full head or so shorter than the twins. Three inches shorter than Brinley. Everything about me feels smaller.. shrunken, compact, fragile. Like I was reborn... Into someone else, just with the same soul. And I guess thats not entriely wrong..

And pale. Goddess, I am so pale. I used to have a tanned warmth to my skin, a glow. Now the sun feels like an interrogation lamp. It makes my skin ache, my eyes burn. Everything is brighter, too sharp, as though the world was dipped in light and I was meant to see darkness only. Everything was amplified. Maybe that was a side affect of being brought back to life..

I spend most days running in the woods. Stormi presses me onward, her paws light, her coat white and gleaming against the trees, I know she misses being golden, lighting the path as we ran.. But she hasnt complained, I think shes just happy we are alive.. Shifting is the only time I don’t feel like I’ve been stuffed into the wrong body. In the wolf form, I can forget how thin I’ve become. How frail. How… empty and hollow I feel now.

Classes have resumed, but I don’t go. Neither do my mates. If I can even call them that anymore.. We circle one another like ghosts, orbiting close, never touching the subject that matters most. The bond.

Or rather the absence of it.

They don’t bring it up. And I don’t bother to ask. Because I don’t know if I can survive the answer. Do they still have their mate bond? I know they all have their marks so I can only assume that their all connected still. I just dont understand how I lost my power.. And my mate bonds.. That wasnt what I sacrifcied.

Lucien has been… different. Present. He insists we eat dinner together a couple nights a week, just the two of us. Sometimes we talk about the day, about the Academy, about the chaos of rebuilding. Mostly, though, he listens. His eyes carry something heavy.. Guilt? Maybe, or pain he won’t say aloud. I can feel it pressing on him, like the bond I no longer share with my mates but can still sense faintly. father to daughter.

He's trying. For once since he entered my life.. My father is trying. And I don’t know how to accept it. I have never had a parent try and know me, understand me.. Just listen and talk to me.. Its... nice? I guess.

The grief hit me like a truck a week after the battle. Not the grief everyone expected.. It was no secret I hated my mother for everything she did..

But she was still my mother.

I was relieved she was gone. Relieved she could never hurt me again. But when the dust settled and I realized I’d never hear her voice, never feel that cold, venomous hand again, something else sank in. That was the grief I felt..

I had nowhere to go now..

When school is over, when the Academy no longer wants me, when my friends scatter.. Where do I go? My mother’s gone. My father is here, but he has the weight of an Alpha, a headmaster, a leader. Where do I fit in?

The twins’ birthday is coming.

They’ll be eighteen. And I… I can’t stop thinking about the marks. About how, before all this, they marked me. Brinley, too. How that bond sang through my skin. How whole it felt.

Now the skin at my neck is bare. The bond gone.

Do they still want me?
Will they mark me again?

Or has that part of our story already ended.. I mean the moongoddess said I wasnt meant to come back..

No one talks about it though. Its a topic I think theyre even scared to bring up..

And my new favorite thing, the nausea.. It started about two weeks ago.

It’s constant now, curling in my stomach like something alive. I can’t eat much without gagging and throwing up. The healers say it’s exhaustion, recovery, maybe stress.

But I know better.

Two months ago, Kieran and I mated. Weve never talked about it since.. We marked one another and had unprotected sex because I knew I loved him, and I wanted to feel his soul tied to mine, not through the shadows and the pecie of my soul I had given him.. We never discussed what it could lead to.. The possibilities. I know, we all had never actually had sex, we all just danced around it. Brinley and I sure.. We had as the humans at my old school call it 'Finger sex" because well.. We dont have the goods to actually fuck.. But this was my first time, and I guess without planning.. How was I supposed to know this would happen... And then I died. There’s no way. There can’t be a way. Its not possible right?

But what if that’s why Selene let me come back? What if that’s why I’m different? S My magic stripped away but my body… changed. Everything about me changed. Mentally I was so frail. Valeriese did alot of damage in that cage.. Mentally, physically.. It was worst than anything my drunk mother did to me.

But after having unprotected sex one..
Was the moon goddess actually that cruel,

It couldn’t be.
Could it?
She wouldnt..

Hell she gave me a second chance at life and shes gonna let me be knocked up and to top it all off take my mate marks from me.. From the man who would be the father?

What a cosmic ass joke. A cruel joke.

Theres no actual way this is my life now.

I run harder in the woods, Stormi howling as she pushes us, "Stop thinking about it little one.. We will figure it out" she said as we continued to run.

The trees blur around me, the earth pounds beneath my paws, and the nausea only sharpens. I’m not ready to ask the question aloud.

Not to my father. Not to my mates. Not even to myself.

Because if the answer is yes, if the Moon Goddess’s price was my life saved.. To save this new part of her.... then my story isn’t just mine anymore.

And I don’t know if I can carry the weight of that.

What has my life seriously become this last year..