ARIA IS BACK

SAME ARIA
The forest had become Aria’s sanctuary, though sanctuary was too gentle a word for it. It was more of a prison she had chosen for herself.

She caged herself in the forest; she thought this would help her in reasoning. She didn’t want to see the man she loved in that state.

She hadn’t changed since then; she was still the same Aria who came from the other world.

Aria felt she was too unclean to see Damien. She messed up, and she wanted to correct those mistakes, but not with her current state.

She couldn’t see things from the human perspective; she walked according to her senses, and they were so active.

Aria hated the fact that she could hear people’s thoughts, footsteps, and she could guess their next action by just their facial appearance.

And her appearance worsened it all. Among the towering pines and twisted roots, she could breathe without the weight of human eyes pressing down on her. She didn’t want to see the fear she knew she would cause—
not when her reflection already unsettled her enough. The molten glow in her eyes, the faint tremor of unnatural hunger that stirred in her chest—these were not things the humans of her village would understand. She barely understood them herself.

She wandered through the wilderness like a ghost, moving with the silence of a predator she had never trained to be.

Small animals fled at the sound of her steps, and when she caught their scent, the sharp pull of her instincts made her jaw clench. It terrified her—how natural the hunger felt, how easy it would be to give in.

Nights were the hardest. When the forest thickened with shadows, she could hear every creature, every heartbeat, every flutter of wings in the canopy.

The forest was alive in ways she had never noticed before, and sometimes, when her hunger clawed at her insides, she wondered how long it would be before the animals were not enough to silence it.

But she stayed hidden. She told herself she needed time—to understand, to fight, to prepare for whatever it was she was becoming. She wasn’t ready to face Damien. She wasn’t ready to face anyone.

—

Meanwhile, Damien’s restlessness grew unbearable. The storm had ended, but the hole left in his chest had not.

He could feel her presence. He couldn’t sit erect and comfortably for a minute; he kept imagining his plans being carried out.

He could see his brother’s blood, and many others in the Blackthorn pack drooling over the city gate.

“She is back,” Elira had told him. Those three words had burned themselves into his mind. They had ignited a flame in him, one he could not extinguish. Every fiber of his being screamed to search for her, to find her, to prove with his own eyes that Aria was alive and breathing.

And yet, Elira barred his path, and it was very frustrating. Aside from taking revenge, he had missed Aria.

He almost forgot how and what she looked like. He didn’t want to accept the fact that he had fallen in love with Aria.

The feeling he had wasn’t a mutual one; it was more than that. He felt something deeper and stronger for her.

He could hear Aria calling his name slowly in the dark, and he hated the feeling.

“Do not go after her,” she warned one evening, her tone deceptively calm, almost maternal. “Not until I confirm her identity. You could be chasing something that wears her face but is no longer her.”

The warning should have given him pause. Instead, it made suspicion curl tighter in his gut.

Why was Elira holding him back? Why was she speaking in riddles, giving him fragments instead of truth? He remembered when she used to speak openly—her knowledge vast and precise, her strategies laid out with clarity. But now she gave him only slivers, as though rationing the truth, giving him crumbs while she hoarded the loaf.

Elira had rolled up her sleeves a lot. She was too good of a manipulator, but she didn’t know who she was dealing with.

It gnawed at him.

Damien began to notice the way her eyes lingered on the horizon when she thought he wasn’t watching, how her voice dropped lower when she muttered to herself during rituals, how she would slip away without explanation and return with no account of where she had been. She was hiding something—more than one thing.

And Damien didn’t like being handled.

So he began to change his plan. He stopped asking her questions, stopped pushing her for answers he knew she would never give. Instead, he watched. Listened. Waited.

He focused only on her movement pattern and communication. He restarted his plan.

He memorized her movements, the routes she favored, the way her tone shifted when she spoke of Aria. Every detail mattered now. He told her less of his own thoughts, shared fewer of his suspicions, and crafted his mask as carefully as she wore hers.

And quietly, he began to make his own moves.

If Elira had secrets, he would uncover them. If she was twisting the truth about Aria, he would know. No longer would he rely on her little truths and carefully chosen words. He would search for Aria himself, in his own way, without her guidance—and without her knowledge.

The game between them had shifted. He wanted to find out her plans first so he could counter them.

Where once Damien had followed Elira with reluctant trust, now he trailed her with sharpened suspicion. He was no longer her ally. He was her shadow.

And deep down, he knew that sooner or later, one of them would slip—and when that happened, the fragile thread between them would snap.

For now, though, he played along. He let her think she still held the reins.

But Damien’s heart and mind belonged to only one goal: finding Aria.

And he would, even if it meant burning every bridge Elira tried to build.