POV - Elena
When the light swallowed us, I thought we were dying.
The Conclave, the shouting, the accusing eyes — all of it vanished in a breath of silver and wind.
For a few heartbeats, there was nothing but silence and the weight of my daughter against my chest.
I could feel her tiny heartbeat through the fabric, faster than mine, steady, alive.
I held on to that. I prayed to it.
"Please," I whispered into the void. "Protect her. Take us somewhere safe."
And the Veil answered.
The world reappeared all at once — not with noise or light, but with stillness.
A soft thud beneath my feet, the smell of wood smoke, and a faint glow coming from a small fire in the corner of a room.
We were inside… a house.
Old, quiet, built of stone and memory. Dust floated like snow in the thin sunlight that filtered through half-closed shutters.
The air smelled of herbs, wax, and time.
I blinked, clutching Aurora tighter.
"Where…?" My voice broke. "Where are we?"
Before the fear could settle, a voice — soft, old, but filled with power — came from behind me.
"Help will always be given to those who ask for it."
I turned sharply.
A woman stood by the doorway.
Tall, though slightly bent with age. Her hair was long and white as moonlight, her eyes a color I couldn't name — silver, gold, and green all at once.
Her clothes were old-fashioned, layered in velvet and linen, marked with faint runes that shimmered faintly in the firelight.
She looked at me the way people look at something they've been waiting a long time to see.
"Who are you?" I asked, trying to steady my voice.
She smiled, slow and knowing. "My name," she said, "is Elaria Voss."
The name hit something deep in my blood — a chord I didn't know I carried.
I'd heard it before, in one of my mother's bedtime stories.
The Witch of the Veil.
The oldest of the line.
The one who taught even the first Alphas the language of the moon.
"You're… real," I whispered.
Elaria's eyes softened. "More real than most who walk the earth. And you, child… you are your mother's daughter."
My knees almost gave way. "You knew her?"
"I did. I was her teacher once. And I promised her that when the time came, her child would never be left unguarded."
Aurora stirred in my arms, as if she understood.
Elaria walked closer, slower than her presence suggested, and reached out.
"May I?" she asked.
I hesitated, then nodded. She touched Aurora's cheek with two fingers, whispering something in a language that felt older than words.
The air shimmered faintly, and Aurora sighed — peaceful, content.
"She carries great power," Elaria said softly. "The Veil listens to her already. And you, Elena… you are not just her mother. You are the bridge between two worlds — the blood of wolves and the magic of witches. You are what the Council fears."
I felt tears sting my eyes. "I don't want to be feared. I just want her to live. To grow up safe."
Elaria nodded slowly. "Then you must learn what you are."
She turned and gestured for me to follow. "Come."
The next days blurred together — slow, quiet, safe.
The cottage stood deep in the northern woods, surrounded by mist and endless trees.
No roads. No paths. Only the hum of the Veil itself keeping us hidden.
Elaria gave me a small room with a bed carved by hand and blankets that smelled like cedar.
Aurora slept beside me every night, her tiny hand always reaching for mine.
And each morning, the lessons began.
Magic wasn't like I had imagined it — not spells or incantations shouted into the air.
It was listening.
It was breathing in rhythm with the world.
It was asking instead of commanding.
Elaria taught me to draw energy from earth and sky, to listen to the trees, to balance the fire inside me so it wouldn't consume what I loved.
At first, I failed — the air would spark, or the candles would explode into flame.
But she never scolded. Only smiled.
"Power responds to emotion," she said. "And you, my dear, feel everything too deeply."
One evening, as Aurora slept in her cradle, I stood outside under the stars.
Elaria joined me, her steps almost soundless on the grass.
"She'll grow fast," she said. "Veil-born children always do. You'll have to decide when to stop hiding."
I swallowed hard. "He'll be looking for us."
"I know." She smiled gently. "And when the time is right, the Veil will let him find you."
I looked at her, tears burning behind my eyes. "Is he safe?"
Elaria's gaze drifted to the horizon. "He is alive. Angry. Lost. But his path is still bound to yours."
I exhaled shakily. "I just want him to know we're okay."
"Then make him feel it," she said softly. "Your bond still exists. It's only sleeping."
"How do I wake it?"
Elaria smiled, turning toward the trees. "By remembering that love," she said, "is also magic."
That night, when the house was quiet, I sat by the fire and whispered his name.
"James."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then — warmth.
A flicker of light deep inside my chest.
Like someone, far away, had heard me.
I smiled through my tears.
He was alive.
And maybe, just maybe, he had felt me too.
Days turned to weeks, and I grew stronger.
My power no longer frightened me.
The Veil no longer felt like a stranger — it felt like home.
Aurora laughed now, bright and fearless.
And every time I looked at her, I knew:
When the time came, I would return.
Not as someone running from fear.
But as someone ready to face it.
And when I did — the world would remember exactly what happens when you try to take everything from a mother.
…
Six months had a way of settling into the bones. Time softened some things and carved others deeper. When I looked at my left forearm now, I saw a map of those months: three thin, pale lines that did not belong to any silly scrape or child's fall. They were the marks of choices made when there was no other way.
I still remembered the Conclave hall as if it were a dream I'd had and could not wake from — the cold stone, the Council's polished faces, the way the light had bent the moment I reached for the Veil. I remember James's shout, the scramble of men, the way the silence afterward felt like a wound.
What I did next was not a plan. It was a mother's hunger translated into motion.
The first night after we fled, I felt the world like a wide, shifting ocean and my feet like roots. The Veil had taught me how to slip between places, to listen to the old language of the land. The world answered me differently now. Where once there had been lists of laws and parchment promises, there was the raw ledger of who had tried to take a child. That ledger had names in it — Eryndor's followers who had smiled while signing orders, the men and women who cheered the idea of control. Two names kept coming back to me with a steady beat: Cael. Varrin.
When Cael was found, his heart still, his face as if sleep had frozen him, the Conclave blamed circumstance — fate, a sudden illness. When Varrin died, the Council called it a tragedy. I called it a reckoning.
I will not write here how I made it happen. The details belong to the dark between the stones, to the Veil and to promises mothers make in silence. But I will tell you about the shape of it inside me.
Standing before someone who has argued for the right to take a child is a strange, awful thing. There is a slowness that takes over your hands. You see a life in the same eyes that once looked upon you with law and hunger. You feel the gravity of every possible future and, for a moment, taste all the small mercies you could grant or refuse.
The first time, everything became very small: the sound of breathing, the thin light of a lantern, the heat of my own blood. I did what I had to do to keep Aurora and to keep other children from being put on a ledger for the Council's pride. When it was over, the room smelled like old paper and rain, and I woke with a scar along my arm that throbbed in the cold.
The second time, it was not the same. The act leaves marks you cannot scrub away. Not just on the skin — though the thin lines that rose on my arm were proof enough — but on the bones of your soul. I learned, then, that killing a man who believed himself entitled to the futures of others is a mercy that tastes like iron.
Each scar is tied to a name I vowed never to speak aloud. They are not trophies. They are reminders. They are also, painfully, the map that led the Council to the knowledge something strange was happening. Rumors spread. The Council shouted about curses and assassins. The world began to whisper my name the way a storm is whispered before it breaks — with awe and fear in equal measure.
When the first councilor died, James was safe in public, and the men who watched me could say nothing. The law could not touch what had happened in rooms where no eyes were watchful. But law had its own way of gathering teeth. The Council tried to pin those deaths on us. Then, when they could not prove it, they fell back on their oldest weapon: accusation and authority. They declared me a fugitive and James a rebel.
We could not win in paper.
That was when Elaria moved from being a shelter and became a teacher in a new way. Her hands trembled sometimes when she spoke of balance, but her voice never did. She showed me how power heals and how power hides. She did not teach me to be bloodthirsty; she taught me to be precise, to see the ripple my decisions made, and — hardest of all — to hold myself accountable.
"You will carry these things," she told me at night, by the small fire that smelled of thyme. "And they will carry you. That is how the Veil keeps us honest. It marks what we do so we remember."
So the scars stayed. They glowed faintly for a few nights — a reminder of the Veil's judgment, perhaps, or of how the world recorded the taking of life. Over time the glow faded. The lines remained. When I touched them now, my thumb warmed the skin and I could almost hear things — names, a laugh, the click of a coin on a table — the small sounds that had led to those decisions.
Elaria insisted we bind those names in different ways than blood. "The Council rules by law and echo," she said. "They speak, and men obey. But all systems have joints. We will not pry by force open those joints. We will close them."
What she meant was work that would not show up on any ledger or in any courtroom transcript. She called it unlacing: a ritual not of warfare but of unbinding. Sitting cross-legged on the old stone floor, with Aurora sleeping in a cradle near the hearth, Elaria directed me through it.
We cut no throats in the ritual. We did not teach armies to march. Instead, we walked the list of Council sigils as if they were stitches on an old coat and quietly, gently, loosening them. Where the robe's thread had once connected power to name, Elaria's magic untied the knot. In places, power thinned away. In others, it cracked and fell like brittle glass. The result was simple and fierce: names in the Council who had relied on the weight of their office felt their reach shrink. Seals that had been used to coerce or to demand were found dull and hairline-broken by the time the Conclave next met.
I will not pretend it did not cause consequences. Stripped of some of its oldest tools the Council reacted with rage and fear. A body that loses its grasp lashes and claws. There were skirmishes. There were threats. Elaria and I learned to hide the soft places we loved — the children, the elders, the small villages that depended on the old ways — so that the Council's claws struck only at empty air.
What we did together was not an overthrow of people as much as an un-making of their claim. We took their certainty and loosened it. Where once a man in a robe said, "You must," and others obeyed, now men found themselves asking, "Why must I?" Their authority had been a mirror: we removed the glass.
It was dangerous, and it left a taste of cold iron in my mouth. When men who could not adapt tried to hold on, they smashed themselves against the world's new edges. The deaths of Cael and Varrin — whatever hands brought them — were the first cracks in an old wall. The unlacing Elaria and I did widened those cracks into paths that could no longer support the old weight.
We also made sure that the Council could not simply point a finger at us and call for punishment that would take other lives. Elaria taught me how to place shields of memory around the people who could not run: wards that did not kill but made certain places useless to those who would use law as a spear. The magic we used was not brute force. It was careful, like a surgeon cutting away cancer without burning the rest of the body.
There were nights I woke with the taste of iron, the echo of a voice that called my name and begged for mercy. There were mornings I could not look at myself in the glass because I could still see the faces of what I had done. Elaria did not pretend these things were easy to carry. "Power asks a price," she told me quietly. "The Veil will always balance, one way or another. Our task is to choose how the balance is measured."
Six months later, the world knows pieces of our story. Rumors of deaths and of "a curse" that bites those who bite children have traveled the lanes between packs. The Council has lost some of its sway. Many of its members are cautious now; some have learned to speak differently in halls where their words might not bind. Others have fled into pockets of influence where they can still claw.
James — he does not know the full measure of what I did. He knows the result: two Councilors dead, rumors that the Conclave's hand has been weakened. He thinks I am hiding, that I am afraid to return. He does not know that I made choices to keep our daughter breathing, and that some of those choices have carved scars I will carry for the rest of my life.
Elaria helps me sleep. She teaches Aurora to be careful with power and shows me how to teach kindness first, and strength second. She keeps the old hearth warm and the new wounds dressed. When I look at the thin lines on my arm, when I wince at the memory of palm and voice and decision, she holds my hand and says, "You did what mothers have always done."
I say the truth in the quiet hours: I would do it again.
Not because I have become blind to cost, but because some things are more valuable than living with a quiet conscience. I would rather carry the maps of my own sins than let my child be added to a ledger that calls her a danger.
The scars remind me when the Veil whispers for vengeance. They remind Elaria and me why we do not use power the way the Council does. We unlace, we shield, we teach. We make sure that no one with the idea of control can simply walk into a nursery and carry a child away under the pretense of law.
And if, someday, James finds us and looks at these marks, I will tell him the whole truth. I will stand in whatever light he brings and let him see each line, every tremor in my voice. He will be angry. He will be proud. He will forgive me in the way he always has: by standing with me.
Until then, we keep moving. We teach Aurora the names of trees, the taste of rain, and the strange and gentle language of the Veil. We bind places where children sleep, not with chains, but with memory. And when the Council looks at their empty hands and wonders who shifted the world beneath their feet, they will find that their power is thinner and their certainty broken.
We did not win clean. We did not keep tidy hands. But we keep a child living, and in a world that still breaks, that is what matters.