ELARA POV
It started in my spine.
Not pain exactly. More like pressure. Like something was pushing out from the inside and had run out of patience waiting for permission. It had been building since morning … this heat that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room, spreading from my chest outward, making my skin feel too tight and my hands feel wrong and my whole body feel like it was waiting for something I kept refusing to give it.
The Void-Eater wanted out.
I knew that was what it was. I didn't have another word for it. The presence inside me … the one that whispered starlight in my last conscious second after the ritual … was pushing. Pressing. Asking for something in a language that wasn't words but that I understood the same way you understand that you're hungry or that you need air.
It wanted me to shift.
I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my hands flat on my knees and tried to breathe through it. I'd been sitting like this for twenty minutes. The heat wasn't going down. If anything it was getting worse. My vision kept going slightly strange at the edges … not blurring, more like sharpening too much, picking up things it shouldn't. The grain of the floorboards. A spider web in the far corner I had no business seeing from this distance.
I was not supposed to shift. That was on the list. Silas's list of things I absolutely did not do. No shifting. No wandering. No east garden after dark.
The heat spiked hard enough that I made a sound.
That was it. That was enough. I was done sitting here waiting for it to stop.
I got up, grabbed my outer layer from the chair by the door, and went to the window.
The Silent Forest sat at the east edge of the Spire grounds. I'd seen it from the garden … a thick line of dark trees that started where the iron fence ended. It had a name for a reason. Nothing from inside ever came out sounding normal. Birds went in and came out not singing anymore. Wind went in and went quiet.
I'd been told not to go there.
I went anyway.
The grounds were empty this late. The guards Silas had added after the poisoned tonic were posted at the main entrances, not the east garden wall, which meant the gap in the lower fence behind the dying hedgerow was unguarded. I'd found it three days ago and hadn't said anything. Some things you keep.
I slipped through.
The forest hit me immediately. The temperature dropped. The sound of the Spire … wind against the towers, the distant shift of guards, the low permanent hum the building made that I'd stopped noticing … all of it cut off like someone had closed a door. One step in and it was just quiet. Real quiet. The kind that pressed gently against your ears.
I walked until I couldn't see the fence anymore. Until the trees were thick enough around me that the Spire's lights didn't reach. Until it was just me and the dark and the quiet pressing in from all sides.
I stopped in a small gap between trees where the ground was flat and looked around. Nothing but forest in every direction. Good enough.
I stood there for a second just breathing. Trying to remember the last time I'd been somewhere with no walls and no guards and no one watching me eat.
The heat was unbearable now. My hands were shaking with it. The veins on my arms … all the way to my neck at this point … were dark and moving fast, faster than I'd ever seen them move before, like they knew what was about to happen and were getting ready.
I had never shifted before. My whole life. Nineteen years. Omega blood didn't shift easy and mine had never shifted at all and every time I'd tried as a kid it had just … nothing. Like the door was locked from the other side.
But something was different now.
Something was on the other side of that door and it was not locked. It was wide open. And it was waiting for me to walk through.
I let go.
I don't know how else to describe it. I just … stopped holding. Whatever I'd been doing my whole life, that constant quiet tension of keeping myself contained, I released it. All at once.
It hit like a wave.
The shift tore through me fast and I gasped with the force of it and then I was on four legs on the forest floor and everything was different. The smells were enormous … wet earth and old bark and something electric that I understood was the Void in the air around this place. The sounds came back, not the way they'd been cut off, but deeper, layered, the forest talking in frequencies I'd never had ears for before.
I looked down at my front paws.
They were wrong.
Not wrong like broken. Wrong like … other. My fur wasn't grey or brown or any color a normal wolf came in. It moved. Like smoke. Like the shadows in the Spire walls. Dark at the base and lighter at the edges and shifting constantly, never fully settling into one shape.
I was not a wolf. I was something that looked like one from a distance.
I stood there in the quiet forest and breathed and felt the heat in my chest settle for the first time all day. The Void-Eater went calm. Content. Like it had just needed this one thing and now it could rest.
I took a few steps. Then a few more. The forest floor was soft under my paws and the dark didn't bother me … I could see fine, better than fine, the trees lit in some frequency that wasn't exactly light but worked the same way.
I don't know how long I was just walking. Long enough to feel like myself for the first time in weeks. Long enough to forget about the prophecy book in the library and the hole in my floor and the Council and all of it for a few minutes.
Then I smelled them.
Wolves. More than one. Downwind of me, moving slow, and they'd been there for a while … I'd just been too caught up in existing to notice. My head came up. My smoke-fur bristled without me deciding it should.
I turned.
There were six of them at the edge of a clearing maybe thirty feet back. Large. Rough-looking even in wolf form … scarred muzzles, mismatched eyes, the kind of wolves that had been living hard outside pack walls for a long time. Rogues.
They were all looking at me.
I held very still.
One of them stepped forward. The largest one. Dark grey, almost black, with a scar that ran from his ear all the way across his nose. He stopped maybe ten feet away and looked at me … really looked, the way the measuring kind of look feels … and then he did the last thing I expected.
He lowered himself to the ground.
All the way. Head down. Front legs flat. The full submission posture. A rogue wolf, in his own territory, going fully down for me.
Then the others followed. One by one. All six of them. Down on the forest floor with their heads lowered and their ears flat.
I stared at them.
The large one shifted. It took a few seconds and then a man was crouching where the wolf had been. Big. Broad. Older than I expected, with a hard face and a long scar that looked worse in human skin. He stayed low. Head bowed.
"General Krix," he said. Like he was introducing himself to someone who outranked him. "Of the free wolves."
I didn't know what to say. So I shifted back. Standing in the clearing in my human form with my smoke-fur gone and my regular skin and the veins moving on my arms like they always did now.
"I don't know what you think you're seeing," I said. "But I'm not…"
"You are." He looked up then. His eyes were steady. No fear in them. Something closer to awe, which was worse somehow. "We've been waiting a long time. The stories said smoke. Said the heir's mother would walk in shadow and command what cannot be commanded." He gestured at the wolves still flat on the ground around us. "They felt you shift from half a mile away. Every single one of them dropped before I did."
"That's…" I stopped. Didn't have a good end for that sentence.
"You shifted smoke." His voice was simple. Just stating facts. "No wolf does that. No Alpha, no Luna, nothing that walks on four legs does that. Only one bloodline. Only one person this generation." He held my eyes. "We are yours. If you'll have us."
I opened my mouth.
A branch cracked behind me. Loud. Deliberate.
I turned around.
Silas stood at the tree line. Still dressed, which meant he hadn't been asleep. His eyes moved from me to Krix to the six wolves still flat on the forest floor. Something moved in his expression that I couldn't fully catch … shock and something underneath it that was more complicated.
He looked at the rogues. At the fealty posture. At me standing in the center of it.
The forest was so quiet even the silence had a sound.