Violet

I woke up somewhere else entirely.

A different body. A different life.

I was an omega. Young, barely more than a child, and terrified in ways I didn’t understand.

But I could feel it. The power humming beneath my skin. The same energy I knew as syzygy, awakened far too early in a body that didn’t know what to do with it.

The door burst open. Wolves poured in.

The vision cut to black.

Another body.

A pack wolf this time, older, standing in a forest clearing with my hands raised. Golden light spiralled around my fingers as I tried to defend myself against the wolves circling me. I had awakened my Lycan powers, had felt the pull calling me somewhere far away, but I had been discovered before I could follow it.

Teeth closed around my throat.

Blackness.

Another body.

An alpha. Strong and fierce, running through the night with a small pack at my heels. We were being hunted, but this time I was not alone. This time I had others, other Lycans, and we were fighting back—

An ambush. Arrows. Fire.

Blackness.

Another body.

A luna this time, standing in a grand hall, my hand resting on the arm of a supreme alpha who didn’t know what I was. I had hidden for years, suppressed the pull, ignored the power that whispered beneath my skin. I had survived by becoming invisible.

But they found me anyway.

They always found me.

Blackness.

Another body.

I stood at the head of an army, a supreme alpha. I had found other lycans. Had gathered them in secret. Had built a hidden refuge where Lycans could live without fear.

For a while, it worked.

Then the other wolves came.

I died fighting.

Blackness.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Omega. Alpha. Pack wolf. Luna. Supreme alpha. The bodies blurred together, a thousand years of lives and deaths flickering past like pages in a book read too quickly. Some lasted years. Some lasted only days. But they all ended the same way.

In blood. In fire. In the endless hunt that never stopped.

And with each death, I felt the pull growing stronger. My wolf’s desperate call echoing through lifetimes, reaching farther, screaming louder, hoping that this time, this incarnation, would be the one to finally find her way home.

Then a face appeared in the chaos of memories.

A woman.

Palisa.

I—another me, another lifetime—stood face to face with her across a blood-soaked battlefield. She was younger in this vision, but unmistakably the same. The same cruel beauty. The same predatory stillness.

How...

There was no way she could still be alive from this time.

"Another Lycan," she said, her voice carrying across the distance between us. "How delightful."

The vision fractured.

But I had seen enough.

Palisa was alive centuries ago, and she was alive now.

What was she?

[ - ]

I slammed back into my own body with a gasp.

My face was wet. My whole body trembled so violently I couldn’t sit upright. I collapsed onto my side in the sand, my chest heaving, my mind reeling.

A thousand years.

The number echoed through me, wrong and impossible.

Everything I had read in Rowan’s archive. All of it had spoken of centuries. Five hundred years. Six hundred at most. That was the timeline I had understood. That was when the wolves had hunted my people to extinction. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

But that wasn’t the beginning?

That was only the end?!

The wolf’s voice drifted through my shattered thoughts, quiet and heavy with ancient grief.

"The hunting began long before the final slaughter. Generation after generation. Across continents. Across lifetimes..."

I pressed my hands against my face, trying to breathe.

I couldn’t properly put to words what I felt. I had died, again and again, in body after body, never knowing why I was being killed, never remembering the lives that I had lived before each one...

Until now.

What hatred could consume the wolves to hunt a whole civilisation down.

It was unfair!

I thought of Zephyr, painting her blood on crystal in the dark. She had done that a thousand years ago.

And for a thousand years, the wolf had called.

Never reaching them until me.

Tears slipped down my cheeks, but I was too hollowed out to sob. I just lay there, the sand warm beneath me, the wolf’s body pressed against my back.

Palisa’s face surfaced in my memory.

I had seen her in one of those fragmented lives. Those same cold sinister eyes were there. Along with the same cruel smile.

She had been hunting Lycans then.

What was she?

Why was she alive now?

The question terrified me more than I wanted to admit.

"How is she still alive?" I whispered.

My wolf didn’t answer. It didn’t know.

It didn’t matter.

I closed my eyes.

The grief was still there, vast and heavy. But beneath it, something else stirred.

A surge of hatred flushed through me.

"They deserve to pay—"

"No!" I cried out, trampling the hatred down, and doing my very best not to let it control me.

"A lot of wolves are innocent. Not everyone thinks like this—"

My wolf’s fury ensnared mine, making it harder to control my anger. She snapped, "They—"

"I know!" I yelled out into the open, my throat choked with sobs.

My hands were clasped together against my chest. "I know. Your grief. Your hatred. Everything you feel is justified."

But I would not blindly act as the wolves had done to us...

"Your pacifistic nature has never left you," my wolf whispered.

Her tone was calmer now, but sadness engulfed her.

Disappointment.

My breaths shuddered as I tried to bring myself under control.

"That... Zephyr and I are different people," I whispered with a shaky breath.

It was the truth.

While it seemed, I had lived many lives, each had their own distinct traits and personalities.

"Some will pay for this rightfully so," I added, my voice growing steady. My body trembled. "Especially the ones still hunting me."

I had my wolf now.

I had power I was fully understanding at a deeper level.

It was not going to end with me.

I would not let it end.