The Alpha didn't move like the others. Its steps didn't crunch the leaves; they suppressed them. I felt the air grow heavy as the massive shadow loomed over me.
Then came the heat. Its breath smelled of old blood and wet fur, huffing against my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut, every nerve in my body screaming to bolt.
Endure.
The Alpha's jaws opened. I heard the click of its teeth. Then, a slow, agonizing crush as it clamped down on my shoulder. It wasn't a quick snap. It was a test of weight. The fangs pierced deep, hitting the bone I'd worked so hard to keep covered in skin.
Endure. Endure. I screamed in my head, but my lips stayed blue and frozen. I felt the warm slip of my own blood running down my chest, soaking into the filth I was covered in. The Alpha growled low, a vibration that rattled my very teeth. He was looking for the slightest flinch, the tiniest hitch in my breath.
Endure. You are nothing. You are a stone. You are a corpse. Endure.
Finally, the pressure vanished. I heard a rough, sand-paper tongue lick the wound—a terrifying sign of ownership.
"The boy is hollow," the Alpha rumbled to the pack. "He has the scent of death on him already. Leave him for the carrion birds when we return. Now... to the gate."
I lay there for what felt like hours, though it was only minutes. The pain in my shoulder was a throbbing rhythm, keeping time with the distant sounds of the village.
I heard the first wood-snap of the perimeter fence. Then, the Chief's voice, desperate and high-pitched.
"They're in the shadows! Stand your ground! If we run, we die as cowards!"
He was wrong. They were already dead.
I watched from the tall grass as the Alpha led the charge. They didn't bark. They didn't howl. They moved like a grey tide, silent and inevitable. I saw the woman who had sorted the cloth—the one who wouldn't look at me. She didn't even have time to scream before a wolf's jaws silenced her forever.
The Chief was surrounded near the central fire. He swung a rusted axe, shouting about glory and honor. But the wolves didn't care about honor. They cared about meat.
I watched the Alpha leap. It was a blur of silver-grey fur. The Chief's "glory" ended with a sickening crunch and the sound of the axe clattering onto the stones.
One by one, the lights in the windows went dark. The screams turned into wet gurgles, and then, eventually, to a silence more terrifying than the noise.
The Alpha turned away, his massive paws thudding against the earth as he headed toward the village. The pack followed like ghosts. I let out the breath I'd been holding in a tiny, silent hiss.
Endure. I did it. I'm alive.
But then, a shadow stopped.
One wolf—scarred, with one ear torn and eyes that burned with a petty, lingering cruelty—didn't follow the others. He looked back at me, his snout wrinkling in disgust.
"The Alpha is too soft on human pups," the wolf rasped, his voice a jagged snarl. "A sacrifice should be silent forever. I don't leave loose threads to crawl back to their King."
My heart stopped. I didn't move, but the "Endure" mantra in my head turned into a scream of Run! The wolf didn't use teeth. He reached down with a clawed paw, his movements unnaturally human, and picked up a jagged, discarded stake from the dirt—a piece of the broken cart I had been hiding near.
"Make sure he's dead," the wolf muttered to himself, mimicking the Alpha's command with a mocking tone.
He lunged.
The wood was blunt and cold. It didn't slide in; it tore. I felt the ribs snap, a sickening crack that echoed in my ears, and then a cold, hollow sensation as the wood pierced straight through to my chest.
My heart.
The world didn't go black immediately. It turned white. The pain was so absolute it stopped being pain and became a deafening roar in my skull. I felt my heart hitch, a stuttering, dying beat against the wood.
The wolf twisted the stake once, a final act of malice, then spat on my face.
"Nothing but meat," he hissed.
He turned and bounded away to join the slaughter.
I lay there, pinned to the earth by a piece of trash. I could hear the village dying—the screams of the people who never fed me, the roar of the fire, the howls of the pack. But it all sounded like it was underwater.
I... will not... die in the slums...
I looked up at the cold, uncaring stars. The "glory" the old men talked about felt very far away. My hand feebly reached up, fingers brushing the blood-soaked wood sticking out of my chest.
The wolf's mockery lingered in the air long after he vanished into the trees. I lay pinned to the earth, the jagged stake a cold, heavy anchor in my chest. Each time my heart tried to beat, it struck the wood, a dull reminder that I was breaking.
As the darkness began to press in, the sounds of the burning village started to fade, replaced by a ghost of a sound from a different life.
"Stand before the King," the old man's voice whispered in my memory, crackling like the slum fires. "And you can ask for anything. Anything."
A bitter sob caught in my throat, tasting of copper and salt. I remembered the heat of those fires, the way we children would lean in, eyes wide, believing that the world had a place for us if we were just brave enough to find it.
"Because for a moment… just a moment… you're not nothing."
I looked down at my hands. They weren't reaching for gold or marble floors. They were clawing at the mud, stained with filth and my own life's blood. I wasn't standing before a King. I was lying in the waste of the things that had hunted me.
The fire of the village cast a flickering light over the clearing, looking so much like those small fires in the slums. But there was no one here to tell a story. There was only the smell of smoke and the encroaching cold.
I would rise to glory... I had told myself. I had promised the boy huddled under the broken cart that he would be someone.
My vision began to swim, the stars above blurring into white streaks. The hunger that had driven me for years—the hunger to be seen, to be known, to be something—felt so small now. It was being swallowed by the silence of the forest.
I felt my fingers go limp, my strength sliding away into the soil. With one last, flickering look at the smoke-filled sky, a small, pitiful thought drifted through the wreckage of my dreams:
Is this the path they talked about? Does my story really end here?