Lyrai (Ghost)
The world has forgotten how to hold me.
The wind still swept through the Bloodpine Forest, tugging at branches and scattering needles across the frozen ground, but it passed through me as though I were smoke.
No weight.
No friction.
No warmth.
Once, I had feared death would be a door slamming shut.
Instead, it became a house without walls.
I drift along the ancestral paths, bare feet hovering just above the frost, my steps inaudible. My shadow doesn't form properly anymore; it spills beneath me in the wrong direction, dragging behind, like something reluctant to belong.
The moonlight bends around me uneasily, skirting the outline of my shape. Ghosts are anomalies; the world doesn't like them.
A pity.
I didn't ask to be one.
The ruins of the old pack village rise before me—charred wood, weed-choked stone foundations, a watchtower lurching sideways like a drunk sentinel. A thin mist curls between the structures where memories still bleed through.
I stood at what was once my home.
The collapsed porch.
The ash-stained threshold.
The hollow where the door used to hang crookedly after the storm of my thirteenth winter.
My mother's laughter once lived inside these walls.
My father's warm rumble.
My own voice—loud, messy, trying to belong to both worlds.
Now there is only quiet.
I kneel, though technically I do not need to bend my knees.
Ghosts don't obey the laws of bones, but habits cling longer than flesh.
My translucent fingers drift over the fractured floorboards.
"Hello," I whisper to the empty house.
The sound doesn't echo. Sound doesn't truly leave my mouth anymore—it reverberates through memory instead. But the forest responds anyway. A low pulse. A tremor in the roots. The ancient wards still recognize the signature of my soul, even if the living do not.
Then the pulse fades.
Everything fades.
This is my eternity: longing without touch, grief without tears, memory without warmth.
The moon rises higher, thin as a curved blade, and something—some instinct buried in the fractured half of me that still feels—pulls my gaze upward.
She's looking at it tonight.
The Moon Goddess sees all wolfkind, or so the old stories insisted. When I was small, I believed she had favorites. Chosen ones. Marked fates.
Now I know better.
The moon sees everything.
But she does nothing.
My chest aches with a phantom echo of the wound that killed me. That memory shouldn't still exist. I shouldn't be able to feel what a ghost no longer has.
But I do.
I remember the Alpha's hands.
The pressure is crushing my throat.
The betrayal that burned hotter than his grip.
My stepsister's cold, hungry gaze—Selene, beautiful and terrified of losing everything she believed was hers.
I remember the sound my soul made when it broke.
It sounds like a mirror shattering underwater.
Half of me dissolves into the earth beneath my dying body.
Half pulled like a spark into the darkness of the Ethereal realms.
I died twice that night.
Once in the flesh.
Once in the soul.
The forest around me stirs suddenly, ripping me away from memory. Leaves don't rustle in warning—no breeze reaches me—but the treetops tremble. Something approaches. Not a wolf. Not human. Not entirely… alive.
My awareness sharpens.
A cold ripple travels across the land, brushing the edges of my ghost-form like the passing of a shadow that has teeth.
"Not you," I whisper. "Not again."
But the Devourer does not answer.
It never does.
It only watches.
I turn away from its distant presence and drift further into the ruins, winding between collapsed walls and broken beams. The more I walk, the more my form flickers—ghosts draining energy the way living lungs exhale. If I wander too far from the ancestral grounds, my shape thins to nothing.
Tonight, though…something anchors me stronger. A new vibration trembles through the soil. A heartbeat that isn't mine. A chord struck on strings I haven't touched in years.
I stopped.
The world holds its breath.
A whisper threads through the air—light as moonlit smoke.
Lyrai.
My name.
Not spoken aloud.
Not heard with ears.
But remembered.
Pulled from somewhere beyond the veil between worlds.
It hits me so hard, my ghost-body falters, glitching like an interrupted projection. I clutch my own chest, not because I can feel it but because habit makes me try.
"No," I breathe. "It's too soon."
The heartbeat grows stronger.
Closer.
A second pulse answers it—my pulse.
The one trapped in the soil.
The one that never crossed over.
The one still screaming beneath the roots.
I stagger back until my spine meets an invisible barrier, stopping me as though the air has hardened.
"Please," I whisper to the night. "Don't come. Not yet."
But souls never listen.
Not to fear.
Not to reason.
Not even to death.
They listen only to themselves.
A soft light blooms at the edge of the ruins, glowing between the skeletal branches. Pale. Unsteady. Searching.
A girl steps into the clearing.
Breathing.
Human.
Alive.
But her eyes—silver mixed with something wild—stare at the world like she's seeing two layers of reality at once. Moonfire flickers at the edges of her pupils, and her gaze darts across the ruins before landing directly on me.
She sees me.
No living creature has seen me in decades.
Her voice cracks as she speaks the truth neither of us should be hearing:
"…Lyrai?"
I collapsed to my knees.
Because the girl standing before me is not a stranger.
She is me.
And she is not me.
She is the beast-half. The reincarnation.
The soul that fled to survive.
"Eira," I choke out.
Her breath shatters into frost.
And as we stare at one another across life and death, the moon flares overhead—bright enough to cast shadows where my ghost should have none.
Something ancient wakes.
Something dangerous.
Something that has been hunting our fractured souls since the moment we split.
The Devourer's presence thickens, curling around the forest like smoke birthed by cosmic absence.
Eira pales.
"Lyrai…what is that?"
My ghost trembles with a fear I haven't felt since the night I died.
"It's what killed our wolf," I whisper.
"And now…it wants the rest of us."