“Welcome my lady.” The midwife bowed as she raised the Princess who had just been born.

But the storm arrived with no warning.

One moment the Gravemire skies were dull and gray, and the next, they split with a roar of thunder so loud it silenced the entire courtyard. Lightning danced above the ancestral halls, illuminating the sharp black spires of the Pack Keep and the blood that had already been spilled that day.

A baby cried.

Somewhere within the eastern wing, in a birthing room soaked in the scent of death and salt, a girl was born. Her cries were sharp, relentless, as if she knew what the world would take from her before she even opened her eyes.

Her name was Aurelia.

.

No one celebrated her birth anymore.

No drums. No howls. No feast to welcome her into the world.

Because the moment she was born, whispers began.

“She doesn’t look like him…”

“Those aren’t Alpha Ronric’s eyes.”

“Lirae… what did you do?”

At the center stood Lirae, barefoot, her hair soaked with rain, the child swaddled tightly in her arms.

She looked thinner than she had the day before. Almost ghostlike. But her voice was steady when she spoke.

“I did not lay with another,” she said. “But if my child is to be cursed by your fear… then take me instead.”

The Elders looked to Ronric.

He held a low expression. “You brought shame to my name.” he said as he bent his head hiding his tears.

“She’s innocent, my baby is and she's yours!.” Lirae exclaimed.

“The pack doubts her blood.”

“Then I will raise her myself,” Lirae begged, “out of sight, out of reach. Let me go into exile if I must ”

Ronric was going to say yes but the elders objected immediately.

It had been three days after her birth, while her mother was trying to recover and she trying to grow. Luna Lirae was accused of adultery.

Alpha Ronric loved his wife so much, so he was willing to forgive her.

But the elders didn't want that. According to tradition, he was to either kill the baby that had partially been formed from adultery or kill the woman involved.

“If you kill my baby, I would rebel against my lord and take my own life if I fail to take the life of everyone involved.” Lady Lirae cried as she was on her knees.

She couldn't bear to lose her newborn, so gave her life in exchange.

And the next day, a Sword was passed on Lirae’s throat in the center of the Alpha's estate and he bled within as he saw the woman he loved the most die under his command

The baby didn't cry and only stared. As if waiting to go with her mother.

But when a servant pried her from her mother’s arms, she wailed so loudly it echoed off the courtyard walls above the rain, above the gasps, above even the silence Ronric left in his wake as he turned away.

He didn’t look back at the blood soaking into the stone. He left with a sharp pain in his chest.

He didn’t look back at the child.

Later that night, as the storm dragged on and the fires burned low in the keep, the child was handed to a wet nurse not one of nobility, but a servant woman with trembling hands.

“Feed her in the shed,” Lady Isabelle had ordered, her voice wrapped in silk and ice. “She is not to stay in the main wing.”

The Alpha needed a Luna immediately and that was when Aurelia's biggest nightmare came into her life.

Out of loneliness and desperation, Alpha Ronric married his concubine Isabelle who had tried seducing him for a long time.

She did not know love. She did not know warmth.

Only the damp stone floor of a servants’ shed. The stale milk she drank from cracked bottles. The distant sound of laughter in the halls above her.

And whispers.

Always whispers.

“She’s the cursed child.”

“She’ll bring the pack down with her.”

“She should’ve died with Lirae.”

Aurelia grew up in that silence.

Learned not to ask. Learned not to cry too loudly. Learned that her presence was a stain in a world that only wanted her gone.

But she survived.

Even as the storm outside faded and the stars returned to the Gravemire sky, inside the keep, one thing remained clear:

Aurelia was never meant to live.

And yet… she did.