Aria Chen's POV
The whisper died as fast as it came.
Aria stood frozen, fingers pressed hard against the jade pendant, waiting for it to speak again. Nothing. Just the red fog rolling against her legs, the distant shrieking somewhere deep in the dark, and the cold reality of what had just happened.
A magical pendant had spoken to her.
She was alone in a monster-filled wasteland.
And behind her, the guards were already climbing back into the carriage.
"Wait—" The word tore out of her before she could stop it.
The first guard glanced back. His expression didn't change. Not curiosity. Not guilt. Just mild annoyance, like she was a fly that hadn't stopped buzzing yet.
"Please," she said. The word tasted terrible in her mouth. She hadn't begged for anything in her entire first life. "At least leave me a knife. Something."
The second guard laughed. Actually laughed, loud and genuine, like she'd said something clever at a dinner party. "Did you hear that? The princess wants a knife." He shook his head. "Sweetheart, knives are wasted on corpses."
The carriage door slammed.
The horses moved.
And within thirty seconds, the only proof that anyone had ever cared whether Aria lived or died rolled away down the road and disappeared into the grey.
She stood there long enough to make sure they weren't coming back.
Then she turned and faced the dark.
Okay, she told herself. Okay. Think.
The pendant was warm against her collarbone—warmer than skin, warmer than it should be. That whisper had been real. She hadn't imagined it. And whatever was inside this pendant was something powerful enough to make her blood feel electric just from holding it.
That was the only good thing she had.
She started walking.
The Borderlands had a sound.
It wasn't one sound—it was layers. Wind through dead branches. Water running somewhere she couldn't see. The crunch of her own feet on gravel. And underneath all of it, like a heartbeat in the earth itself, something breathing. Something huge and patient and completely uninterested in whether she was scared.
Aria kept moving.
She wasn't athletic. Seraphina's body had soft hands and delicate ankles and the muscle memory of a girl who spent her entire life in palace libraries. Every sharp rock felt like a personal attack. Her lungs burned from the thick air. Twice she twisted her ankle on uneven ground and had to stop, teeth clenched, waiting for the pain to become manageable.
She didn't let herself cry.
In my first life, she thought, I worked sixteen-hour days with migraines and never cried. I can handle rocks.
The howling started about an hour in.
It came from her left, distant at first. Then closer. Then close enough that she could tell it wasn't one animal. It was a pack.
Aria started running.
She didn't know where she was going—she just knew that standing still felt like choosing death. So she ran, arms pumping, feet slapping the ground, branches whipping at her face. Her lungs screamed. Her legs felt like wet paper. But she ran, because in her first life she had learned one thing above all others: when everything is falling apart, keep moving.
She found the cave by accident.
She was scrambling up a rocky hillside, trying to get higher ground, when her foot broke through a crust of dead leaves into empty air. She caught herself on a root, heart slamming, and looked down.
A narrow gap in the rock face. Just wide enough.
She squeezed inside.
The cave was small and smelled like wet stone. Dark—completely dark once the last of the red sky faded outside. Aria pressed her back against the far wall and pulled her knees to her chest.
Her hands were bleeding. She'd cut them on the rocks during the climb. She held them against her chest and felt the sting pulse with every heartbeat.
Stock what you have, her brain said, slipping into the corporate assessment mode that had gotten her through ten years of corporate warfare. Resources. Skills. Options.
Resources: one jade pendant that might be magic, torn clothing, bleeding hands.
Skills: fifteen years of business strategy, zero combat training, zero survival knowledge, and whatever was buried in Seraphina's memories—palace etiquette, court politics, and an extensive knowledge of historical poetry. Utterly useless.
Options: survive the night or don't.
Aria laughed.
It wasn't a happy sound. It was the kind of laugh that comes out when something is so terrible it loops back around to funny. The sound bounced off the cave walls and came back to her strange and hollow.
"From one death to another," she said out loud, to no one. "Brilliant, Aria. Really brilliant."
She thought about her first life. The reports. The presentations. The performance reviews where her boss praised her work and took credit for her ideas. She had given everything to a company that filed the paperwork to empty her office before her body was cold.
She thought about Seraphina. A girl who had studied twice as hard as every other royal, who had tried desperately to be useful, to be wanted, to be worth keeping—and been thrown away anyway.
Two lives. Same story.
Nobody gave us anything, she thought. So we never had anything to lose.
Somehow, that thought steadied her.
She pressed her palm flat against the jade pendant. It pulsed once, slow and deliberate, like something saying I hear you.
"Whatever you are," Aria whispered, "I need you to be real. Because I have nothing else."
The pendant pulsed again. Warmer this time.
And then—from outside the cave—a sound.
Low. Rumbling. Patient.
A growl.
Aria's whole body went rigid.
She stared at the cave entrance. The darkness outside was total—no moon, no stars, just the red-tinged black of a Borderlands night.
Then she saw them.
Two yellow eyes, floating in the dark. Unblinking. Fixed directly on her.
Whatever it was, it was big. She could hear its breathing now—slow, controlled breaths that puffed fog into the cold air. It wasn't panicked or frenzied. It wasn't howling for backup.
It was simply watching her. Deciding.
It knows I'm trapped, Aria realized, her blood running cold. It knows there's nowhere for me to go.
She pressed harder against the cave wall. The jade pendant suddenly blazed hot against her skin—painfully hot, like it had been dropped in fire. She grabbed it instinctively and yanked it away from her chest.
The moment her fingers closed around it, the yellow eyes outside sharpened.
The growling stopped.
Silence.
Then the wolf stepped forward into the cave entrance—and Aria finally saw it clearly.
It was the size of a horse.
Black fur that seemed to swallow the darkness around it. Paws like dinner plates. Teeth that caught no light because they were too dark, like weapons carved from shadow itself.
And it was looking at her the way predators look at prey that has already accepted its fate.
Aria looked at it.
Then she looked at her blood-slicked hands.
Then at the jade pendant, burning like a coal in her palm.
She thought about her first life. About dying alone while a laptop screen glowed beside her. About being useful and obedient and small until there was nothing left of her to bury.
She thought about Seraphina, who had cried herself to death in this very body because everyone she loved had turned their backs.
No, Aria thought. The word was calm. The word was final. Not like this. Not without a fight.
She grabbed the sharpest rock she could reach.
The wolf lunged.
And the jade pendant—the one the guards had called a worthless trinket—
Exploded.