"Hi, yes you aren't dreaming, it's the chubby Kelly," I say inwardly as I see the unhappy face expression of Jason who is disheartened. 

The guests laugh at us. They call our couple all sort of names. "The prince charming and the pancakes' eater Kelly" is one I can sadly remember."

"I, Jason Bentley of the South pack, reject you Kelly Thompson as my mate and the Luna Queen," he declared fiercely.

***
Kelly Thompson, an eighteen-year-old curvaceous and wolfless she-wolf, has been quietly admiring Jason Bentley, the heir apparent to the throne of the dominant South pack, for a number of years.

Unfortunately for Kelly, she doesn't get the same attention in return from Alpha heir Jason, as the handsome daughter of his old father's Gammas, Betty Nord, is already the love of the pack's future Alpha. But, the plump Kelly has an advantage over the skinny Betty because of a strong vow made by Jason's father, the Alpha King Don Bentley, that his son will marry the daughter of his Betas who gave their lives two years ago in a fight against the North pack's fiercest adversaries in order to preserve the life of the Alpha heir.

But clearly, nothing goes as smoothly as Kelly imagines.

The Rejected Curvy Luna Queen

It is not a place but a *sensation*—a scream frozen mid-rupture, a synapse between dimensions that twists our bones into origami. Time here is a shattered hourglass; ice from the tundra drifts alongside ash from the Godforge, and the air reeks of burnt ozone and wilted roses. Eden walks ahead, his stormlit eye reflecting a void that isn’t there, while Veyd’s golden-bloodied fingers leave smoldering prints on the ice. Jara grips her rifle like a talisman, her scavenged lens cracked but still scanning for threats that don’t register as real. 


The Weaver’s voice curls around us, silk and serrated steel. **“You’ve tasted my siblings’ power—Lumen’s purity, Malleus’s greed. But I am the first wound. The oldest hunger.”** 


The Hunger stirs in my veins, a shadow coiled around my pulse. *It lies. We are older.* 


*Are we?* I think, but it doesn’t answer. 


The fracture