People say that you only realize what you had when you lose it, but what if you knew all along and you still lost? What if you tried with every breath you took to preserve that thing, that person you loved and cherished above any other and she still chose the other?

I wanted to blame her, to stop her, to shout at the top of my lungs just so she would let go and turn to me, come to me where I waited for her at the edge of the crowd. What I was seeing was how she held onto him like he was the most precious thing in her life, the only thing that she truly wanted and needed. And I couldn't do anything... anything at all but watch, hold my breath, count my prayers as I lifted them silently.

Everything in me broke. I knew no one listened to that man whose heart was shattering while he watched her happiness unfold. I knew that even if I cried out to her, she wouldn't hear me. She wouldn't notice if I waved my hand in front of her face. She wouldn't want me to breathe that air she took in from him.

She was too far gone to return where I needed her.

They tore their clothes, the people around me. They shifted into their wolves, acting on the same compulsion their leaders were acting upon. The Moon was awake tonight and she forced them to act like their nature required. Rejoice in my silent despair. Bask in the guttural animalistic sounds that came out of their throats. Fall underneath the passion that none of them had foreseen until it exploded.

Looking at how they reveled into each other's arms, how they spread those incorporeal wings toward that future I didn't belong in, I felt bitter. I grew angry. I shattered.

I wanted to burst into millions of pieces and scatter onto the chilly breeze that kissed my skin. I wanted to turn into glass and stick into their skin, make them—her—hurt the same way she hurt me with what she did now.

The sound of paws thundering across the ground told me the pack was retreating now. Their howls rang clear in my ears. Merry songs, energetic sounds as they went on to run through the woods, chanted out their joy beneath that same Moon that cursed me again.

Her head fell to the crook of his neck, her lips tasting his skin all over again. He was no longer screaming but grunting, grinding into her, once the initial pain of her bite had worn off only the instinctual response of his body was left. To claim.

'Call it quits!' I wanted to shout, but nothing would come out. I wanted to melt away just like the wolves were melting away from this place where destiny revealed itself, but I stood alone, petrified and unblinking as I watched them sink into each other and forget the eyes that were still watching, seeing, filling with grief that bubbled from the depths of that rejected heart.

Brushing the tears away, I found the strength to spin around, turn my back to the sight of them moving toward the house as they kissed and ripped at each other's clothes. Passion and heartbreak. Completion both to their bond and to my dismissal.

I was not needed. I was not wanted. I was... expendable. Always at the edges.

Training my eyes on the barely illuminated path leading toward town, I ran, fled, left them behind to drown into that happiness of theirs. I wanted to drown too. I wanted to immerse myself in liquid and never come back up for air.

With the pack gone, probably hunting in the woods, the town seemed deserted, barely a dozen of lights on the houses' windows letting me know some of them had remained. Children with their mothers or people who were too old to roam the forest in the cold night, I didn't know and I didn't want to find out now who had stayed.

The idyllic view of the houses, white picket fences and well-kept porches, clean streets with old style lanterns to illuminate my path, it was the exact opposite of the ruins inside me, ruins I wanted to forget and blissful oblivion was what I sought with my eyes searching down the street.

That light, dim inside the small bar I navigated toward, it was the only light my eyes saw for days.

By the time she found me sinking under the influence, I was as blank as a newborn. Granted, a lot less innocent and a lot drunker but as mentally wiped as a baby.

All I remembered was my own name and obviously, Oracle.

Whipping my head around when I felt the body plop down on the stool next to mine, I discovered her in her usual plain dress. Pale yellow or so it looked under the light. Her white hair was braided at the back of her head, a few locks falling out of the knot to frame her wrinkled face as a displeased expression painted on it when she turned to me.

Beside the two of us, there were a few other patrons sitting at the round tables arranged close to one another in the small room filled with alcohol vapors and cigarettes' smoke. And just like the wooden furniture taking up the space, those patrons seemed in an equally disheveled state.

"Lucas," Oracle greeted quietly, almost like she was afraid to speak to me now that it had happened. I chuckled at her, finding the fact that she'd come here because of me amusing. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn't step a foot inside a place like this, but circumstances were far from normal right now. And so was I.

I was sulking and wasting myself inside a run-down bar that was open 24/7 and to the utmost delight of poor rejected souls such as I served a fine selection of strong balms to wounds both physical and of the metaphysical kind.

"What do you want, Oracle?" I grumbled, my speech slurred. "Are you happy now that she chose him?"

She was silent for a while and that silence stretched in between us, pregnant with so much she could say but didn't dare voice out. Probably because she saw me fragile, she knew I was barely holding myself up, or maybe because it was true. She had wanted them together, her manipulations finally pushed her into his arms where Oracle considered it was her place—with the other man.

"It's just what it is, Lucas. I'm neither happy nor disappointed with her for doing what she was meant to," she said at last. A heavy, tired sigh tumbled out of her lips. It couldn't fool me. I could see the glimmer in her pale blues. She had been waiting for this moment, warned me time and again it was going to pass and now it had. She was content that what she'd wanted all along had transpired, casualties notwithstanding.

"But I am disappointed with you. Just look at yourself. We have a war at our hands and you're wasting yourself away here when you have your own destiny to fulfill," she reminded. My destiny, the one she spoke of was to die and even though she didn't go as far as to spell it out for me, the unspoken words echoed in my mind, burned a trail inside of it and then anger followed.

Rage, silent, scorching, consuming every logical thought burst inside me until I itched to hit something, preferably the woman who stood next to me and thought it was her right to play with me and my life, to make me do things I never wanted to do. Demand it from me.

"It's not my war to fight and I don't want that destiny you're talking about," I gritted out, the hand around the glass tightening its grip as I took a swing. "Besides, what do you want me to do? I'm here, aren't I? I'm waiting like a dog for its master to tell it when to launch so what else is there for me to do now?"

"It's time you became what you were always supposed to be, Lucas. You must go and explore your father's heritage." Her voice was low, barely a whisper, but her words, they were like shouting in my ears.

"I do believe she had something in mind when she created you and she must have been happy when she did to make you into such a fine man, Lucas." She was talking about her goddess once more, a goddess I hated, one I hadn't been entirely sure I believed in at a point, but with all of the evidence I had now, I was almost convinced she was real, and the Moon hated me right back as much as I did her.

"I'm not saying she chose an easy path for you to walk," Oracle went on, her conviction in her goddess' rightfulness irking the living shit out of me as I listened to this lesson about divine intentions. "But I believe she's going to reward you in the end. She's always fair to her children and she will be fair to you too. I can see it in your future—a time when you'll be happy and loved and you will love in return, but first, you'll need to prove yourself worthy of her gift."

I looked down at the amber liquid in my glass not understanding why I needed to prove anything to anyone and although, I was a coward who didn't have it in myself to face the woman I loved about all the things she did and ways she'd used and hurt me, I wasn't afraid to ask this one question. "Why? What do I need from your goddess so I must prove myself to her?"

Unseeing eyes bore at me, eyes that saw beyond what I could but were blind to the tangible world around us.

"You're lacking, Lucas. You don't have a soul or if you do it's half of what you need and I believe she's finally presenting you with the opportunity to be complete."

"Without Scarlet," I added.

Oracle nodded. "You aren't meant for her, Lucas. You are meant to leave her with him and save her."

I downed my drink. She was asking me to become a traitor and with how things had developed I could as well do that.

I had no reason to stay any longer.