MARKED FOR PRETEND - Chapter 2: Chapter 2

*CHELSEA*
They found me near the edge of the wildlands, where the air always smelled of damp earth and forgotten things.
I was gathering blue thistleroot, the kind that made your fingers tingle if you picked it wrong. My basket was half full when the wind shifted. Birds went quiet. Even the insects held their breath.
Then came the scent. Wolves.
I didn’t look up right away. I knew what I’d see before I saw them.
Three men in crisp black uniforms. Gold embroidery. Sigils stitched onto their chests. One carried a scroll. The other two carried swords they wouldn’t need.
The village watched from a distance. They always did, when it came to me. Never too close. Never too kind.
“She’s the witch’s girl,” someone muttered.
“No place for her in the Selection,” another hissed. “They must be mistaken.”
But they weren’t mistaken.
And I wasn’t fully a witch.
They didn’t know that, of course. No one did. Not really.
I had no wolf. My shift never came. Most wolves changed by eighteen, sometimes earlier. But I had passed eighteen with no stir, no growl in my chest, no silver thread pulling me to the moon. And in our world, that meant one thing.
Broken.
So they called me witch. Because I lived with one. Because I worked with herbs. Because they were too afraid to call me nothing.
But even that name it never truly fit.
The woman I called Ma had power, yes, but nothing close to what real witches carried in their bones. She stitched spells like she stitched fabric: slowly, simply, with fingers calloused from years of surviving. She was feared, yes but also tolerated, because she helped.
She saved.
And me? I helped her mix teas and poultices. I learned how to silence pain. How to burn fever from the body. But I’d never called the wind. Never lit a fire with my palm. Never bled magic like the stories said witches did.
Not until later, anyway.
Ma once told me the truth in a whisper, during a night when thunder rolled and my fever nearly split me in two. She’d held my head in her lap and said, “You weren’t born of me, child. But the stars said I’d find you. So I did.”
She never said more. Never told me who my real parents were. Only that I’d come to her wrapped in cloth soaked with magic and mystery, and she’d raised me as her own.
But I always felt it that something inside me didn’t fully belong.
The guards approached like I was prey. Their movements were stiff, rehearsed. I noticed how none of them looked me in the eye.
“Chelsea Ravenspell,” the first guard said. “By order of the Council of Elders and in fulfillment of an honored pact, you are hereby summoned to participate in the Sacred Selection.”
I stared at him like he’d grown horns.
“You’re joking.”
He wasn’t.
He unrolled the scroll like a funeral banner. My name was there in thick ink, etched between ancient runes and royal seals.
“The Selection is for wolves,” I said coldly. “Or have the rules changed?”
“It is by royal command,” he said, ignoring my tone.
“Do you know what I am?” I asked, voice low.
Behind him, I saw the black carriage at the base of the hill. Horses. Royal crest. The kind of luxury that never came out this far.
They were serious.
“You are the daughter of the witch who once saved this realm from bloodshed,” the guard replied. “And the promise made to her must be honored.”
My stomach twisted.
“My mother died for these people. And now they want to dress me in silk and pretend like her blood still matters?”
“You have no choice,” he said. “And if your mother were here, she would tell you the same.”
That silenced me more than anything else could.
Ma wouldn’t want me here. Not in that palace. Not among wolves.
But she’d never let me run from fate either.
So I didn’t pack. Didn’t cry. Didn’t say goodbye to the village that had never claimed me.
I walked down the hill with the wind biting my back, and stepped into a carriage lined in velvet and secrets.
The thistleroot basket lay forgotten in the dirt, the blue petals already turning black beneath the setting sun.