Rejected Omega Was Told to Sing the Luna Hymn as a Joke – But Her Voice Left the Alpha King Speechless

The Journey to the Capital

Dawn came too quickly and not quickly enough. I stood in the courtyard as the king’s caravan prepared to depart: massive horses, armed guards, and supply wagons.

The whole pack had turned out to see them off, to bow and scrape and promise loyalty. No one looked at me.

I wore the same kitchen dress from the night before because it was the cleanest thing I owned. My hair was braided down my back, and I carried nothing.

The king appeared in full traveling gear—dark leather and weapons that looked well-used. He barely glanced at me before jerking his chin toward one of the carriages.

“You’ll ride with the supply wagon.”

Not with him, not even with the guards—with the supplies. I climbed into the wagon bed, settling among crates of food and rolled tents.

The wood was hard and splintered; it would be a miserable journey. I smiled anyway.

“Catherine.”

I looked up. My father stood beside the wagon, his face carefully blank.

“You will behave with honor. You will not embarrass this pack further.”

Not “be safe,” not “write to us,” not even “I’m sorry”—just “don’t embarrass us.”

“Yes, father.”

Ambition and Destruction

He nodded once, then walked away. Angelia appeared in his place, her expression unreadable for a moment.

I thought she might actually say something real, something sisterly.

“I hope you know what you’ve done,”

she said quietly.

“The capital isn’t kind to wolfless freaks. You’ll be torn apart within a week.”

“Then I guess I’ll finally have something in common with you,”

I replied, my voice pleasant.

“We’ll both know what it’s like to be destroyed by our own ambitions.”

Her eyes flashed with rage, but the wagons were already moving. I watched our pack house shrink in the distance and watched the forests I’d grown up in fade to dots on the horizon.

I didn’t look back. The journey took three days, and I spent them bouncing around in the supply wagon, eating dried meat and stale bread, and sleeping on burlap sacks.

The guards ignored me completely; the king never checked on me once. It should have been humiliating, but it was freeing.

For three days, no one expected anything from me. No one watched me with disgust or pity; no one reminded me of what I lacked.

I was just no one, and no one was exactly who I wanted to be.

The Palace and the Underworld

On the third evening, we reached the capital. I’d never seen anything like it.

The city sprawled across the valley like a living thing: buildings of white stone and dark wood, and markets that glowed with lamplight. At the center, rising above everything else, was the palace.

It was beautiful, with marble and glass and soaring towers that caught the sunset and threw it back in shades of gold and crimson. But as we passed through the gates into the palace grounds, I noticed something else.

The lower levels were different—darker. The beautiful facade didn’t extend below ground.

The wagon stopped in a courtyard, and a sharp-faced woman in gray appeared.

“This is the wolfless one?”

One of the guards nodded. The woman’s lip curled.

“Follow me.”

I climbed down from the wagon, my legs stiff from three days of travel. The woman—she never gave her name—led me through a side entrance and down a narrow staircase.

We went into the underground. It was vast, carved from the bedrock beneath the palace.

Corridors extended in every direction, lit by flickering torches. The air was cool and damp and smelled like stone and something else… something metallic.

Blood, I realized. Old blood.

The King’s Monsters

“You’ll work in the lower kitchens,”

the woman said crisply.

“You’ll sleep in the servants’ quarters. You’ll not speak unless spoken to. You’ll not go above ground without explicit permission. And you’ll absolutely never go near the king’s private chambers.”

She said that last part with particular emphasis, her eyes boring into mine.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Someone will show you to your quarters. You start work at dawn.”

She swept away, leaving me alone in the corridor. I waited for someone to collect me, but no one came.

Slowly, I became aware that I wasn’t alone. Faces appeared in doorways—servants, I assumed, though they moved with strange fluidity.

They stared at me with expressions I couldn’t read—not quite hostile, but not welcoming either. They were curious, wary, like they were trying to decide what I was.

“You’re the singer,”

a voice said behind me. I turned to find a young woman, maybe twenty, with dark skin and darker eyes.

“The one who made the king freeze.”

Word traveled fast, apparently.

“I’m Catherine.”

“I know who you are. What I don’t know is why you’re here. The king doesn’t bring guests to the lower levels.”

“I’m not a guest. I’m a servant.”

“Servants don’t arrive in the king’s personal caravan.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“And servants definitely don’t get the king’s protection.”

Royal Protection

“I don’t have the king’s protection.”

“Then why,”

she said slowly,

“did he explicitly forbid anyone from harming you?”

My breath caught.

“What?”

“This morning, before you arrived, he called a full assembly and declared that you were under royal protection—that anyone who touched you would answer to him personally.”

She tilted her head.

“So I’ll ask again: who are you, really?”

“I’m no one,”

I whispered.

A scream cut through the air. We both froze.

The scream came again—raw, agonized, barely human. It was coming from deeper in the underground.

The young woman grabbed my arm.

“Don’t. Don’t ever go toward those sounds. Don’t ask what they are. Don’t even think about them.”

“But someone’s hurt!”

“Someone’s always hurt down here,”

she said grimly.

“This is where the king keeps his monsters.”

The Alpha King’s Cage

She started to pull me away, but I resisted, my heart pounding.

“What do you mean, monsters?”

She looked at me with something like pity.

“You really don’t know, do you? You don’t know what the king is.”

“He’s an alpha.”

“He’s cursed,”

she hissed.

“And you just walked into his cage.”

Another scream, closer now, and beneath it, a sound that raised every hair on my neck. It was a roar that wasn’t quite wolf and wasn’t quite human—something other, something wrong.

The young woman dragged me down a different corridor into a small room with several cots.

“Stay here. Don’t leave until morning. And for the love of the moon goddess, don’t let your curiosity kill you.”

She shut the door, and I heard a lock click. I was alone in the dark, listening to screams echo through stone.

I finally understood. The king hadn’t rescued me; he’d imprisoned me.

When Fear Meets Courage

I didn’t sleep. How could I, with those sounds crawling through the walls?

There were screams that cut off abruptly, roars that made the stone floor vibrate, and underneath it all, a rhythmic pounding. It was like something massive throwing itself against a door over and over, testing the limits of its cage.

I sat on the narrow cot, hugged my knees, and tried not to think about what the young woman had said.

“Cursed.”

What did that even mean? Alphas were powerful, yes, but they were still wolves, bound by the same nature as the rest of their kind—unless they weren’t.

Unless the king was something else entirely. Dawn came eventually, signaled by a shift in the air and the way the screaming finally stopped, replaced by an exhausted, terrible silence.

The lock clicked, and the door opened. A different servant stood there, an older man with gray hair and kind eyes that had seen too much.

“Come. You’ll work in the lower kitchens today. Stay close to me and don’t speak to anyone.”

The King’s Sanctuary

I followed him through the maze of corridors. In daylight—or what passed for it down here with the torches—I could see more details.

There were scratch marks on the stone walls and doors reinforced with iron chains bolted to the ceiling. In places, they hung empty.

This wasn’t a servants’ quarters; it was a dungeon.

“What is this place?”

I whispered. The old man didn’t look at me.

“The king’s sanctuary, where he keeps the things that can’t be allowed in the light.”

“Things? You mean people?”

“I mean what I said.”

His voice was gentle but firm. We reached the kitchens, a vast space carved from living rock with massive hearths, preparation tables, and cauldrons big enough to bathe in.

It was hot and loud and chaotic, with servants moving with practiced efficiency. No one looked at me directly, but I felt their attention like pinpricks on my skin.

The old man—his name was Thomas, I learned—set me to work on menial tasks: peeling vegetables, scrubbing pots, and carrying water from the deep wells. It was mind-numbing work.