The night after the rogues let her live, the forest felt too big.
It always had been; the Rogue Lands were nothing but distance and teeth and sky. But now, with the echoes of their laughter still scratching at the back of her mind and the taste of her own power bitter on her tongue, the emptiness pressed closer.
Luna picked her way along a rocky stream until moonrise.
She moved on stubborn legs, long after logic said she should stop. Each step jarred bruised ribs and sent flares of pain through her scraped knees. Her clothes were stiff with dried mud and smoke. Old blood had turned tacky along her left arm where the thrown stone had grazed her.
Twice she stumbled badly enough that she had to catch herself on all fours.
Her wolf whined in the back of her mind, equal parts exhausted and restless.
*Stop,* the animal part of her urged. *Curl. Breathe. Lick wounds. Sleep.*
*Keep going,* another voice—hers, human, raw—argued. *If you stop, they'll find you again. Or something worse will. Keep. Moving.*
The stream's chuckle finally gentled into a pool near a low rock outcrop. A leaning birch spread its thin branches overhead, leaves whispering in a wind too weak to matter.
It was as good a shelter as any she was likely to find.
She slid down beside the pool, boots slipping on damp stone, and sat with her back against the rock. When she let herself fully relax into it, her bones felt like they might turn to water.
The pool's surface was dark, nearly opaque under the heavy sky, the thin curve of the moon smearing across it in broken silver.
Luna stared at her reflection.
Hollowed cheeks.
Eyes too large in a too-thin face, green-silver irises bright even in the dim.
Dirt smeared along her jaw. A bruise shadowed the ridge of one cheekbone. Someone else's blood—deer, rogue, she wasn't certain anymore—streaked one side of her throat.
She barely recognized herself.
The kitchen omega, the runt who'd known every splinter in the great hall floor, who'd kept her chin tucked and her voice soft, stared back at her only in flashes, in the set of her mouth when she fought tears, in the way her shoulders still hunched defensively, like she expected a slap.
But there were new things, too.
A faint, silvery line along each wrist, only visible when the moonlight hit her skin just right—as if something under the surface shone through.
A steadiness at the base of her throat that hadn't been there before. Not visible. Felt. The coal in her chest had become... company.
She had shouted at a storm and made it listen.
She had turned earth to mud under enemies' feet.
She had howled power into the air and watched it stun wolves twice her size.
Power coiled in her blood now, restless and undeniable.
It did not keep her warm.
Not the way a body pressed against hers at night would have.
She tipped her head back against the rock and closed her eyes.
The stream gurgled softly beside her. Somewhere in the distance, an owl called—a low, hollow sound that made the darkness feel deeper.
Her wolf paced under her skin, unsettled.
Packless, it kept reminding her. Alone. No tails to touch. No shoulder to lean against. No answering howl.
The memory of Moonshadow's dens came unbidden.
Crowded sleeping chambers that had always smelled of too many bodies. Pups climbing over each other, omegas muttering and laughing, the constant, low music of breathing and snoring. She had complained, sometimes, in her own head, about the lack of privacy. The way someone always seemed to be pressing against her. The way there was never enough fresh air.
She would have given anything, in that moment, to hear even one familiar snore.
Tears pricked, sudden and fierce.
She swallowed them back, jaw clenching.
"You wanted this," she whispered harshly to the night. "You said you'd rather die in the wild than live on their scraps."
Wanting it didn't make it easy.
Her hand drifted, almost of its own accord, to her sternum.
The ember glowed there, low but constant.
Not hot now. Warm. A small, steadying weight.
She pressed her palm against it.
"I'm not... completely alone," she told herself. "I have *you.* And the Goddess. And the land."
It sounded thin even as she said it.
The Goddess did not curl around her at night.
The land did not laugh at her clumsy jokes or roll its eyes at her dramatics.
Power hummed in her veins where once there had been only fear and stubbornness. It answered when she called, it argued when she pushed too hard, it nudged her hands in new patterns.
It did not know how to listen the way another wolf could.
"Do you miss it?" she asked, quieter now, gaze flicking up to the slit of moon through the birch branches. "Pack. Voices. Being... *one of.*"
The sky didn't answer.
The ember shifted, a small, curious swirl.
Her mind wandered, unbidden, along the bond.
She'd tried not to reach for it since the dream of shadows curling around Orion's ankles, since feeling that smooth, cold wrongness where his open presence should have been.
Now, tired and raw, she brushed against it almost by reflex.
A low thrum.
Distant.
Muted.
For a heartbeat, she felt him.
Not thoughts. Not images.
Just a sense of... weight. A pressure behind her breastbone that wasn't her own. Heavy. Contained.
Lonely.
Her own loneliness, sharp and bright, slid along that thread like a question.
It met something thick.
Unresponsive.
Like a hand pushing against glass.
She flinched away, wincing.
The wall between them remained.
"Fine," she whispered, voice hoarse. "Be locked away. Be cursed. Be... whatever they've made you. I'll— I'll figure this out alone."
The word alone landed like a stone.
She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.
Her wolf, stung by the failed reach, tucked its tail.
For a while, she just sat there, listening to her own breathing and the water and the too-loud silence between sounds.
Memories rose, stubborn and uninvited.
Elia's rough voice, swearing creatively as she'd taught Luna to gut a fish.
Little Rian, one of the pups, sneaking into the kitchens to steal dough and then giggling when the flour exploded all over his fur.
Even Selene.
Her scornful laugh. The way other wolves had laughed *with* her, piling on.
Back then, surrounded by all of that, Luna had felt alone too. Invisible, except when someone needed a target.
Yet there had been *structure.* A net of bodies and rules and expectations that, even when they hurt, had held.
Out here, there was nothing left to push against but hunger and horizon.
"I don't know which kind of alone is worse," she admitted to the water.
The stream answered with a soft slap of current against stone.
She pressed her forehead to her knees and breathed.
In.
Out.
Her breath warmed the small space behind her legs.
Her scent wrapped around her—a thin mix of pine and sweat and blood and smoke.
It smelled... *wrong* to her wolf.
No pack-mark twined through. No Alpha's strength overlaying. No pup-sweetness or kitchen-herb comfort.Weak on the surface. Untethered.
Her wolf whined louder now, a restless, aching sound inside her ribs.
*We are pack animals,* it reminded her. *We run with others. We sleep in piles. We groom and snap and press neck to neck. This—this edge, this constant guard—it is not our nature.*
Luna swallowed hard.
"I know," she whispered back. "I know. But we can't go back. Not yet. Maybe not ever."
The curse perched on Moonshadow's walls like a patient, dark bird in her mind's eye.
Going back now would be walking into teeth she didn't understand.
She was not strong enough to break whatever was wrapping around Orion's soul, around her old pack's roots.
Not yet.
"And no other pack will take us," she added, bitter. "Not with *that* scent on us. Not with this—" She flexed the fingers of her right hand; faint silver lines shimmered briefly beneath the skin. "—glow. We'd be a threat at best. A resource to hoard or to cut out at worst."
The Rogue Lands had taught her that lesson quickly.
Darrin's hungry eyes. The rogue woman's calculating gaze.
Tools. Weapons. Not packmates.
The ember pulsed slowly against her palm.
A question, almost.
If she wanted, she could press more fully into its warmth. Let it fill the hollow places. Turn the ache in her chest into something sharp and bright.
Power could be a blanket.
If she let it.
She considered it, for a long stretch of silent moments.
Then she shook her head minutely.
"No," she whispered. "You're... part of me. Not all of me. I don't want to drown in you just because I'm lonely."
The admission surprised her.
The coal burned warmer.
Pleased.
She lifted her head and let it rest back against the rock again.
Above, the birch branches swayed gently, throwing shifting patterns of dark and light across her face.
She remembered, with a pang that was almost physical, watching packmates curl up around each other after long days. Warriors whispering low jokes. Parents tucking pups under bellies. Even the tight, efficient sleep of border patrols, backs to each other, ears tuned outward, trust binding them in a ring.
Touch.
She had gone weeks now without more than a tree's bark under her fingers, water over her skin, the brief, rough contact of an enemy's grab.
Her own arms around herself did not count.
Her chest hurt with the wanting of it.
It wasn't about romance.
Orion's face—those pale-mutated eyes from her dream—tried to swim up. She pushed it aside gently.
This was more basic. Animal.
"I miss being able to bump someone's shoulder just because I'm there," she whispered, voice hitching. "I miss having someone... *witness* my day."
She had walked through storms and fires and fights and omens with no one to say, at the end of it, *You did well,* or, *You were stupid,* or even just, *You survived.*
All those moments existed only in her own chest and in the memory of indifferent trees.
If she vanished under a rockslide tomorrow, the world would go on. The Rogue Lands would swallow her without comment.
Would anyone in Moonshadow... shiver, suddenly, without knowing why?
Would Orion wake from his cursed half-sleep, heart pounding, with the sense that something vital had slipped away?
She didn't know.
The not-knowing ached.
Apart from the Goddess' rare, thin intercessions, there was no one to answer her thoughts. No one to nudge her back from dangerous edges—not physically, not emotionally.
Her mind skittered toward the jagged, half-shameful thought that had been hovering more often lately:
*Did I do this to myself?*
She had chosen to leave.
He had rejected her, yes. The pack had stood and watched, yes. But she'd been the one to turn her back and step over the border.
She could have groveled. Could have begged for some lesser place.
Could have swallowed the mate-bond whole and tried to become invisible again in familiar corridors.
Instead, she'd walked into teeth and cold and this vast, echoing emptiness.
"Do you ever regret it?" she asked the bare sky. "Marking me? Pushing me out? Was there a path where I stayed and learned this slowly, surrounded by... them?"
The moon didn't answer in words.
The ember did.
It pulsed with a quiet, firm certainty.
No.
No soft path.
No safe, slow training in a pack that didn't value her until a curse forced their eyes open.
This was the only way she'd have learned to listen to roots instead of orders. To bend storms instead of under weight.
"That's what I thought," she muttered, half-laughing, half-crying.
The tears won.
Silent at first—just a blurring of her vision, a tightness in her throat.
Then harder.
A few escaped, hot tracks cutting through the grime on her cheeks.
She wiped them away with the heel of her hand, angry at herself.
No one was here to see. No one would mock.
Her own pride stung anyway.
Weak.
Runt.
Crying alone in the dark where no one cared.
She pressed her lips together until they hurt.
The Goddess had said her heart was a storm waiting to be named.
Storms were not dignified things.
They raged. They wept across hillsides. They tore leaves free and threw them around without apology.
"Fine," she told the water, half to herself. "Cry, then. Get it out. But don't drown in it."
The next tears came easier.
They slid quietly over her skin, dropped into the pool with small plinks that barely marred its surface.
She watched the ripples spread, faint and brief.
They vanished quickly.
Her chest loosened a fraction.
When she'd run dry, she sniffed once, inelegant, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
"Real pretty," she muttered. "Stormroot, chosen of the Goddess, conqueror of... mud. Sniffling on a rock."
The sarcasm soothed more than any gentle comfort might have.
She leaned forward and dipped her hands into the pool.
The water was shock-cold.
She hissed between her teeth, then cupped it and splashed it over her face.
Dirt and salt and dried blood washed away in brownish trickles.
She stayed like that for a moment, face tipped up, water dripping from her chin, gooseflesh racing along her arms.
The pool murmured against her fingers.
She felt its small, steady flow, self-contained and unconcerned with the dramas of wolves above it.
Her loneliness did not move its course.
She breathed in, the air wet and sharp in her sinuses, and let a sliver of the ember seep into her fingertips.
The water around her hands tingled.
She didn't freeze it.
Didn't push or pull.
She just *felt* it.
The way it moved around obstacles. The way it went where gravity drew it but adjusted for stones, for hollow places.
*Packless but not patternless,* something in her thought.
Wolves had their way of moving together, of knotting around each other like currents.
She had stepped outside that river.
That didn't mean there were no other flows.
Trees. Streams. Wind. The quiet hum of earth.
They weren't pack.
They didn't offer warmth or shared stories.
But they were... present.
Consistent.
She let her awareness stretch outward, thin as a spider's silk, barely touching the ground, the nearest roots, the thin skin of water.
Under her back, the rock steadied her.
Around her, the forest breathed.
A squirrel chattered faintly somewhere above.
A fox padded softly along the opposite bank, its paws almost soundless. It paused, glanced her way, nose twitching, then moved on, unbothered.
The loneliness didn't vanish.
It settled.
Became a layer instead of an all-consuming fog.
Her heart was still packless.
Her bed was still stone.
But there were other kinds of belonging.
The Goddess' mark burned in her blood.
The elements had begun to recognize her touch.
Moonshadow's curse had thrown a spidery, dark net over her origins, but it had not erased them. It had not erased *her.*
She was tethered in invisible ways—to the pack that had shunned her, to the Alpha who had rejected her, to the moon that watched, to the land that hummed.
The rope between her and Orion might be frayed, muffled by something slick and old.
The rope between her and anyone else might be cut or never tied.
But there were threads, thinner but no less real, that connected her to soil and storm.
"Maybe," she said quietly, fingers combing idly through the freezing water, "maybe 'pack' can... mean more than just wolves in the same den."
Her wolf bristled at that, instinctive and affronted.
*Nothing replaces pack,* it insisted.
"Nothing replaces," she conceded. "But things can... add. You don't have to be less wolf to also be more *world.*"
The wolf huffed, unconvinced but too tired to argue.
She smiled to herself, a small, crooked thing.
The pool's surface calmed.
Her own heart slowed, the frantic edge of earlier panic softening into an ache she could breathe around.
The clear awareness settled in with it:
Magic or no magic, Goddess-marked or no, she was still a social creature curled alone in the wild.
That hurt.
It would keep hurting.
No amount of power would erase that.
Maybe the point wasn't to numb it.
Maybe the point was to carry it.
To let it carve her into a shape that understood other people's loneliness. Other wolves' isolation. Other hearts pressed against walls, internal or external.
If the Moon Goddess had pulled her out of the pack's tight circle, burned her path with trial and power and emptiness, perhaps it was because a leader forged in a crowd knew only how to speak to crowds.
A leader forged alone might know how to reach those at the edges.
"Is that it?" she asked the thin moon, voice wry. "You're turning a runt into someone who can hold a different kind of pack?"
Wind slipped through the birch leaves overhead.
They whispered against each other.
Her chest warmed.
Not an answer.
An acknowledgment.
She let out a slow breath.
"Fine," she said. "But you'd better send me *someone* eventually, or I'm going to start talking to rocks more than I already do."
The rock at her back, being a rock, said nothing.
The ember, amused, flickered.
She stayed beside the pool until the cold seeped all the way into her legs and practicality forced her to move.
She gathered a small pile of damp wood and coaxed a thin, smokeless fire into existence, careful not to draw more attention than necessary. She dried what she could, ate a strip of meat so tough she had to chew until her jaw ached, then curled on her side with her back to the rock and the fire at her feet.
Sleep came in fits, clumped around half-remembered images of shoulders brushing hers, of pups' weight on her ribs, of Orion's hand reaching without touching.
In every dream, when she turned to meet those presences fully, they blurred.
Melted into fog.
She woke with empty arms and empty eyes.
Each time, she pressed her hand to the ground, to her chest, to the air, breathing through the spike of loss until it ebbed.
At dawn, she rose.
She stamped warmth back into her feet.
She rolled her stiff shoulders.
She pressed her palm once more against that steady coal and whispered, "We're still packless. But we're not purposeless."
Then she turned her face toward a horizon she couldn't see and walked on, a single, small figure threading her way between trees—lonely, yes, but carrying, deep and stubborn and growing, the first quiet shape of a different kind of pack in her heart.