The days after the Moonstone Grove felt like walking with new skin.
Everything was sharper.
The crunch of gravel under her boots, the hiss of wind through dry grass, the suck and slip of mud—each sound came with a second layer now, a soft, humming echo that whispered not just *what* the world was doing, but *how.*
She could feel the weight of clouds before she saw them.
Sense the tiny, restless tremors of roots stretching underfoot even when the trees above looked still.
The ember in her chest—no longer just a coal, but a small, turning moon—responded faster when she reached for it, eager without being wild.
The world noticed her.
When she pressed a palm to a boulder to steady herself, warmth pulsed faintly from rock to skin.
When she drank from a stream cupped in her hands, the water shivered, just barely, before touching her lips, as if recognizing an old story in her veins.
It was not enough to make survival effortless.
Hunger still gnawed.
Cold still bit.
Her limbs still throbbed with the day's walking by nightfall.
But under all of that was a new… rightness. As if some misalignment she hadn't even known to name had shifted closer to place.
On the third morning after leaving the grove, she woke with her heart pounding and no memory of a nightmare.
The dream that lingered was not claws or curses, but light.
Silver, white, blue—colors of the moon and her own power—spilling across a dark surface.
A word had hung at the edge of consciousness when she jerked awake, evaporating before she could catch it.
She sat up in the little hollow she'd chosen beside a fallen log, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
Frost silvered the grasses around her. Her breath puffed white in the cold air. The sky was a clear, brittle blue; the moon, a thin ghost in one corner, watched with a sleepy eye.
Luna pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders and listened.
The land hummed.
A faint, restless vibration under the frost.
Weather was shifting.
Even without the Goddess' new thread in her, she would have known winter was coming. The thinness of game. The bite in the wind. The way the sun seemed to slide lower each day.
With it, she could feel more.
Something building at the edges of her awareness.
Pressure.
Potential.
Like the swell of a held breath.
She chewed on the last of her tough meat strip and washed it down with a sip of water, trying not to think too hard about how little remained.
Food had become an ugly math she did each morning.
Power had helped her hunt once. It would need to help again soon.
But something in her said, *Wait.*
So she did.
She broke camp, slung her light pack over her shoulders, and followed the slope of the land where it drew her—toward a line of low hills that rose ahead, their tops dusted with frost, their flanks clothed in a mix of scrub and stubborn pines.
The air grew colder as she climbed.
The feeling of pressure grew with it.
By midday, thin clouds had gathered—high, streaking fronds that caught the pale sun and smeared its light. The wind, which had been a playful, fitful thing in recent days, had gone still.
Her wolf paced inside, uneasy.
"Storm?" she muttered, squinting at the sky. "Snow? I'd rather not be on an open slope for that, thanks."
No answer came in wind or cloud.
But the little moon in her chest turned.
Her steps drew her toward a notch between two hills, where stunted trees clung to rock and the ground narrowed.
As she approached, the sense of being *called* intensified until it was almost a physical tug on her sternum.
"Goddess?" she breathed, pulse speeding. "Is this You again, or something else?"
No silver woman stepped out from behind a tree.
No disembodied voice shook the air.
Instead, the wind, which had lain limp all morning, rose in a single, deliberate gust.
It hit her from the front, hard enough to make her stagger.
It wasn't cold, the way wind should have been here this time of year.
It was… scented.
Ozone. Rain. Salt.
She choked, coughing.
Not because it burned.
Because it filled her lungs with too much at once—the smell of summer storms and far-off seas, things she had never actually seen, only heard about in stories.
When she blinked away the involuntary tears that sprang to her eyes, the notch between the hills had changed.
Just as the Moonstone Grove had not looked entirely like other forest, this place was not just another dip in stone.
The rock walls that rose on either side were smoother here, their usual jagged faces worn down into flowing curves. Fine veins of pale mineral—quartz?—ran through them, catching the thin light and tossing it back in scattered glimmers.
The sky above the notch looked… deeper. Higher.
As if someone had taken the little piece of sky over this place and stretched it, so that clouds passing overhead moved more slowly, as though reluctant to leave.
The air tasted charged.
Every hair on Luna's arms lifted.
The little moon in her chest rolled, then pulsed, hard enough she pressed a hand to her sternum with a wince.
"All right," she whispered. "Okay. I'm listening."
She stepped into the notch.
It felt, instantly, like stepping into a held breath.
The world on either side—trees, frost, the familiar buzz of the Rogue Lands—muffled.
In here, another sound rose.
Low.
Continuous.
A kind of thrumming.
She knew thunder. The crack of it. The boom.
This was… *before* thunder.
The swirl and gather of pressure in the air.
Her skin tingled.
The rock under her boots, worn smooth by whatever old forces had scraped this channel open, hummed faintly, like distant, restrained vibration.
The notch widened into a small, roughly circular basin.
The far side ended in a sheer face of stone, its surface polished by time into a gentle curve. Faint, twisting veins of quartz traced across it in spirals and arcs that, if she squinted, almost formed patterns.
The ground here was bare rock, no moss, no soil.
In its center, a shallow bowl had been worn—or carved—into the stone, as if some giant thumb had pressed down and left an imprint.
Water filled it.
Only a hand's-breadth deep, but glass-still, reflecting the sky above with an unnerving clarity.
Luna's heart thudded.
"It's another…" She swallowed. "Sacred place."
Not like the grove.
Sharper.
Where the grove had felt like the Goddess' gaze at rest, this felt like Her eye narrowed, focused.
"Stormroot."
The voice came from everywhere at once.
From the hum in the rock.
From the charge in the air.
From the slow swirl of clouds above, now drawing together in a way that made her stomach clench.
Luna dropped to one knee without thinking, head bowing.
"Goddess," she whispered, breath steaming. "I—I came as You pulled."
A soft, almost amused note threaded the answering presence.
"You would have walked around this place twice and still found your way in," the Goddess said, Her voice like wind running fingers over stone. "You are ever drawn to thresholds."
Luna huffed a short, shaky laugh.
"Or I'm very bad at avoiding trouble," she said.
"You are learning to stop calling My tests trouble," the Goddess countered, not unkindly. "Stand, little storm."
Luna rose.
She felt no physical figure near, no silver-clad body as in the grove.
Here, the Goddess' presence was more… elemental.
Not distilled into a shape.
Too large for that.
The stone wall at the far end of the basin seemed to breathe.
The shallow pool in the rock's hollow shivered once, then stilled again.
"Place your hand in the water," the Goddess said.
Luna's palms were already sweating, despite the cold.
She wiped them on her trousers, took a slow breath, and stepped forward.
The bowl's edge came to her knees.
She knelt again, this time deliberately, and extended her right hand.
Her fingertips broke the water's surface.
Cold, she expected.
It was.
But underneath the cold lay a crackling sensation, like pins and needles from a limb slept on too long.
The instant her skin touched, the little moon in her chest surged.
Water leaped, rearing up around her fingers in a thin, twisting column.
She gasped, nearly jerking her hand back.
"Hold," the Goddess' voice murmured.
The word ran down her arm like a command whispered directly to her muscles.
She stilled.
The water—weightless and impossibly responsive—wrapped her fingers, coiling up her wrist in a spiraling sleeve.
Tiny sparks flashed within it.
Static.
Her breath hitched.
Fear spiked.
She imagined, unbidden, the fire she'd faced, the river she'd half-frozen, the wind she'd shouted at.
"What are You doing?" she whispered.
"In the grove, you received," the Goddess said. "Here, you will agree."
"To what?" Luna blurted.
Lightning flickered, very far off, low and faint like a single candle in a vast hall.
"You were born with threads to all the elements," the Goddess went on. "A rare weaving. Most wolves carry a single strong current in their blood, with traces of others. You are atypical. Stronger. Wilder. Left alone, that could make you powerful—and unstable. I would not see you burn to ash from both ends."
Her words dropped like stones into Luna's mind.
*Atypical.*
She'd been that her whole life.
Small, strange, not fitting shapes others wanted.
"Then why—" The protest ripped free. "Why make me like this at all? If it's… dangerous?"
The air pressed in.
"You were not made for comfort," the Goddess said simply. "You were made to be an answer where only complicated questions lined the sky."
Luna's shoulders slumped.
Exhaustion—of spirit more than body—washed through her.
"Sometimes I wish You'd made a simpler answer," she muttered.
"A simpler answer would have broken under what comes," the Goddess replied. "You will not."
There was no arrogance in it.
Only certainty.
It scared her worse than hollow praise would have.
"Your gift is broad," the Goddess continued. "Now you must choose a shape within it. A *focus.* A name the world can recognize."
The water tightened around Luna's wrist.
The static within it flared.
A small crack sounded—no louder than a twig snapping, but it made her heart leap.
"A… name?" she repeated, swallowing. "Like… ice, or flame, or—?"
"Elements are like wolves," the Goddess said. "They gather in packs and families. Fire is not just blaze. It is spark. Ember. Molten stone. Water is not just river. It is mist. Ice. Flood. You cannot carry them all equally, not as you are. But you can *bind* yourself to one aspect, and through it, reach more clearly to the others when you must."
Luna's mouth was dry.
"Bind myself," she echoed.
The word tasted like both promise and shackle.
"You have touched many faces of My power," the Goddess said. "You walked into a blaze and commanded it back. You shaped earth under rogues' feet. You coaxed frost into being. But there is one that has always lived in your howls. In your heartbeat."
The next gust of wind hit her from behind, hard enough to bend her forward over the water bowl.
She caught herself with her left hand on the rock's edge, knuckles scraping.
Her wolf surged inside, ears flattened.
A low roll of thunder—closer now—vibrated through the stone.
"Storm," Luna whispered.
"Yes," the Goddess said. "Storm is not a single element. It is the meeting of them. Air. Water. Light. Sound. It is change, sudden and fierce. It is cleansing, and it is destruction. It is *you.*"
Luna shook her head minutely, water-sleeved hand trembling.
"I'm not—" she choked. "I'm small. I'm—"
"*Were,*" the Goddess corrected softly. "You were small in a stone box built by fearful wolves. Out here, you are as large as your courage allows you to be."
Lightning flickered again, closer.
The water around Luna's arm climbed to her elbow, clinging like a second, fluid skin.
Tiny sparks seemed to dance inside it now, quick flashes that barely kissed her nerves.
"Take this gift and you will be marked," the Goddess said. "Not just as My chosen. As *storm-caller.* As one who can bend the meeting of sky and earth."
Luna's breath came faster.
Images crowded her mind:
Trees bending under the weight of wind she'd summoned. Rivers rising at her call. Lightning lancing down where she pointed.
Power enough to crack stone walls.
Power enough to drown those who had laughed as she starved.
A thrill shot through her.
Exhilaration.
Terror.
"If I say no?" she forced out.
The Goddess did not flinch.
"Then you will remain as you are," She said. "Gifted. Unfocused. You will still be able to call small ice, small fire, small shifts in ground. But when the great storm comes for your pack, you will meet it with handfuls of scattered light instead of a blade."
Her voice did not accuse.
It laid choice bare.
Luna closed her eyes.
Her right arm, sleeved in living water and crackling faint energy, ached.
Her left, braced on stone, shook from holding her up.
She saw Moonshadow's walls in her mind's eye, dark threads crawling through cracks.
She saw Orion's pale, emptied gaze.
She saw pups clinging to each other under a sky gone wrong.
She also saw Selene's smile, thin and cutting.
Heard old laughter in the great hall when she'd dropped a tray.
Felt the cold slap of rejection, the churn of her own humiliation.
She could take this power and use it to burn. To flood. To *lash out.*
The Goddess had warned her about fury.
In the Moonstone Grove, She had told her that knowing her own rage was the first tether against drowning in it.
Luna breathed once.
Twice.
Her heart slowed, a fraction.
"I don't want to be a weapon," she whispered.
The admission hung naked in the charged air.
The Goddess' presence sighed, an exhale that rustled the unseen edges of the notch.
"Then do not," She said. "Storms feed forests as often as they fell trees. They bring rain to cracked earth. They clear rot. They carve new paths for rivers. You will not always be able to prevent destruction. But you can choose when to wield it for more than your own history."
Luna swallowed.
Her throat hurt.
Her wolf paced, hackles half-raised, then stilled, ears pricking as something deeper—a bone-deep, ancient instinct—recognized the shape of the path being offered.
*Alpha.* the buried thought whispered. *Not of rank. Of force.*
She had never wanted rank.
Never wanted the crosshairs of expectations.
But force?
That, she had begged for since she was a pup, hands clasped under moonlight, asking not to feel so *helpless*.
She opened her eyes.
The little bowl of water still wrapped her arm, gleaming, trembling faintly with the barely-contained currents inside.
"I'll take it," she said softly. "Not to tear them all down. To… stand in front of what's coming. To have… *enough* when I get there."
Silence answered for a heartbeat.
Then the Goddess' voice, low and rich and proud:
"Stormroot, I name you Stormcaller."
The word sank into the air.
Into the stone.
Into Luna's skin.
The wind grabbed it, tossing it higher, scattering it in echoes she could not hear but could *feel.*
Her wolf howled inside, soundless and wild with the rightness of it.
Stormcaller.
The little moon in her chest blazed.
The water around her arm surged.
Lightning hit the stone wall above the basin.
She saw it coming—not as a straight jag of light, but as a twisting, branching nerve, reaching.
It struck the quartz-veined curve with a crack that made her teeth ache.
Instead of exploding rock, it ran.
Down.
Across.
Into the carved bowl.
Into the water.
Into her.
Luna screamed.
Not in pain, exactly.
In sheer, overwhelming sensation.
Light flooded her.
It did not feel like fire.
It felt like every nerve ending in her body had woken at once, lit from within.
Her bones thrummed.
Her heart slammed so hard she thought it might leap from her chest.
The hair on her arms and neck stood straight up.
For a terrifying moment, she felt as though her skin could not possibly contain what was pouring through her.
She would burst.
Scatter as ash and light across the basin.
"*Breathe,*" the Goddess' voice cut through the crackling.
She dragged air into her lungs like someone who had been under water too long.
In.
Out.
Slowly, the initial shock rolled back.
The lightning did not leave.
It settled.
It threaded itself through her, curling into the little moon in her chest, etching itself into pathways along her nerves.
She felt it in the line of her spine.
In the hollow spaces behind her knees.
In the tips of her fingers and toes.
The water-sleeve around her arm evaporated with a soft hiss, droplets turning to steam that did not burn her.
Her arm remained encased in… sensation.
Her skin looked unchanged.
But underneath, energy crawled, restless and somehow content at once.
She sagged, catching herself again on the edge of the bowl.
Her breath came in harsh gasps.
The stone under her left hand was warm now, not cool. The quartz veins glowed faintly, holding afterimages of the strike.
Thunder rolled, finally, a deeper, rumbling sound that shook little flakes of frost from the rocks at the rim of the notch.
"Stand," the Goddess said.
Her voice held pride, command, and something else—something like… joy.
Luna pushed herself up.
Her legs wobbled.
She managed to straighten, back pressed to the smoothed rock wall, right arm hanging at her side, humming.
She flexed her fingers.
Fine blue-white lines flared under her skin, like temporary tattoos made of light, tracing from her wrist up her forearm, disappearing under her sleeve.
They pulsed once with her heartbeat.
Then faded, sinking deeper.
"Stormcaller," the Goddess said again. "Your gift is *calling the sky down.*"
Luna's stomach flipped.
"That sounds… dangerous," she said hoarsely.
"Power *is* dangerous," the Goddess replied. "That is why I give it to those who know they are capable of harm and are *afraid* of it."
Wind rushed through the notch, swirling around her.
It did not shove this time.
It circled.
Reverent.
She lifted her right hand, palm up, fingers spread.
"Try," the Goddess whispered.
Luna hesitated.
"What if I… burn everything?" she asked quietly. "What if I *can't* control it?"
"You will not learn control by never touching the reins," the Goddess said. "Start small."
Small.
She could do small.
She focused on the little pool now refilling slowly from some unseen source, rain or seep or magic, she couldn't tell.
She called to the ember—no, the *storm*—in her chest.
It rose, eager, a brighter, quicker rush than the old coal's glow.
She guided it up her throat, down her arm.
It tingled.
Settle, she told it, firm but kind.
We're not breaking the world yet. Just—call a spark.
Her fingers prickled.
She remembered the feel of barely-there static in the water around her arm.
She reached for that memory.
Breathed into it.
"Come," she whispered.
The air above her palm tightened.
A faint thread of light flickered into being there.
Not a bolt.
Not a fork.
A single, hair-thin line of silver-blue dancing between two points—her skin and a notch in the stone rim of the bowl.
It snapped once, making a sound like a tiny crack of ice.
Luna flinched, then laughed—a high, breathless sound of disbelief.
She'd done that.
On purpose.
Not catching wild lightning, but *making* a sliver of it.
The gift purred in her nerves, pleased with the exercise.
"Again," the Goddess said softly.
Luna drew another slow breath.
This time, she reached not just for light, but for *sound.*
Storms were not just seen.
They were *heard.*
She imagined the low rumble of thunder, the way it rolled across hillsides.
She had never heard a sea storm, but she'd heard elders talk of how the air shook.
She let that imagined sound sit in her chest, just under her heart.
Then pushed it out along with the light.
The new spark that leaped from her fingertips to the stone this time came with a faint crackle, like a spark dancing across dry hair.
Not much.
Enough.
Her lips curved.
"Good," the Goddess murmured, approval warm. "You will not always be calling it so close. You will reach for clouds and currents. But remember: all storms begin small. With shifts like this. With choices."
Luna lowered her arm slowly.
The hum in her bones settled to a background buzz.
Her muscles shook—not from lightning, but from the effort of containing it.
"What will it… look like?" she asked, still half in awe. "When I use it… *big?*"
The Goddess' presence smiled, though She did not condense into shape.
"Like a sky torn open," She said. "Like rain answering your grief. Like fear in the eyes of those who thought you could be pushed aside forever."
The old wound in Luna's chest—rejection, humiliation—throbbed.
She breathed through it.
Let the idea of their fear sit in her hand for a moment.
Then let it go.
"What if I hurt… the wrong wolves?" she forced herself to ask. "What if my anger aims wrong? At… pups. Omegas. Wolves who only ever learned what their Alphas taught them."
The Goddess' voice softened.
"You will make mistakes," She said. "No leader's path is clean. But you have something many do not, Stormcaller: you *remember* what it is to be small under someone's paws. That memory will be a check on your worst impulses."
She paused.
"And when you fail," She added, "when your storm knocks down what you meant only to shake—you will grieve. You will make amends where you can. You will *learn.*"
Luna's shoulders heaved.
She didn't like the thought of failing.
Of hurting the very wolves she was slowly realizing she might have to save.
But pretending she would be perfect was another kind of arrogance.
"Stormcaller," the Goddess said again, the word now wrapping around her like a cloak. "Champion of My change. When the time comes, you will stand on walls that thought themselves eternal and show them how quickly sky can change."
A chill licked down Luna's spine.
Not from cold.
From vision.
Images flared again, stronger now.
She saw herself—older? No, not much. Just different—standing on Moonshadow's highest parapet, arms outstretched, hair whipping in a gale that bent even the stone.
Clouds boiled over the compound.
Lightning laced them, jagged and bright.
Wolves below—tiny from that height—craned their necks, eyes wide, coats plastered by rain.
Selene, face pale, lips drawn.
Orion, head tilted back, cursed eyes again their old stormy color—wide, awed, something like apology written in their lines.
She saw shadows on the walls, oily and writhing, peeling away under the onslaught of light.
Her heart lurched.
The vision snapped away, like a thread pulled too tight and cut.
She stood again in the stone basin, legs shaking, palm tingling faintly from her two small sparks.
"I… saw—" she began.
"I know," the Goddess said. "Visions are not predictions. They are possibilities. But that one is bright. Likely. It will not come without cost."
Luna swallowed hard.
"When?" she whispered.
"When the curse has sunk its hooks deep enough that some will fight you harder than they would fight death itself," the Goddess said. "When the ones who laughed at your tears are choking on their own. When you have learned to call lightning without burning the child who stands behind the enemy you hate."
Her words curled in Luna's gut like live wires.
She nodded, once, because her voice might fail her.
The wind in the notch gentled.
The pressure in the air eased, fraction by fraction.
The little bowl's water had stilled again, save for a few faint ripples where droplets from the lightning strike had fallen.
The hum in the rock settled into a low, contented vibration.
"Rise now as My chosen champion," the Goddess said, formal in a way She had not been before. "Stormcaller. Element of change. Remember this place. Remember this pain and pleasure when the sky feels far. You do not need to come back here to call Me. You carry the bowl in your own bones now."
Luna's throat burned.
Chosen champion.
Of a Goddess.
Of an element that did not belong to one direction, one shape, one comfort.
She'd been the pack's weakest.
Now the world itself was being told to listen when she shouted.
"Thank You," she whispered, the words feeling woefully inadequate. "I'll… try not to disappoint You."
The Goddess made a soft sound that might have been a laugh.
"You will," She said calmly. "Disappoint Me. Anger Me. Surprise Me. That is the burden of love. I chose you knowing all of that."
Heat stung Luna's eyes.
She blinked fast.
"Then I won't… stop," she said, voice fierce and small at once. "Not until the shadows are off them. Not until—" Her voice cracked. "Not until he looks at me and *sees* this. Not just the runt he threw away."
The word he hung naked.
The Goddess did not chide her for pinning some of this on Orion.
"Your mate's seeing is his own journey," She said quietly. "Your storm must not hinge on his eyes. But yes. I will not lie to you: this gift will force him to see you differently. Whether he bows or breaks in front of that truth is his choice."
Luna shuddered.
She didn't know, yet, if she wanted him to bow.
Or if she wanted to walk past him, shoulders steady, the first time in her life she wasn't bending around his absence.
"We'll… see," she whispered.
"We will," the Goddess agreed.
Her presence thinned.
The electrified feeling in the air subsided.
Luna was left in a stone bowl, under a slowly clearing sky, with her arm buzzing and her heart too big for her ribs.
She sank down to sit on the rock, legs sprawled, not caring how ungraceful it was.
Her body felt wrung out, as if someone had taken hold of her bones and twisted.
Her mind, too full, buzzed like a struck hive.
After a while, when her breathing had slowed and her hands steadied, curiosity pried its way through the fog.
She lifted her right palm.
Flexed.
Nothing visible flared under the skin.
She focused.
Reached—carefully—for the new thread in her.
It rose, like a snake lifting its head, curious but coiled.
She chose a small target: a loose pebble near her left boot.
She summoned a whisper of light.
"Come," she murmured.
A tiny spark jumped from her fingertip to the pebble.
It cracked, a hairline fracture appearing along its surface.
She grinned, teeth flashing on a breathless laugh.
Then she let the energy sink back down.
Rest.
She did not want to get drunk on it.
Not here.
Not today.
Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet.
Her legs trembled, but they held.
She looked once more at the little bowl.
At the faint scorch-mark where lightning had kissed stone.
At the spirals of quartz that now seemed, to her attuned senses, to form the rough outline of a curling cloud.
"Thank you," she said, to rock, to air, to unseen eyes. "For… trusting me with this."
A stray gust of wind ruffled her hair, light and almost playful.
She took it for an answer.
Climbing out of the basin, she paused at the notch's exit and looked back.
From this angle, with the ordinary Rogue Lands rising around it, the place looked almost mundane.
A dip in stone.
A glint of water.
A trick of light on rock.
No wolf stumbling past would guess that lightning had traveled down those curves and into a runt's veins.
"Good," she murmured. "Let it stay that way. Not everyone needs to know where to stand to call the sky down."
She turned away.
The air beyond the notch felt thicker.
Less charged.
But she carried the charge now.
Every step she took over frost and root and loose stone left a faint echo of awareness in the ground.
The wind, when it brushed her face, seemed to pause a fraction of a second, tasting her, before moving on.
Stormcaller.
She rolled the word around in her mind.
It did not fit perfectly yet.
It would.
As the day wore on and the sun slid lower, clouds gathered again—this time a natural bank, heavy with unshed snow.
Luna watched them from the shelter of a thinning stand of pines, back against a trunk, arms wrapped around her knees.
She lifted her right hand.
Just once.
Was tempted to reach for them.
To see if they would dip, darken, at her whisper.
She didn't.
Not yet.
Power was a muscle.
It needed rest between lifts.
Instead, she watched.
Felt.
Let the storm build on its own.
For the first time in her life, watching heavy weather roll in did not fill her with dread.
Or with the helpless, childish urge to pray it away.
Something in her throat loosened.
A laugh bubbled up, quiet and astonished.
"I'm going to be hell on your walls, Moonshadow," she murmured, not entirely unkindly. "On your curses. On your pride."
Snow began to fall—soft flakes, lazy and unfocused.
They settled in her hair, melted on her heated cheeks.
She tilted her head back.
Stuck out her tongue like a pup.
Caught one.
Laughed again, softer.
Power hummed under her skin.
Loneliness still ached.
Fear of the future paced at the edges of her thoughts.
But beneath and through all of that was a new, undeniable truth:
The Moon Goddess had not only seen her.
She had *chosen* her.
Named her.
Bound a piece of storm to her soul.
She was no longer just a runt with odd dreams and a stubborn heart.
She was a stormcaller.
A champion.
And somewhere ahead, under the same darkening sky, a cursed pack waited for the day her thunder rolled over their roofs.
She pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders as evening deepened.
A normal, natural chill seeped into her bones.
She smiled into it.
"Soon," she whispered to distant stone walls and still, shadow-choked halls. "Soon, you'll hear me."
Above her, the clouds rumbled—a soft, answering purr.
Not because she'd called.
Not yet.
But because storms were out there, always.
Waiting for a hand like hers.