The wind changed the day the forest fell quiet for *her* pack.
Not for the Rogue Lands, not for nameless dens and burrows the way it had before the avalanche. This time, the shift in the air reached past moss and stone and the uncertain lines of rogue territory, curling like fingers into a place she had been trying not to think about.
Moonshadow.
Luna sensed it first as an itch.
Not on her skin.
In her lungs.
She had been walking most of the morning, following a faint deer trail that wound through a sparse copse of pines and out into low, scrubby moor. Snow lay in thin, wind-scoured sheets, caught in hollows and behind boulders, but the sky was clear. The storm she had bent away from the valley had spent itself days ago.
Her muscles still ached from that effort, a stiff, satisfying soreness in shoulders and thighs.
Each breath she drew tasted of resin and cold earth and the distant hint of running water.
Ordinary.
Then, halfway between one step and the next, the air went thin.
She paused, frowning.
It wasn't that there was less of it.
It felt… empty.
Like breathing in a room after all the people had slipped quietly away.
Her wolf, which had been drowsing under her skin, stirred.
Ears pricked.
Tail stilled.
*Wrong,* it said. *Something—gone.*
Luna sniffed.
The pines' sharpness. The faint musk of some night-creature's passing. The iron-tang of her own packless scent.
Under it—a thread of something else.
Old smoke.
Stone dust.
A note she hadn't smelled directly in weeks, but carried in her memory like a scar.
Moonshadow.
Her heart lurched hard enough to make her stumble.
"Impossible," she muttered, catching herself on a low branch. "I'm too far. The wind doesn't carry that far."
The wind answered with a small, gusting laugh that wasn't amused.
It tore through the pines around her, rattling their needles, then dropped so suddenly that the silence that followed rang in her ears.
Her skin pebbled under her clothes.
She straightened slowly, every sense flaring open.
"Goddess?" she whispered to the still air. "Is that—?"
No voice poured down from the sky in answer.
No silver figure blossomed from mist.
But something *else* moved.
A breeze rose—not from any single direction, but curling in on itself, circling her like a cautious animal.
It lifted the ends of her hair, tugged at her cloak, then stilled directly in front of her chest, as though resting its unseen forehead against her sternum.
The little moon inside her lurched.
Her stormgift recognized kin in the currents.
This was not the wild, battering gale she'd bent against the avalanche.
This wind had purpose.
It carried weight.
Smell came with it, clearer now, as if some barrier had thinned.
Smoke.
Not fresh, woodsmoke-from-a-cooking-fire smell.
Old.
Stale.
Laced with something acrid, like burned herbs and scorched stone.
Under that: the iron-laced sting of blood.
Under *that*: wolves.
Not rogues' tang.
Pack-wolf layers.
Moonshadow's muddled signature—pups and elders and warriors and omegas all wound together—faint and frayed.
Fear twined through it all, sharp and sour.
Luna's stomach knotted.
She reached out, without thinking, as if she could *touch* the wind.
Her fingers brushed only air.
It brushed back.
Cold slid along her skin.
Her vision blurred for a heartbeat.
Then something *opened*.
She was standing in the pines and on the ridge above Moonshadow at the same time.
Smell hit hardest.
Thick, choking smoke, not from hearth fires but from timbers, stone dust hanging in the air, churned into a fine grit by too many desperate paws. Blood. Fear-sweat.
Sound followed.
Howls.
Dozens of them.
Not the rolling chorus of a pack greeting the moon.
Sharp.
Fractured.
Some cut off abruptly, like a word bitten in half.
A deeper voice—Alpha-deep—shouted orders, hoarse with overuse and something else Luna didn't want to name.
Orion.
Her breath hitched.
She couldn't *see* him.
Whatever thread the Goddess and her own dream had shown her once was still blocked, thick with tar and shadow.
But she could *hear* the strain in that shout.
"TIGHTEN THE INNER RING!" the echo of his voice roared somewhere in that half-vision. "DO NOT LET THEM—"
The sound cut, swallowed by another noise.
A low, rolling boom.
Not natural thunder.
Too close.
Too solid.
Walls cracking.
Stone giving way.
The air in that distant place shuddered.
Screams rose.
High.
Brief.
Luna's hand clenched on the branch until her knuckles turned white.
The wind around her shivered.
The next breath she drew in the pines tasted only of resin again.
The vision snapped.
She staggered.
Snow crunched under her boot as she caught herself, heart racing, lungs working like bellows.
"What was that?" she rasped. "What—"
"The wind carries more than leaves," a low voice murmured near her ear.
Not the Moon Goddess.
The timbre was lighter. Playful and sharp-edged, like frost.
Luna turned her head slowly.
No one stood there.
No silver-clad figure.
No storm-coalesced shape.
Only a swirl of snow, kicked up by a breeze that hadn't been there a heartbeat before, spinning in a tight column at shoulder-height.
It twisted, shivered, then elongated.
For a moment, it almost formed a shape—a lean, wolf-lit silhouette with laughing eyes.
Then it shredded apart, scattering in all directions.
"Who—?" Luna began.
"Names," the wind whispered, now from her left, now from her right. "You wolves are very fond of names. You called for the Moon. She gave you storm. You breathed in my cousin's rage on those walls you once scrubbed. You think we did not *notice*?"
Wind.
Not just air.
Not just currents.
Something old that lived inside them.
Luna swallowed, the hair on the back of her neck standing up.
"Spirit," she managed.
The word felt right in her mouth.
The air rippled.
Approval.
"How else," it said dryly, "do you think your Goddess hears every howl? She can't be everywhere at once. We carry. We listen."
The thought of every half-choked prayer she'd ever sent skyward riding on invisible backs made her cheeks heat.
She pushed that aside.
"What did you show me?" she demanded, trying to steady her voice. "What's happening at Moonshadow?"
Silence answered.
Not indifferent.
Considering.
Pines creaked.
The breeze that had circled her stilled again for a long, stretched heartbeat.
Then a gust hit her full in the chest.
Hard.
She stumbled back a step.
Images slammed into her as if dropped from a great height.
Stone walls, grey and familiar, webbed with new, dark lines—cracks that pulsed faintly, as if something within them breathed.
Those same cracks exhaled oily mist that writhed along the mortar, snaking into doorways, seeping under thresholds.
Wolves stumbled through it, coughing, eyes watering.
Some shook their heads and pushed on.
Others froze where they stood, pupils dilating, muscles locking as if strings had been cut.
A pup—six moons at most—stood in an inner hallway, pressed against the wall, tiny claws digging grooves into stone, eyes huge and wild as a shadow-laced mist curled past her.
She whimpered.
Called for her mother.
No one answered.
Her whimper pitched higher.
The mist licked at her, curling around her paws, her legs.
Her eyes glazed.
She sank slowly to sit, then to lie, breath still moving, chest still rising and falling, but all light gone from her gaze.
Luna choked.
"No!" she shouted, hands flying out as if she could reach through the vision. "NO—get *away* from her—"
Her fingers closed on empty air.
The wind shrieked in her ears, as if she'd screamed into a gale.
The scene shredded, scattering like torn paper.
She dropped to her knees in the snow, stomach heaving.
Dry.
Empty.
There was nothing left in her to throw up but a bitter taste.
Cold seeped through her trousers into her skin, numbing kneecaps.
Her lungs labored, each inhale stabbing.
The wind calmed, circling her once more, gentler now, as if apologizing for the force of the message.
"You asked," it said quietly. "We showed."
She panted, eyes stinging.
"That was—" Her voice broke. She pushed through, hoarse. "That was the curse. It's… it's *in* the walls now. In the air. It's taking the pups."
"Yes," the wind said. No softening. "And the old, and the tired, and the ones who keep their eyes closed. The cracks were only in stone, once. Now they are in them."
Luna squeezed her eyes shut.
Images from her first dream of Orion—silvered eyes, unmoving limbs—rose up, overlaid on what she'd just seen.
He'd been the first.
Of course he had.
Selene.
Her mother.
Her own high hallways.
All the places she'd scrubbed and served now swam in that dark mist.
No wonder the land had tasted wrong when she'd pressed her palm to the ground near Moonshadow's border in her dreams.
It had been inhaling poison.
Her heart hammered against her ribs so hard it hurt.
"You're just… showing me?" she croaked to the air. "Why? To torment me? I *know* they're cursed. I can't break it from here—"
The wind hissed, offended.
"We are not shadows," it snapped. "We don't feed on teeth-grinding and helplessness. We bring. We warn. We go where stone can't walk."
Luna swallowed.
"Warn me of what?" she whispered. "That they're in danger? I already knew—"
"No," the wind interrupted, sharper. "Warn you of this: the cracks widen. The shadow is greedy. It likes a full belly. Walls will not hold it long. It will push out. It will creep along old scents. It will follow blood and bond."
Cold coiled in Luna's gut.
Old scents.
Blood.
Bond.
Her.
Her thread to Orion.
Her years in that stone compound.
Her scent ground into the very walls from cleaning and carrying.
"Are you saying—" Her voice went high and thin. She forced it flatter. "It'll *spread*? Beyond the pack? To the Rogue Lands? To other packs? To—"
"Yes," the wind whispered, gusting through her hair, tugging it so her eyes watered more. "Curses like this do not politely stay behind your lines. It was called by pride and fear and greed. Those are not Moonshadow's alone."
She thought of other packs she'd only heard of.
Of rogue bands who might wander too close to tainted grounds and carry shadow on their fur like burrs.
Of pups who had nothing to do with Orion's decision, Selene's schemes, the elders' cowardice.
Of her own feet, retracing old paths whether she liked it or not.
A new understanding clicked, cold as ice, in her chest.
She'd told herself for weeks that she'd go back "if" she grew strong enough.
"If" she found a way.
"If" the Goddess made it clear the time was right.
The wind had just removed the if.
"Why me?" she burst out, the question that had been growing like a bruise finally tearing free. "Why can't the Goddess send someone *else*? Another Alpha. A pack that already loves their own. A… a spirit like you, with teeth. Why does it have to be the runt they all threw out?"
The breeze eddied in front of her face.
It did not caress.
It did not slap.
It just hovered, cool and implacable.
"We carry news," the wind said. "Not choices. But we've watched you, storm-wolf. Since the first night you screamed at the sky. Since you walked out alone instead of folding in."
Snow swirled around her in small, tight spirals, not enough to blind, enough to wrap her in a moving veil.
"We saw you call cloud and crack earth," it went on. "We saw you *turn back.* We saw you *heal.*"
Warmth flushed Luna's cheeks, bitter and unwilling.
"That fox would have died without me," she muttered.
"And you would have walked on," the wind countered. "You did not. You bent your path for something that could not pay you back. That is not a shadow's way."
She wanted to argue.
To say she'd had no choice.
That she'd just been… foolish.
Her throat closed on the lie.
Memory of the fox's pain, the way its eyes had met hers, the feel of her own power moving not to burn but to mend, rose up unbidden.
The wind seemed to taste her silence.
"Your pack taught you your worth was scraps," it said. "Now the cracks eat them, too. There is justice in that. We would not fault you if you laughed and turned your back."
Luna flinched.
Because she *had* laughed, once.
Bitterly.
Imagining Moonshadow humbled.
Imagining Selene's face when the runt she'd tormented came back shining.
The image turned to ash now, curled and bitter, in the face of a pup's eyes going blank.
"But?" she whispered, because the wind's tone held one.
"But," it agreed. "If you walk away now, it will not just be them. The shadow will press into the earth you've been learning to love. The rivers you've coaxed. The storms you've shaped. It will climb along the threads you've begun to spin to other hearts. You know this. You *feel* it."
She did.
Deep under her fear and fury, under her resentment and weariness, something older stirred.
Duty.
Not the warped version she'd carried in Moonshadow, where "duty" meant silence and acceptance of hurt.
Something closer to what the Goddess had laid in her at the grove and at the storm-basin.
A duty not to power over wolves.
To the world that had started to trust her hands.
Her thoughts flicked to the valley she'd just spared.
To the fox she'd released.
To the Moonstone Grove, roots deep and quiet.
To the image of the little pup in the hall, eyes clearing and then clouding as the mist took her.
Her jaw locked.
"I don't know how to *fix* it," she said hoarsely. "I can bend snow and wind. I can tingle inside a wound. But that? That's old. Deep. It started in the space between *gods.* I'm barely holding myself together most days."
Silence.
Snow whispered down, a few stray flakes drifting under the pines.
Then, very softly, as if someone had leaned down to speak into her wolf-ear alone, the wind said:
"You will not go back alone."
Luna's head snapped up.
"Who?" she demanded. "The Goddess? Spirits? Another pack?"
The air eddied, almost… amused.
"Winds do not make promises about wolves," it said. "We know only that others have felt the cracks, too. Some wait outside them, teeth bared. Some pace inside, claws dull from scratching stone. Threads are pulling. We have watched them twitch."
Threads.
The Goddess' fingers brushing invisible lines.
The glimpse She'd given Luna in the grove of thin, silver strands reaching out from her chest in unseen directions.
Her belly fluttered with a different kind of fear.
Connection.
*"Your pack is not yet fully gathered,"* the Goddess had said.
She had thought, stubbornly, that maybe she could gather it somewhere far from Moonshadow.
Somewhere no one knew the runt's name.
Now the wind spoke as if she had no such luxury.
"What do you *want* from me?" Luna whispered, because it was easier to be angry at the messenger than at the situation. "A promise? An oath? A timeline? I don't even know how far I am from home anymore."
The breeze tugged at her cloak again, like an impatient child.
"Listen," it said.
Then it pushed into her ears.
Not with images this time.
With sound.
A howl rose, distant and thready, as if carried from much farther away than any normal voice could reach.
High-pitched.
Desperate.
Not a pup's.
A she-wolf's.
"Oriiiiiion—"
The name cracked apart halfway through.
Not because her voice failed.
Because something cut across it—another sound, jagged and wrong.
A snarl that wasn't wolf.
A wet, sucking noise.
A muffled thud.
Silence.
Luna's own howl tried to climb out of her throat.
She clamped her teeth down until her jaw hurt.
She knew that voice.
Not like a lover's, not like a friend's.
Like an echo of old, daily cruelty.
Selene.
Her tangled emotions toward the other woman—hate, pity, resentment, grim understanding—twisted.
The wind let the sound hang there, thrumming in her.
Then, softer, it brought another.
A weak, ragged wail that might once have been a howl, now nothing more than a raw spill of sound.
"Lunaaaa—"
Not Selene this time.
Not Elia.
Not any wolf whose voice she could clearly name.
A young male, by the pitch.
One who had been a boy when she left.
Begging the air.
Begging the Goddess.
Begging her.
The world swayed.
She braced one hand on the nearest tree trunk, forehead pressing into the rough bark.
"Stop," she whispered to the wind. "Please… stop."
Mercifully, it did.
The pines rustled.
Her own harsh breathing filled the spaces between.
"No more pictures," she croaked. "No more… snatches. I get it. I get it."
The wind calmed, settling into a low, constant flow, like water in a stream.
"We bring warnings," it said, back to that almost gentler tone. "Now you have them. The rest is yours."
Her fingers dug into the bark.
"You're telling me it's time," she said dully. "To go back."
"Yes," it said simply.
Anger flared, sharp and bright.
"At what strength?" she demanded, turning her head, speaking to empty air, to invisible currents, to the Goddess who might be listening through them. "I just *learned* how not to blow my own bones apart with a bolt. I can hold an avalanche for a valley. That's not a curse that started before my grandmother's grandmother was born. I'll walk into that and it'll… *eat* me."
"Then you will not walk in as the runt this time," the wind replied. "You will walk as storm. As healer. As something they do not have a word for yet."
Fear sat heavy in her gut.
With it, under it, something else rose.
A fierce, ugly gratitude that the choice was being taken from her.
Because if it hadn't been, she might have found a hundred ways to lie to herself.
"To say, 'Another season. Another storm. Another practice,'" she muttered.
"Yes," the wind agreed, merciless. "You would have. You carry your hurt like a shield. It kept you alive. Now it keeps you away."
She wanted to argue.
To say she was being *careful*, not cowardly.
Her mouth opened.
Closed.
The words tasted hollow even before they left her tongue.
Her memories chose that moment to rise: Orion's eyes sliding past her, unseeing. The elders' heads bowed, not in shame, but in silent agreement. The pups she used to feed, watching, learning.
If she did nothing, those pups would grow up—or *not* grow up—with that same pattern carved into their bones.
She'd promised herself, once, in the rawness right after the rejection, that she'd never again beg at Moonshadow's gate.
Maybe she didn't have to beg.
Maybe she could kick it open.
Her heart pounded faster.
Fear and purpose tangled.
The wind swirled, once, around her legs, then ran off downhill, darting through the scrub like a teasing wolf.
It tugged at her clothes, her hair, as it went.
"North," it whispered, in passing. "Then east, along the river you spared. The land remembers your feet. You'll find their scent again, sooner than you think."
She almost called it back.
Almost begged for more specifics.
Distances.
Dangers.
A map.
It was already gone, lost in the broader currents, her ears filled again with ordinary winter sounds.
Only the faint, lingering taste of Moonshadow's smoke, mixed now with something bitterer, remained on her tongue.
She stayed against the tree for a long moment, eyes closed, breathing slow and deliberate.
In.
Out.
Counting heartbeats to keep panic from cracking her.
Her wolf paced.
Snarled.
Whined.
All at once.
*Home,* it said, in a small, bewildered voice. *Hurt. Ours. Not-ours. We left. We go? We fight? We hide?*
"We go," Luna whispered back, throat raw. "Not because they deserve it. Because… the land around them does. The pups do. The wolves they'll never see coming do."
Her wolf huffed, uneasy but… resolved.
It wanted to protect territory.
Even if that territory had spat it out.
She pushed herself upright fully, palms scraping bark as she pulled away from the tree.
Her legs felt unsteady, like she'd just come down from another confrontation with her own power.
In a way, she had.
Taking this step felt more frightening than calling lightning.
Lightning obeyed rules she was starting to understand.
Old hurts did not.
She adjusted her pack on her shoulders with stiff fingers.
Finally looked north, really looked, as if expecting to see Moonshadow's stone towers already piercing the horizon.
Of course she couldn't.
Ridges and trees and distance still lay between.
But the line between her and those walls was no longer vague.
It hummed.
A path-shaped chord, pulled taut.
She took one step.
Then another.
The snow creaked under her boots in small, familiar protests.
She forced her pace to stay steady.
Not running headlong on fear's teeth.
Not dragging her feet so doubt had space to slip back in.
The wind did not speak again in full sentences.
But every so often, a gust would come from the right direction, nudging her a little east or west.
When she hesitated at a fork in the land—one set of hills rising gently, one cutting steep and treacherous—the air would taste subtly different, cool and clean along one route, heavy and stale along the other.
She followed the cleaner currents.
As the sun sank and the sky streaked pink and indigo, the land she walked began to look… familiar.
Not in specifics.
In flavor.
The way the trees grew thicker in some places, leaving clear glades where the pack had once trained. The faint, half-faded smell of very old wolf-mark on certain stones.
She found a broken boundary marker just before dusk—a rough, waist-high rock she'd scrubbed more than once, moons ago, when the elders wanted their borders to look respectable for visiting Alphas.
Now, moss crept up its sides.
A crack split it, thin but deep.
Luna stopped.
Her fingers brushed the worn top.
The old scent of Moonshadow clung in pits and grooves: long-faded, overlaid by wild and rogue and fox, but there. Familiar as a forgotten lullaby.
Underneath it, something else pulsed.
The same wrongness she'd felt in the wind's warnings.
Fainter here, at the very edge.
But present.
Her hand recoiled, instinctive.
She stared at the stone, heart thudding.
Her wolf's lips peeled back in a silent snarl.
*Not-pack,* it growled. *Not-us. Wrong.*
"No," Luna whispered. "Not you. Not this. You *were* ours."
Were.
Past tense.
The word ached.
She dropped her pack and sank to sit with her back against the old border marker, the stone cold and unyielding under her shoulder blades.
The sky above had deepened to full night, stars pricking through the dark like shy sparks.
The moon—a modest, waxing crescent—hung low, throwing a slim path of light across the snow.
It looked close to where Moonshadow would be, if she walked far enough.
She tipped her head back more, the rough stone digging into her scalp, and stared up at that narrow curve.
"I hear You," she said quietly. "I hear Your winds. I saw Your cracks. I am *coming.*"
The words tasted like an oath.
They anchored something inside her that had been floating since the day she left.
The Goddess did not appear.
But a faint, familiar warmth bloomed in her chest, as if someone had pressed cool fingers briefly to her heart and then let go.
Approval.
And warning.
There would be no clean triumph here.
No simple swoop in, blast curse, swoop out.
She would face wolves who had never apologized, who might never, even with death on their thresholds.
She would have to look into Orion's silvered eyes without letting the girl he'd rejected claw her back down.
She would have to decide, again and again, whether to heal or to withhold.
Her hands flexed in her lap.
Lightning hummed.
Healing warmth answered.
She thought of the wind spirits and their patience. Of the way they'd carried howls and warnings for seasons without caring about who thanked them.
"I won't see You," she murmured, eyes on the moon. "Not the way I did in the grove or the storm-basin. Not when I walk into that shadow. I know. But… don't let me forget what this felt like. Being *asked.* Being warned. Let me remember I'm more than what they made me."
Snow whispered down, a few stray flakes drifting onto her upturned face.
They melted quickly on her skin, tiny cold kisses.
Her wolf yawned, tired and anxious.
*We sleep?* it asked, reluctantly. *Then go?*
"Yes," she whispered. "Sleep. One more night out here, where the air is still mostly clean. Tomorrow… we step over the line."
Her pulse jumped at her own words.
She almost took them back.
She didn't.
She rolled her shoulders, wincing as stiff muscles complained.
Built a small, low fire, shielding its smoke with her body and a makeshift rock wall. Ate the last of her dried meat, every chew tasting of ash and memory.
When she finally lay down, cloak wrapped tight, back once more against the cracked boundary stone, she pressed her palm to the ground.
It hummed, faint and uneasy.
Under her fingertips, the vibrations carried not just the ordinary murmur of roots and water and small, sleeping things.
A distant, deeper shudder ran through it.
From ahead.
From Moonshadow.
From the cracks chewing their way through walls and wolves.
"Hold together," she whispered to the rock, to the soil, to the roots that still reached toward her old home. "Just a little longer. I'm coming to help. Or to try. Or to… stand and scream at least."
The earth did not promise.
But it did not shrug her off.
That would have to be enough.
Sleep, when it came, was thin and restless, full of half-formed images of hallways filled with mist and winds howling through broken windows.
Once, she jolted awake, heart pounding, certain she'd heard her name called on the air.
Only the pines whispered.
Only the embers crackled softly.
She lay there, staring at the small arc of moon through the branches, breathing until the urge to run in the night eased.
Morning came cold and pale.
Her breath puffed white as she doused the coals and shouldered her pack.
She stood for a long moment with her hand on the cracked border stone, thumb rubbing over the groove where, once, an elder's paw had worn a smooth indentation from endless "patrols."
"Stormcaller," she said quietly to her reflection in that small hollow. "Storm-healer. Omega. Runt. Goddess' answer. All of it. We walk back. Not for them. Not *only* for them. For the land they sit on. For the pups who never got a chance to choose. For the wolves who will never know our name but will feel the cracks ease."
Her reflection in the stone's faint wet sheen was warped.
Older than the pup who'd last touched it.
Sharper.
Her eyes glowed faintly in the morning light, green-silver with power and tiredness.
She huffed once.
Almost a laugh.
"Let them laugh at this," she muttered, turning away.
Then she stepped past the marker.
Back onto ground that had once been withheld from her.
Back toward a pack that had become a shadow of itself.
Back toward the heart of the curse.
The wind rose at her back as she walked, not pushing, not shoving, just… accompanying.
Carrying, somewhere ahead of her, the faint, quiet scent of storm and moon and a runt who had finally turned around.