Moonshadow looked smaller.
Not in stone and timber—its walls still rose where the trees thinned, its towers still bit at the sky—but in something harder to name. A sag in its bones. A dimming in its eyes.
Luna saw it first in the way the trees stopped.
The forest had always ended in a broad, respectful ring around the pack compound. No roots too close to foundations, no branches overhanging the patrol paths. The elders had called it "discipline." Keep the wild at bay. Domesticate the edge.
Now, saplings leaned against half-collapsed fences.
Bramble thickets crept almost to the base of the outer walls, tangling with old patrol trails until the lines blurred.
The wild was pressing back.
Winning.
Luna and Elia moved through it quietly, breath pluming white, boots crunching on frost and broken twigs.
"Used to send omegas out to cut all this back before gatherings," Elia muttered, pushing aside a thorny branch. "Can't spare the hands now. Or the hours."
"Because of the curse," Luna said.
"And because everyone's too busy picking at each other's throats," Elia replied. "Shadow doesn't have to do all the work when pride gives it so much help."
Her words pricked.
Old memories stirred: arguments in the great hall over scraps of power, over who had Orion's ear and who didn't, over which wolves deserved comfortable dens and which could make do with drafty corners.
Back then, the pack had been strong enough to absorb that poison and still stand.
Now, everything felt... thin.
Fragile.
They emerged from the last of the underbrush onto the final rise before the main gate.
Luna stopped dead.
Moonshadow loomed before her.
Its walls—once smooth-grey and imposing in their severity—were mottled now.
Dark veins ran through the stone, not like moss or age-stains, but like a sickness. Fine hairline cracks, spiderwebbing out from corners and arrow slits, pulsed faintly in the growing dusk.
She could *see* it now, what the Goddess and the wind and her own dreams had hinted at.
The curse wasn't just a presence in the halls.
It had woven itself into the rock.
In some places, the cracks were small, no wider than a hair. In others, they gaped a hand's breadth, stuffed clumsily with rags or chinked with hastily mortared stone.
Those patch-jobs bled shadow around their edges.
A faint, oily mist seeped there, curling upward in tendrils that the wind would snatch and pull away only to see them regrow.
Torches flickered along the wall-top, their flames a sickly yellow.
The defensive walkway that circled the inside of the wall sagged in one section, as if some great weight had leaned against it from the other side.
The main gate—great wooden doors banded with iron—hung askew.
One of the iron hinges had warped, leaving a hand-wide gap at the bottom corner.
Through it, Luna caught a glimpse of motion: paws. A tail. The swift blur of a body.
Running.
She listened.
The sounds were all wrong.
No steady pads of patrols.
No barked commands in tight formation.
Instead: disjointed yelps. The thud of paws in frantic, uneven rhythms. A crash as something—someone—hit a wall too hard.
Elia watched Luna's face, jaw set.
"Not the proud Moonshadow you remember," she said.
"I remember a different kind of rot," Luna murmured, throat tight.
Elia snorted softly.
"Pretty rot," she said. "This is uglier. But at least it's honest about breaking."
A sharp, wordless shout split the air from somewhere beyond the wall.
Not an order.
A cry.
Pain or rage.
Or both.
Luna's hands clenched at her sides.
An answering growl rose unbidden in her own chest.
Her wolf was pacing again, hackles high.
*Den,* it said. *Ours. Hurt. We fix? We burn?*
"Where are the sentries?" Luna asked, scanning the top of the wall.
Elia's jaw tightened.
"Gone," she said. "Or… changed."
A shape lurched into view along the walkway, moving oddly.
Luna's breath stilled.
The wolf—large, male, powerful once—walked with the stiff, jerky gait of a puppet pulled on the wrong strings.
His eyes gleamed pale in the torchlight.
Not the soft, silvery glow of her own connection to the Goddess.
A dead-metal sheen.
He passed within a step of a gaping crack in the wall.
The shadow-mist there curled up and around his paws, his legs, like smoke fondling a new log on the fire.
He didn't flinch.
Didn't stop.
Didn't *see* it.
He reached the corner, halted.
Turned.
Walked back.
The same stiff, rote path.
Over and over.
A sentry, of a sort.
But not watching for rogues.
Watching only for whatever the curse whispered inward, not outward.
Luna's stomach turned.
"How many like that?" she asked, voice thin.
"Too many," Elia said. "Not enough to call the pack 'gone.' Enough to make every room feel like a grave with the bodies still standing."
Luna swallowed hard.
"And Orion?" she forced out.
Elia's eyes flicked to the highest tower.
The Alpha's tower.
A thin plume of smoke rose from a narrow slit window there.
Not chimney-smoke.
Something else.
Dark.
Sour.
"He fights it," Elia said quietly. "Harder than most. That's part of the problem."
Luna frowned, dragged a sleeve over her cold nose.
"How is that a problem?" she demanded. "If he fights—"
"He fights *everyone*," Elia snapped, patience fraying. "Anyone who suggests he can't fix this by growling at it. Anyone who suggests he's not enough."
Old wounds in her tone.
Luna flinched, not at the rebuke, but at how familiar that sounded.
Stubbornness.
Blindness.
"It was slow, at first," Elia went on, eyes back on the cursed walls. "You were gone. The pack… adjusted. New wolves rose. Selene got sharper. The elders got more afraid of losing their place."
Old names, spoken like ghosts called to a new feast.
Luna's spine stiffened at Selene's.
"What did she do?" she asked.
Elia's mouth thinned.
"What she always does," she said. "Whispered. Turned worry into weapons. Turned legitimate fear into reasons to keep certain wolves further down."
Her gaze slid to Luna meaningfully.
"She told the pack your leaving was proof of your… unfitness," she continued. "Proof the Goddess had made a mistake. Proof that any 'signs' we thought we saw in you were just… delusions of liking the runt."
Heat flared under Luna's skin.
Anger.
Hurt.
A tired, unsurprised resignation.
"We knew that," she said. "We saw her do that even when I was still here."
"Oh, it got worse," Elia said dryly. "When the first crack appeared."
Her hand lifted, fingers pointing at a jagged black line slicing down from one of the carved moon emblems over the gate.
"It wasn't there one night," she said. "Then it was. Thin as a hair. Right through the center of the moon."
Luna's eyes narrowed.
She remembered that stone—the central symbol above the gatehead, where pups traced their claws and elders prayed.
"What did they say?" she asked.
Elia's voice dropped into a mocking imitation of a solemn elder's.
"Oh, the usual," she droned. "'The Goddess tests us.' 'Our faith must be stronger.' 'The runt left; this is what happens when you turn your back on your fate.'"
She snorted.
"Never mind that *they* were the ones who helped shove you out," she added. "Memory is a funny thing when pride gets its teeth in it."
Luna's lip curled.
"And Orion?" she pressed, the name like a stone on her tongue. "What did he say?"
"He said he'd keep us safe," Elia said.
A complicated mix of loyalty and bitterness roughened her voice.
"He called more patrols. Tightened training. Pushed warriors until they dropped. Anyone who faltered was… moved. Closer to the kitchens. Closer to the nurseries. Out of his way."
Out of his way.
Omega-ward.
Luna's throat tightened.
She pictured Rebel—the wolf Orion had once trusted with second-in-command duties—barking orders in the yard, pushing new recruits hard.
She imagined those same wolves stumbling in the hallway now, eyes silvering over.
"The cracks grew," Elia went on. "Spread. Pups had nightmares of shadows on the walls. Old wolves refused to sleep in rooms that tasted wrong. Selene said it was weakness. That only those with *true* Moonshadow blood could withstand a little darkness."
Disgust twisted her mouth.
"And the Bloodfangs?" Luna asked, forcing her attention back to present dangers. "When did they start circling?"
"When they smelled fear," Elia said simply. "We heard their first howls at the far borders about… three moons ago. Close enough now you can see their eyes from the parapets on a clear night."
As if to punctuate her words, a faint, mocking howl rose from the tree line behind them.
Not close enough to be an immediate threat.
Close enough to say: *We're watching.*
Internal cracks.
External teeth.
Pack fraying in the middle.
Luna's shoulders drew up toward her ears, tension knotting every muscle.
A part of her wanted to turn and seize the nearest tree with both hands and shake it until bark flew.
Another part wanted to sink down in the snow and put her head between her knees.
"I should have—" she started, guilt clawing up her throat.
Elia cut her off with a sharp slap to the back of her head—not hard enough to hurt, just enough to shock.
"Don't," she snapped. "Don't you *dare* start with 'I should have' when you were out there learning how not to die every day while these fools argued about whose wall-hangings offended the Goddess least."
Luna's eyes flashed.
"I *left,*" she ground out. "I walked away. Now *this*—"
"You left because staying would have killed you," Elia hissed. "In a different way than this shadow. You coming back sooner, smaller, weaker, would have just given it one more body to chew. You hear me?"
Luna swallowed hard.
Nodded.
"Yes," she murmured. "I hear you."
"Good," Elia said, hand dropping. "Save the self-flagellation for when we can afford to waste energy on it. Which is not now."
Luna sucked in a breath.
It burned.
The air here was thick with more than smoke and shadow.
Old arguments.
Old loyalties.
Old love.
It all lay in the stone.
In the worn grooves of the path leading to the gate.
In her own muscle memory as her feet unconsciously avoided the places where she knew the frost was thinnest, where old leaks made slippery patches.
Her wolf pressed forward.
*Home,* it said again, less certain now. *Den. Hurt-den. We… fix?*
"Yes," Luna whispered inside. "We try."
She took a step toward the gate.
The ground shivered.
Not from her.
From within.
A section of the wall to the left of the gate—one she remembered as solid and featureless—quivered as if struck from the inside.
For a heartbeat, the pulsing cracks there flared brighter, like veins lit from beneath.
Then stone *exploded* outward.
Not in neat chunks.
In jagged fragments, hurled with ferocious force.
Luna ducked on instinct.
A rock the size of her head whistled through the space where her skull had been, slammed into a tree behind with a wet-cracking sound, and dropped into the snow, leaving a steaming black trail where shadow hissed from its sides.
She came up in a crouch, power surging to her hands so fast her fingertips burned.
Elia had thrown herself flat, arms over her head.
Dust billowed from the new gap in the wall, choking and thick.
Within it, something moved.
Luna squinted, eyes watering.
At first, she thought more wolves were pushing through.
Then she saw the shape.
A formless, roiling mass of darkness, denser than the mist she'd glimpsed at the cracks before.
It poured from the hole like smoke under pressure, curling into the open air, hungry.
At its edges, where it brushed snow and splintered rock, frost blackened, then flaked away, leaving slicks of damp, sour-smelling earth behind.
It was not full night yet, but where the mass moved, light dimmed, as if the dusk clung heavier around it.
Luna's breath hitched.
This was what she had felt in her dreams.
Not the half-glimpsed, grinning storyteller in that false hall.
The raw spill of the curse itself.
It had found a way out.
"Inside, outside, what's the difference anymore?" Elia rasped, scrambling to her knees, eyes hard.
A wolf tumbled through the gap in the wall ahead of the shadow-mass.
He hit the ground hard, rolled, skidding on the slick snow.
Luna's heart lurched.
She recognized him this time.
Kade.
A middle-ranked warrior, older than her by a few years, broad-shouldered and scarred from a dozen training-field scuffles.
He'd been one of the first to laugh when she'd tripped with a tray.
One of the last to mock when she'd left, his gaze unreadable.
Now, his eyes shone the same pale, dead silver as the puppet-sentry's.
He staggered to his paws, movements slow and stiff.
Shadow clung to his fur like oil, dripping from his shoulders in tendrils that tried to rise back toward the wall.
Luna's fingers dug into the frozen earth.
Her stormgift snarled, eager to leap.
Her healer's thread twisted in her chest.
Kade took one step toward them.
Stopped.
His head tilted, as if listening to a voice only he could hear.
Then, jerkily, he turned—not toward Luna, not toward Elia—but back toward the wall.
Back toward the shadow leaking from it.
"NO," Luna snapped, power rising with the word. "You don't get to *feed it.*"
Wind answered her anger, whipping around her in a small cyclone, dragging dust and shadow-smell away from her face.
Lightning snapped between her fingers.
She didn't call it down.
Just let it dance in a thin arc from palm to palm, a visible warning.
"Kade!" she shouted, throat raw. "Stop!"
His ears didn't flick.
His fur didn't bristle.
He kept walking, each step slow but inexorable.
Like a sleepwalker heading for a cliff.
Elia cursed under her breath.
"See?" she said, hoarse. "They *choose* it now. Don't even fight. Just go."
"They're *not* choosing," Luna shot back, something wild trembling in her voice. "It's steering them. Like… like a hand on the back of their neck."
Her own neck prickled.
She'd felt that hand once.
The goddess' fingers had been careful, respectful, even when forceful.
This was a cruel parody—no consent, no care.
Just hunger.
Kade reached the jagged edge of the gap.
Shadow licked eagerly toward him.
Without allowing herself more time to think, Luna moved.
Her feet left the ground.
The world blurred for a heartbeat as she let her wolf rise just enough to give her speed, not full shift—muscles bunching, tendons stretching, power flooding her limbs.
She crossed the distance between them in a few long strides.
Her hand shot out.
Closed around Kade's foreleg just above the paw.
His fur burned cold under her skin.
The shadow hissed where her fingers brushed it, splattering back like water from a hot iron.
Kade's head snapped toward her.
His eyes were empty.
No recognition.
No anger.
Nothing.
Just that eerie, distant pale shine.
Luna's stomach lurched.
She slammed her stormthread down through her arm into her grip.
Not to scorch.
To *jolt.*
"WAKE," she snarled, voice cracking.
A pulse of energy shot from her palm into Kade's leg.
Not lightning enough to char fur.
Enough to make his muscles spasm.
He yelped—short, sharp.
For a heartbeat, light flared in his eyes, blue-green, his *own*.
"Lu… na…?" he gasped, as if surfacing from deep water.
Hope stabbed her.
Then the shadow surged.
It poured up his leg in a thick, dark wave, like ink running toward a blotter.
It hit her hand.
Cold seared her skin.
She hissed, instinct screaming at her to let go.
She held on.
Pain lanced up her arm, freezing, crackling, worse in some ways than fire.
Her healer-thread jerked awake fully at that, flaring under her skin, trying to push the cold back.
Shadow and storm met in the narrow tunnel of Kade's limb.
The feeling was wrong.
Like scraping bone against stone.
His body convulsed again.
His eyes rolled white.
Foam flecked his lips.
"Stop!" Elia shouted behind her. "You'll tear his soul in half—"
Luna's grip tightened.
She gritted her teeth, pulling *back* with both the storm and the new, fragile warmth of her healer's gift.
"Let. Him. GO," she ground out to the shadow.
Not begging.
Command.
The mass at the wall shuddered.
For a heartbeat, it recoiled from Kade's legs, dragging tendrils away as if injured.
In that sliver of time, Luna yanked.
Not physically—though her body strained.
She yanked with **will**.
With every stubborn, furious fragment of herself that had refused to die in the Rogue Lands, that had refused to let the avalanche take the valley, that had refused to leave the fox to bleed.
Kade screamed.
Not in pain alone.
In tearing.
In something inside him stretching between two hungers.
Luna screamed with him, not with fear, but with effort.
Her vision whited out at the edges.
Then—abruptly—the tension snapped.
Like a rope giving way.
Luna flew backward, the force of the release hurling her onto her back in the snow.
Cold slammed her lungs.
Her arm spasmed, fingers clawing the air.
Shadow spattered from her palm, droplets of pure dark that sizzled when they hit the ground, then sank in, leaving small, smoking pits.
Kade crumpled where he stood.
His body hit the snow with a thud.
For a long heartbeat, he didn't move.
Luna's heart stuttered.
*No…*
Then his chest hitched.
Once.
Twice.
He sucked in a ragged breath, coughed, rolled weakly onto his side.
His eyes fluttered open.
Blue-green.
Clear.
He stared at the sky, blank, panting.
Then, slowly, his gaze slid toward Luna.
Recognition.
Horror.
Grief.
"Luna," he whispered, voice raw. "You… shouldn't be here."
She laughed breathlessly, the sound half-mad.
"You're welcome," she rasped.
Behind her, the shadow-mass at the wall recoiled further, tendrils snapping in on themselves like cut snakes.
It did not flee back through the cracked stone.
It *spread* sideways instead, slicking along the wall's face, seeking a new seam.
The cracks pulsed, hungrily.
Luna pushed herself up on her good arm, the other limp and aching at her side.
Her palm was pale, veins darkened faintly under the skin where the shadow had licked in.
She could feel it there—a faint, cold throb, trying to sink deeper.
Her healer-thread flared in response, like a fire stoked around a splinter.
Not enough to burn it out fully.
Enough to wall it off.
For now.
Her whole body shook.
She looked at the breached wall, at the writhing dark struggling to decide where to go next.
At Kade, gasping and half-conscious.
At Elia, standing over him with a stick clutched in her hands like a club, eyes darting between them and the shadow.
At the sagging towers, the crooked gate, the puppet-sentry still walking his dead route above.
Moonshadow was not just cracked.
It was crumbling.
From within and without.
Old trust gone.
Old order shattered.
New hungers gnawing at every weak point.
"Peril," the Goddess had said.
Warnings in the wind.
Blood on the border.
Now, standing in the snow with shadow-throb in her veins and a warrior's panting gratitude in her ears, Luna understood just how close to breaking the pack truly was.
One more hard shove—from Bloodfang fangs, from internal betrayal, from the curse itself—and the walls would not just crack.
They would fall.
And when they did, what seeped out would not be just stone-dust and frightened wolves.
It would be the same darkness now nosing along the wall-face, tasting the air, sampling the path her own blood and bond left.
She staggered to her feet, jaw clenched.
Elia glanced at her, wariness and a flicker of awe warring in her expression.
"Can you do that… for all of them?" she asked, nodding at Kade, at the still-patrol on the wall.
Luna looked at her trembling hand.
At the pits burned into the snow around where shadow had dropped from her skin.
"At this cost?" she said quietly. "No. It'll tear me apart."
Truth tasted like failure.
Elia's mouth tightened.
"But I can do it for some," Luna went on, voice gaining strength with the admission. "And I can do *something* about that."
She jerked her chin toward the shadow-slicked wall.
"And that," she added, meaning the curse's creeping reach. "And the rogues who want to rip this carcass apart while it's still alive."
Her gaze traced the line of towers, the sag of stone.
"This pack has been rotting from the inside for years," she said, bitter and soft. "The curse just… made it visible. Made it hurt faster."
"And now?" Elia asked, rough. "What do you see?"
Luna swallowed.
"Something worth saving," she said, surprising herself with the honesty of it. "Not because they were kind to me. They weren't. But because if this falls the way it's falling, it'll poison everything it touches on the way down."
Her words hung in the cold air.
Kade coughed again, a wet, ugly sound.
"Storm," he rasped, eyes squeezed shut. "Your storm… hurts."
Luna's lips twitched.
"Good," she said. "Means it did something."
Behind her, the shadow at the wall hissed, recoiling another inch from her voice, as if offended by her claim.
The walls shuddered.
The lights on the towers flickered.
Howls rose from within—fear, anger, confusion.
Moonshadow was in peril.
Not tomorrow.
Now.
Luna rolled her aching shoulders back, lifted her chin to the cracked stone and the creeping dark.
"Then we start," she said, to Elia, to Kade, to the walls, to herself. "We start tearing rot out and shoring up what can still stand. Before there's nothing left but shadow and snow."
Elia nodded once, hard.
"About time someone said it," she muttered.
Together, they turned toward the askew gate.
The failing pack waited beyond—smaller, meaner, more desperate than the one that had cast Luna out, and yet still, somehow, hers.
She stepped forward, storm humming under her skin, healing warmth coiled like a ready ember, the first true test of her power and heart about to begin on the cracked stones of the place that had once named her worthless.