The forest did not care that she had left a pack behind.
It did not care that the Moon had once touched her, or that an Alpha had spoken her name like a wound before a gathered circle. Out here, beneath the tangled canopy and the unmarked sky, Luna was nothing but warm flesh, beating heart, and scent.
To some things, that meant food.
The first morning alone broke cold and damp.
Luna woke to the sound of dripping water and the ache of too little sleep. The hollow between the oak roots had kept her from the worst of the night air, but dew had crept in anyway, dampening her blanket. Her joints were stiff. Her back ached.
For a moment, she didn't remember where she was.
Her hand found only fabric and earth where the rickety frame of her bunk should have been. She blinked up at a vaulted ceiling of branches, leaves patterned dark against a pale, misty sky.
Then it rushed back. The Circle. The decision. Elia's hard hands tying the bundle. The long walk into trees that didn't know her name.
She sat up slowly, biting back a groan as her muscles protested.
Her stomach burned with a hollow, unfamiliar insistence.
Hunger.
Not the mild, background emptiness she'd known in the pack kitchens when Mara held back seconds from omegas. A sharp, clawed thing that had spent the night eating at the lining of her own belly.
She reached for her bundle, fingers clumsy, and unwrapped it.
Dried meat. Cheese, turning a little oily at the edges in the increasing warmth. Hard bread.
The sight was almost enough to make her weep with relief.
She forced herself to eat slowly—small bites, chewing each one thoroughly, even as the urge to cram it all into her mouth at once made her hands shake.
She washed the food down with water from her flask, then looked around.
In daylight, the forest seemed less like a single, undifferentiated wall and more like a series of layered veils. Trunks rose in columns of pale grey and dark brown. Moss spread in thick patches, dotted with tiny, half-hidden mushrooms. Ferns fanned from low dips in the ground.
There were no worn paths here. No trampled undergrowth marking where patrols had passed a hundred times before. Every direction looked equally unused.
Luna stood, slung the bundle across her back again, and picked one.
South and east would, eventually, curve back toward known territory—hers or someone else's. North led toward colder lands she had only heard stories about. West stretched into the deep Rogue Lands.
She turned west.
Her memory held scraps of overheard conversations. Rogue attacks from the west. Rogue packs forming, breaking, reforming like storms. Harder hunting. Thicker brambles.
But she wasn't heading toward a rumor of others. Not yet.
First, she needed to survive herself.
By midday, the pack compound might have been a dream.
The trees thickened as she walked, their branches knitting together overhead until only dappled slices of light made it to the forest floor. Bird calls shifted—less of the chatter she knew, more strange trills and whistles.
Her legs burned. Her breath sawed in and out of her chest.
She had never realized how much she usually *stopped.* In the pack lands, every task was broken into pieces. Scrub. Stand. Fetch. Walk. Sit. Sleep. Now there was only movement and the relentless awareness of the sun's slow arc.
She stumbled more often. Caught herself on trunks, bark scraping her palms. Her shoes—already thin—picked up burrs and tiny stones. Blisters bloomed where the leather rubbed.
The bond to Orion pulsed in the background, dull and distant. Once, mid-step, a sharper jolt made her glance over her shoulder, though there was nothing but layers of green and shadow.
He had felt something—her distance, perhaps, marking itself in the strange, unquantifiable ways of the mate bond. A thread stretched thin.
She turned her face back toward the unknown.
By afternoon, her water flask was light. The ache in her stomach had returned.
She forced herself to ration the remaining bread and meat. A bite here. A swallow there. It did little more than take the edge off.
She needed fresh water.
Moonshadow lands had creeks and pools at predictable places; maps hung in the Alpha's war room marked them in careful ink. Out here, there was only the sound of her own breathing and the occasional rustle of something small in the underbrush.
She paused, closed her eyes, and listened.
At first, all she heard was the rustle of leaves, the creak of branches.
Then—faintly—a different sound, almost beneath hearing.
A trickle.
Her eyes snapped open.
She turned slowly, head cocked, trying to pinpoint the source. It seemed to come from somewhere downhill, to her right.
She moved that way, stepping carefully, ears straining.
The sound grew clearer—a soft, constant spilling.
She pushed through a dense clump of ferns and nearly went sliding down a steep, moss-slick bank.
Below, a narrow stream cut through the earth, its water clear and shallow, dancing over smooth stones.
Relief punched through her.
She dropped to her knees at the edge, cupped her hands, and drank.
The water was cold enough to make her teeth ache. It tasted of iron and silt and green things. It tasted like *life.*
She drank until her stomach complained, then splashed the remaining water on her face, the shock clearing some of the fog from her mind.
A faint scent caught her as she knelt there, bent over the stream.
Musky. Sharp. Predatory.
Her whole body went rigid.
Wolves.
Not Moonshadow—no overlay of smoke and stone and the particular spice of her former pack. This was rawer. Dirt and old blood and something a little sour.
Rogue.
Her heart thudded.
She lifted her head slowly, water dripping from her chin, and scanned the trees.
The wind was moving toward her—carrying their scent *to* her, not hers to them. That bought her a sliver of time.
She eased back from the water, wiping her hands on her trousers, and slid behind a thick bush at the top of the bank, crouching low.
Moments later, they appeared on the opposite side of the stream.
Three of them.
All in their human forms, though "human" felt like too civilized a word for the way they moved—loose, feral, every muscle coiled and ready.
The first was tall and rail-thin, with a shock of dark hair hanging in his eyes. His clothes were torn, stained with things Luna did not want to name. A long, twisted scar ran from his jaw to his collarbone.
The second was shorter, thicker through the shoulders, with close-cropped hair and a broken nose that had never healed quite right.
The third was younger, maybe only a couple of years older than Luna, his hair in ragged tangles. His eyes were too bright, shifting restlessly.
They came to the water's edge and drank without ceremony, plunging their hands in, slurping straight from their palms.
"Thought you said there was a den nearby," the broken-nosed one grunted between gulps.
The tall one shrugged.
"Old scent," he said. "Might have moved on. Or been moved on."
The young one laughed, a quick, nervous sound.
"Bet they ran when they smelled *you,* Rafe," he said. "You stink worse than a dead boar in summer."
"Shut it, Kellan," Rafe snapped without heat. "Keep your nose open. Smelled something else, didn't you?"
Luna's fingers dug into the dirt.
"Yeah," Kellan said, sniffing the air again. "New. Not one of ours. Not pack either." His head turned slowly, nostrils flaring. "Female."
Her stomach clenched.
The broken-nosed one—Darrin, if she remembered right from Elia's muttered stories about rogue trouble at the border—grinned, showing uneven teeth.
"Fresh meat," he said.
Luna's pulse spiked.
She shrank back as much as the bush allowed, thankful she had wind and leaves between them. She tried to slow her breathing. To make herself small. Smaller than she already was.
"Could be just passing through," Rafe said. "Could be trouble. Either way, we'll find out."
He straightened, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and scanned the bank.
Luna held as still as stone.
After a long, tense moment, Rafe shrugged.
"Nothing this side," he said. "Come on. We've got to check the old den before night. Want walls around us when the real predators come sniffing."
Darrin snorted.
"Real predators," he muttered. "Hear that, Kellan? We ain't real."
Kellan rolled his eyes.
"You're real enough when you're snoring," he said.
They moved on, their scent trail sweeping along the opposite bank and away into the trees.
Luna waited until they were out of sight and their smell had thinned before she let out the breath she'd been holding.
Her hands were shaking.
She had known, in the abstract, that there were other wolves out here. Wolves like the ones Moonshadow had fought at the borders—desperate, vicious, with nothing to lose.
Seeing them—smelling them, feeling the way the air shifted around their presence—made the danger real.
"If they'd been downwind," she whispered, "if I hadn't stopped for water..."
She might have met them face-to-face.
Her stomach twisted at the thought of their eyes on her, of their words. Fresh meat.
She pushed herself to her feet, legs unsteady, and looked at the stream again.
It was both lifeline and risk.
Everything out here would be like that.
The days that followed blurred into a brutal education.
She learned quickly that the Rogue Lands did not offer second chances.
One misstep on a slick log could send her crashing onto rocks. One inattentive moment at dusk could mean waking nose-to-nose with a curious fox—or something larger, less easily spooked.
She slept lightly, waking at every rustle.
The first night she tried to make a fire, she nearly set her blanket alight. The second, she managed a weak, smoky flame that sputtered out in a light rain.
The third night, shivering and damp, she decided to forgo flame entirely. The thought of the light drawing eyes—rogue wolves, other things—was more terrifying than the cold.
Hunger gnawed at her constantly.
Elia's provisions lasted longer than they should have, because Luna forced herself to stretch them. She parceled out dried meat strips into tiny, bitter slivers. She broke hard bread into crumbs. She scraped every bit of cheese with her teeth.
Even so, by the end of the first week, the pouch was nearly empty.
Her body felt... hollowed.
Her steps grew slower. Her edges sharper beneath her skin.
She foraged clumsily at first.
Back home, she'd watched the older omegas pick berries from the hedges near the compound, laughing and popping them into their mouths. Here, she stared at clusters of dark, shining fruit and hesitated.
Some were safe.
Some were not.
She didn't know which was which.
She recalled half-remembered warnings from elders—red means dead, white will bite, blue might save you, black might slay you. None of it was consistent enough to trust with her life.
She watched what the birds ate.
What the squirrels carried.
If a plant's berries remained untouched while others were stripped, she left them alone.
Slowly, she began to recognize a few safe things—a tart, red-tinged berry with a star-shaped crown; a cluster of small, sweet, dark-purple ones on low-growing bushes.
She learned to dig for roots when her hands weren't too numb. Some were stringy and bitter. Some left a pleasant earthy taste on her tongue.
Once, desperate and dizzy, she bit into something that looked like a pale, fat carrot.
Her mouth tingled.
Then burned.
Then went numb.
Her heart lurched.
She spat it out, clawing at the dirt to rinse the taste away with water. Her tongue felt too big in her mouth. Her throat tightened.
Fear surged through her.
"Goddess, no," she choked. "Not like this. Not... stupid."
The sensation ebbed after a few minutes, leaving her shaky and sweating.
She did not touch that plant again.
Her body began to change.
The soft layer of kitchen-fed roundness she'd carried—a thin padding over bones—melted away. Her clothes hung looser. Her face grew sharper in the reflection of still pools: cheekbones more pronounced, eyes larger.
Her muscles, though aching, hardened.
She climbed more. Jumped more. Swung herself over fallen trunks and dragged herself up steep inclines by her hands.
Her hands bled.
Blisters burst under old calluses. Splinters lodged deep, their angry red halos throbbing. She dug them out with Elia's short knife, biting down on her blanket to muffle any sounds.
Blood slicked her fingers. The smell of it drew insects and made the hair on the back of her neck rise.
Blood, she learned, was an announcement.
On the third week, she misjudged a leap across a narrow ravine.
Her foot slipped on loose stones. She went down hard, her shin slamming into jagged rock. Pain flared up her leg, white and shocking.
She rolled, grabbing at roots, and managed to arrest her slide before she tumbled all the way to the bottom.
For a moment, she lay there, chest heaving, staring up at the thin slice of sky between the ravine's walls.
Then the scent hit her.
Sharp. Metallic.
Her own blood.
She forced herself to sit up and looked.
A long, ugly gash split the skin of her shin, bright red welling up and beginning to trickle.
Her stomach lurched—not at the sight, but at the understanding.
Out here, blood was not just pain.
It was invitation.
She yanked at the hem of her shirt, tearing a strip of fabric free with shaking hands. She wrapped it around the wound as tightly as she could, hissing through her teeth.
The pressure helped. The flow slowed to a sticky seep.
"Up," she muttered. "Up, up, up."
Her voice shook.
She dragged herself the rest of the way up the ravine wall, using roots and small ledges. Every pull sent fresh jolts of pain through her leg. Her vision blurred once; she blinked hard, refusing to let it go dark.
When she reached the top, she collapsed on her back, gasping.
The forest spun slowly above her.
After a few breaths that tasted of iron and dirt, she rolled onto her side and forced herself to stand.
Her leg throbbed. Every step was a jolt.
Too slow, a part of her mind whispered. You're too slow now.
She limped until she found a thick cluster of bushes and crawled beneath them, curling into the narrow, scratchy hollow. Branches snagged at her hair, her clothes. Leaves pressed close.
It was cramped.
It was also hidden.
She lay there, biting her lip, listening for anything that might have picked up the scent trail she'd left behind.
No howls came.
No cracking of larger branches.
Just the soft, constant murmurs of smaller life.
Eventually, exhaustion swallowed the pain.
She woke hours later to stiff muscles and a leg that felt like someone had driven a dull stake through it. The makeshift bandage was soaked through, the fabric stuck to the wound.
She peeled it away, gritting her teeth, and inspected the cut.
Ugly. Deep. But not gaping. No bone showing.
She cleaned it as best she could with water and a clean part of her shirt, then rewrapped it.
As she worked, something prickled at the edge of her awareness.
Not through the bond—Orion's presence was distant, his life a far-off thrum.
From the earth.
A faint, buzzing sensation under her fingertips, like the softest vibration of a plucked string.
She paused, hand resting lightly on the ground.
It grew, just a little, responding to her attention.
Warmth seeped into her palm.
Not like fire. Like something stirring in the dirt beneath, slow and sleepy.
She frowned.
In her dreams, back in the pack, she'd seen glowing cracks in the earth. Light pouring up through them. The Goddess's figure veiled in silver, her blessing a hum behind Luna's heart.
Now, here, with her blood soaking into unknown soil, that memory shivered through her.
"Not yet," she whispered. "I'm not ready. I don't... know how."
The vibration didn't vanish. It simply settled.
Waiting.
She did not yet understand it.
She only knew that, even here, hurt and hidden and hungry in a thorn-bristling hollow, something old and strange in the earth recognized her.
Whether that was comfort or threat, she did not know.
The days blurred on.
She learned to read the sky.
Pink-gold light meant morning. Harsh white overhead meant she should seek shade and water. Long shadows meant it was time to find shelter before the real darkness fell.
She learned to read the forest's moods.
Silence was not always safety. Sometimes it meant something bigger had passed through, driving smaller life into hiding.
Sudden bursts of birds from lower branches meant she should freeze, listen, wait.
Once, she watched a lean, grey shape move through the trees a hundred paces away, head low, steps smooth.
Not a wolf.
A mountain cat.
Its muscles rippled beneath its short fur, tail twitching. It paused, sniffed the air, then moved on.
Luna did not breathe until it had vanished completely.
Twice, she heard howls in the night.
Not the familiar chorus of a united pack, their voices rising and falling in practiced harmony.
These were... ragged.
Solo voices. Two, sometimes three, calling without the answering comfort of many.
Rogues.
Lonely.
Hungry.
Angry.
Each time, she buried herself deeper in whatever scant shelter she'd found—a hollow log, a tangle of roots, a shallow scrape in a dirt bank—and prayed they would not smell her.
The bond with Orion frayed further under the strain of distance and hunger.
Sometimes, for days, she barely felt it—just a faint, background hum. Other times, it sparked without warning, sending an ache through her chest.
Once, as she crouched above a small, muddy pool trying to coax frogs from the reeds with a sharp stick, a sudden spike of something—fear? fury?—from his side made her spear miss entirely.
The frog darted away, vanishing into murky depths.
She wanted to scream.
She wanted to send her own feelings back down that silvered thread, to hurl her exhaustion and bitterness against his carefully composed walls.
She didn't know how.
So she choked the urge down and kept moving.
Every night, before sleep, she pressed her palm to the ground.
"Still here," she murmured to the unforgiving dirt. To the Goddess. To herself. "Still walking."
Sometimes the earth vibrated back, faintly.
Sometimes it didn't.
Once, on a particularly bleak night when the sky had clouded over and the damp crawled into her very bones, she lay curled under a fallen tree and let the tears come.
They slid silently into the moss.
"I thought leaving would feel like... freedom," she whispered. "It just feels like dying slower."
Her stomach growled in answer.
"I don't know if I made the right choice," she said. "Staying hurt. This hurts. Maybe it's all just... different flavors of the same."
The silence pressed close.
Then, so softly she almost missed it, something shifted.
Not in the air. In her.
A small, hard knot of... something. Anger. Pride. The part of her that had pushed back against Selene's sneers even when she'd kept her head down.
It straightened.
"You chose," it said, in her own voice, fiercer than she felt. "No one pushed you out of your own skin. You walked yourself here."
She sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve.
"Fine," she muttered. "But if I walked myself here, I can walk myself *through.*"
The forest did not reply.
But the ember in her chest glowed a little warmer.
She began, slowly, to think less like a pack wolf and more like a creature of this rough, unclaimed place.
She stopped avoiding thorns.
Instead, she used them.
She broke off stout branches from bramble bushes and dragged them behind her to brush out her tracks.
She wove thorny twigs into crude circles around her sleeping spaces, not enough to keep larger predators out, but enough to make them *pause.*
She found a bush heavy with small, bitter berries that stained her fingers red and her lips darker.
Rogues hated the taste of those berries, Elia's voice surfaced from some distant memory. "Spits 'em right out. Says they remind 'em of medicine."
She ate them anyway, grimacing, and rubbed the crushed juice along her wrists, her neck, the hem of her shirt.
Masking her scent.
Rogue's blood and thorns.
She was beginning to understand why the stories painted them so sharp.
They weren't born cruel. Not all of them.
They were ground into hard edges by necessity.
One afternoon, following the second sound of running water she'd heard in as many days, she crested a small rise and found something that made her stop.
A den.
Or the remains of one.
A shallow cave opened in the hillside, its entrance partially obscured by hanging roots and ferns. Old scent clung to it—wolf, layered and stale. Rogue, by the lack of any familiar pack markers.
Bones littered the ground nearby—small, mostly. Rabbits. Birds. A couple of larger ones, cracked to get at the marrow.
The earth inside the cave was packed flat, indented in a few smooth hollows where bodies had once curled.
No fresh tracks.
No recent scat.
Whoever had lived here was gone.
She approached slowly, every sense stretched.
At the entrance, she crouched, nose wrinkling.
Smoke. Faint. Old.
Some rogue had tried, more than once, to make this a home.
It had not lasted.
Nothing did out here.
Her muscles screamed at the idea of sleeping on anything other than a damp hollow. Her wound throbbed under its scabbed bandage.
The cave's shade was cool. Its walls, solid.
She knew, with the cold clarity survival etched, that taking up space in an old den could bring more trouble than comfort.
If its former occupants returned. If others had claimed it since.
But night was falling. The sky outside was already bruising purple.
She stepped inside.
The cave was deeper than it looked from outside, narrowing after a few paces into a low pocket just large enough for three wolves to curl up together. The air was dry. The earth held the ghosts of old warmth.
She set her bundle down, then hesitated.
At the back of the cave, something glinted in a crack in the stone.
She moved closer, reaching out cautiously, and pulled.
A small piece of metal came free—the broken tip of a blade, dulled by time.
Rogues had lived here. Fought here.
Maybe died here.
She closed her fingers around the metal, feeling its weight, then tucked it between two rocks beside where she would lay her head.
A reminder.
She curled up on the flattened earth, pulled her blanket around her, and listened.
The Rogue Lands creaked and whispered outside.
Somewhere, far away, a wolf howled—a long, mournful sound that spoke of hunger and defiance in equal measure.
Luna did not answer.
Her voice was not ready for that yet.
She lay there instead, staring at the thin crescent of moon visible through the cave mouth, and spoke to it in a hoarse whisper.
"I thought you were only in the circles," she said. "In the rituals. In the songs."
Her lips twisted.
"You're here too," she added. "In the cold. In the empty. In the places where no one's watching but you."
The ember in her chest pulsed in response.
"Fine," she said, exhaustion dragging at her words. "Watch. I'm not done yet."
Rogue blood and thorns.
That was what she was becoming.
Every cut, every scratch, every sharp hunger carved away some of the softness pack life had left on her.
It hurt.
It also, strangely, felt... honest.
No one out here pretended to be kind while wielding knives under the table. The mountain cat would kill her if she was careless. So would a rogue pack that chose to see her as competition rather than potential ally.
The Rogue Lands did not hide their teeth.
Neither, slowly, would she.
She slept.
And as she did, far behind her, in a compound ringed with stone, an Alpha woke sitting bolt upright in his bed, heart hammering for reasons he could not name, and a future Luna turned in her sleep, frowning, sensing some shift she could not yet trace.
Between them, a half-frayed bond hummed in its half-life.
Ahead of Luna, beyond the next line of trees, the land waited.
It did not care where she had come from.
It cared only about whether she could survive.
Every step she took now was a lesson written in blood and bramble.
And with each lesson, whether she knew it or not, the runt who had once been trampled beneath pack feet was being reforged into something the Rogue Lands themselves would have to learn to reckon with.