The dream found her on a night when her body had very nearly given up.
Luna had walked too far on too little—too little food, too little sleep, too little hope. Her injured shin throbbed with each step, a deep, hot ache that made the edges of her vision blur. Late in the day she had misjudged a descent, sliding the last few feet on loose dirt and catching herself awkwardly with an already scraped hand.
By dusk, she could hardly keep her eyes open.
She found a shallow dip in the earth at the base of a birch tree, its peeling white bark ghost-pale in the fading light. The hollow wasn't much—half-shelter at best—but it was enough to curl into. The sky above was a patchwork of dark branches and a thin wash of stars.
The moon, just past full, peered down between the limbs, its light a cool, indifferent sheen on her upturned face.
Luna pulled her damp blanket around her shoulders and lay on her side, knees drawn to her chest. Her stomach was a tight, hollow knot. Her bones felt like they were filled with sand. Every breath came with a small, weary hitch.
"Moon Goddess," she whispered to the slice of sky, her voice rasping. "If you mean to let me die out here... at least let me sleep first."
The prayer was half-resentment, half-surrender.
Darkness slid over her like a falling curtain.
And then there was light.
Not the harsh glare of noon, not the flicker of torchfire, but a soft, endless silver radiance that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
She was standing.
The ache in her shin, the gnaw of hunger, the bite of cold—they were gone, as if someone had stepped between her and every discomfort and said, *no further.*
Her bare feet rested on a surface that looked like water, black and glassy, but it held her as surely as stone. Each shift of her weight sent slow, shimmering ripples outward, silver chasing silver into the darkness.
Around her, there were no trees. No underbrush. No gully walls or bramble thickets.
There was only an immense, velvet sky.
Stars crowded it, but not the way she knew them. These were brighter, closer, their light alive. They wheeled and drifted, forming and reforming constellations she did not recognize. Sometimes they seemed to cluster into the shapes of wolves, noses lifted in silent howls, before dissolving again into scattered points.
Above all of it hung the moon.
It was vast—so close it filled most of her vision, its curve stretching from one edge of the horizon to the other. Craters and valleys marbled its surface, faintly shadowed, like the marks of an ancient, thoughtful hand.
Its light poured down in great, soft pillars, bathing everything—the glassy water, Luna's upturned face—in luminous silver.
She turned in a slow circle, heart pounding, breath catching at the beauty and strangeness of it.
"Where... am I?" she whispered.
Her voice did not echo.
Instead, the water beneath her feet rippled in answer.
In front of her, the silver light thickened, gathering in a column that rose from the glass-dark surface to the low-hanging moon. It shimmered, brightening until she had to squint, raising one hand to shield her eyes.
Within the light, something moved.
A shape stepped forward, carved itself out of radiance and shadow.
At first, it was a wolf.
Tall, slender, every line of her body both elegant and wild. Her fur was not fur at all, but falling starlight, each strand a tiny galaxy in motion. Her paws left no mark on the surface, yet each step sent delicate ripples spreading outward.
Her eyes were full moons—pale, deep, reflecting not just the world around her but something behind it.
Luna's knees went weak.
She sank to them without thinking, hands pressed flat to the not-water, head bowing.
"Goddess," she breathed.
The wolf regarded her for a heartbeat.
Then the light around her flared, and her shape... unfolded.
Silver fur blurred into streaming hair. Limbs lengthened, reorienting. The muzzle shortened, cheekbones fine and stark. The tail's arc smoothed into the trailing edge of a long, flowing gown.
The wolf became a woman.
She was tall—taller than Orion, taller than any elder in Moonshadow's hall—and impossibly graceful. Her gown was made of night-sky, deep and rich, studded with slow-drifting stars that shifted when she moved. Her hair fell in a smooth, endless spill of silver down her back, catching the moonlight in a thousand points.
Her skin held the soft glow of bone under light. Her face was both ancient and ageless—strong lines softened by something like sorrow and something like immeasurable patience.
Her eyes... Goddess, her eyes.
They were the same as the wolf's had been: round and pale and bottomless, each iris a swirling storm of silver and shadow. Looking into them, Luna felt as if she might fall forward forever.
"Rise, Luna," the Moon Goddess said.
Her voice was not loud. It didn't have to be. It soaked into Luna's bones, humming along the small coal that lived behind her sternum.
Luna's body obeyed before her thoughts caught up.
She pushed herself upright, legs surprisingly steady. Her hands trembled.
"You... you came," she said, the words rough.
The Goddess' lips curved in something that was almost a smile, tempered by something older.
"I have always been here," she said simply. "You just have not always been able to see."
Luna's throat tightened.
"I called," she said. "From the kitchens. From the clearing. From the Circle. I–"
Her voice cracked.
The Goddess lifted one hand.
"Shh," she murmured, and though the sound was soft, it carried more power than any shouted command Luna had ever heard. "I heard."
The simple statement shivered through Luna like a touch.
All those lonely nights. All those whispered prayers into pillow and dirt. *I heard.*
"Then why..." The question broke free before Luna could stop it. "Why did you let it happen the way it did? The bond. The Circle. The... rejection."
The word scraped her throat raw.
Pain flickered across the Goddess' face—not surprise, not guilt, but the ache of someone who had anticipated this wound.
"I did not come to you to speak of Orion," she said gently. "Not tonight. His story is bound to yours, yes. But he is not the reason I marked you."
Luna's breath caught.
"You... marked me?" she repeated, barely above a whisper.
The Goddess took a step closer.
Up close, she smelled only faintly of anything—a cool sweetness, like night-blooming flowers, and something more austere beneath it: cold stone, clear water.
"When you were brought to Moonshadow," she said, "you were half-dead. Skin stretched thin over small bones. Blood sluggish. Breath a fragile thing."
Images surfaced in the air around them as she spoke, as if her words painted on the silver mist.
Luna saw a much smaller version of herself, limp in a warrior's arms, mud clinging to a torn shirt. Saw Elia in the kitchens, frowning down at her on a pallet of rags. Saw Mara clicking her tongue disapprovingly.
"I watched," the Goddess said. "You were not born under Moonshadow's crest. Your blood carries strands even their seer could not read. Old threads. Forgotten patterns. You are... not just theirs."
Luna's heart stuttered.
"What do you mean?" she asked. "Not just theirs? I'm– I'm an orphan. No family. No–"
"You are not without lineage," the Goddess interrupted, her tone soft but firm. "Only without records."
The images in the air shifted.
Forest, deeper than the Rogue Lands. Trees so old their trunks were as wide as houses. A long-ago moon, huge and bright, bathing a clearing in fierce silver.
Wolves moved through that vision—larger than any Luna had seen, pelts streaked with colors that didn't quite exist. Their eyes glowed faintly, their paws left impressions of light with each step.
At the center of the clearing, a she-wolf stood, her fur a strange, swirling pattern of stone-grey and near-white. Around her paws, tiny rivulets of water bubbled up wherever she stepped, vanishing back into the ground as she passed.
Beside her, a dark-furred wolf with eyes like embers shook himself, and sparks flew from his coat into the night, hanging in the air like fireflies.
Elementals.
Luna knew the word before the Goddess spoke it, dredged up from stories murmured over dishwash basins when the elders thought she wasn't listening.
"Once, long ago," the Goddess said, "there were wolves who carried in their bones not just teeth and claw and pack-scent, but the raw tongues of the world. Stone. Water. Air. Fire. Storm."
The vision wolves moved, playing, fighting, their movements leaving trails of light and shadow across trees and rocks.
"They were my first children," the Goddess went on, something like fondness threading her voice. "They sang with rivers and rolled with thunder. They walked across snow and did not sink, because the snow knew them. They burned and were not consumed, because flame knew them too."
Luna watched, wide-eyed, as one of the wolves leapt from a cliff and landed on a wave that rose up to meet him, seafoam curling around his paws like fond hands.
"What happened to them?" she whispered.
The Goddess' eyes dimmed, just a fraction.
"The world... grew noisier," she said. "Packs rose, claiming territories. Alphas learned to love walls. Wolves forgot to listen to the earth beneath their feet and the sky above their backs."
The vision shifted again.
Now she saw packs like Moonshadow, though their symbols were different. Wolves gathered around fires, arguing, boasting. Lines were drawn on crude maps. Borders. Claims.
"The elementals' gifts frightened many," the Goddess said. "Power that did not bow easily to rank made Alphas uneasy. Some tried to control them. Some tried to use them. Some tried to... extinguish them."
The images darkened.
Wolves bearing elemental traits stood apart, their eyes too bright, their fur sometimes sparking, sometimes trailing mist. Others looked at them with a mix of awe and fear, forming circles that excluded them.
"Many lines faded," the Goddess said quietly. "Forgotten. Diluted. Hidden away in the blood of wolves who lived and died without ever feeling what lay sleeping under their skin."
The visions faded, leaving only the endless silver and the Goddess' face.
"In you," she said, "those threads wake again."
Luna's breath hitched.
"In... me?" she echoed, disbelieving. "I– I held a drop of water. I made a little mud slide once. That's not–"
"It is the first breath of a storm," the Goddess said. "Small. But no less real for its size."
She lifted one luminous hand and, without quite touching Luna's chest, held her palm inches above that familiar spot behind the sternum.
Heat flared there in response.
Not the dull ache of overexertion. Not the burning shame of the Circle.
Something... clean.
Something like a coal catching a new draft.
"You feel it," the Goddess said. It wasn't a question.
Luna nodded, unable to speak.
"This," the Goddess went on, her voice low and certain, "is not Moonshadow's gift to withhold. Not Orion's to reject. This is older. This is mine. This is *yours.*"
The words landed like stones in a still pool.
Shock rippled through her first.
Then, slowly, something else.
Recognition.
She had always felt... slightly misfit, even in her own skin. Too much and too little at once. Thinner, yes, weaker by pack standards, but also humming with something no one else around her seemed to feel.
The Goddess' hand hovered, silver light pulsing faintly from her palm to the coal in Luna's chest.
"Your blood," she said, "remembers the old songs. Beneath the hurt. Beneath the scars. Beneath the names they gave you."
Runt.
Stray.
Burden.
Her throat constricted.
"And my blood?" she managed. "You said I'm... not just Moonshadow. What am I?"
The Goddess' gaze softened.
"There was a pack once," she said, "far deeper in the wild than Moonshadow's walls could ever see. They did not build high halls. They did not carve crests into stone. They carved them into rivers and mountains instead."
The silver mist coalesced again into images.
She saw a vast forest on the edge of mountains, where low clouds slid like ghosts between jagged peaks. At its heart lay a wide, still lake, black as glass, reflecting a full moon with perfect clarity.
A pack moved along its shores, their pelts catching moonlight in strange ways.
Some seemed rimmed in frost, breath steaming colder than it should in the summer-night air. Some left faint scorch-marks where their paws touched dry grass. Some stirred dust-devils with the flick of a tail.
"They called themselves Stormroot," the Goddess said. "Wolves whose line began where roots touched storm-clouds, who remembered that the world above and below are always speaking."
Luna watched as a dark-furred female, belly heavy with pups, stood on a low rock overlooking the lake. Lightning flickered in her eyes when she raised her muzzle to howl at the moon.
Something about her profile—her jaw, the slope of her nose—snagged at Luna, a tug of familiarity she couldn't place.
"They are gone now," the Goddess said softly. "Scattered. Broken by greed and fear and time. But blood remembers what memory forgets."
The pregnant female's image lingered, haloed in moonlight.
"Your mother," the Goddess said, "was Stormroot."
The words dropped like a stone into Luna's world, cracking something open.
"I..." She swayed. "I never– I don't even know her name."
"Names are wind," the Goddess said gently. "Blood is river. It runs on."
The vision of the Stormroot wolves faded, leaving Luna trembling in the silvery dark.
"Then... why Moonshadow?" she whispered. "Why was I found there? Brought there?"
"Because your mother knew," the Goddess said. "She knew what hunted her. She knew Stormroot's enemies. She knew she was running out of road."
Grief shadowed the Goddess' eyes.
"She crossed into Moonshadow territory bleeding," the Goddess said, voice quieter now. "The warriors who found her were young. She begged them, with her last strength, to take her pup. To keep you inside their walls. It was the closest safety she could find before the dark took her."
Luna's knees gave out.
She sank back down onto them, hands braced on the glassy surface that somehow did not chill her.
"My mother," she choked. "She– she died there? For me?"
The Goddess' hand finally—*finally*—touched her.
Cool fingers brushed Luna's hair back from her face, the gesture so achingly familiar and so utterly unknown that a sob tore from her chest.
"She died choosing you," the Goddess said. "As you have been dying, slowly, choosing everyone but yourself."
The truth of it cut, then cleared.
"She put you in a cage to save your life," the Goddess went on. "I came tonight to tell you this: you were never meant to stay in it."
Luna looked up, tears carving burning paths down her cheeks.
"I left," she whispered. "I walked away."
Pain and pride moved together in the Goddess' gaze.
"Yes," she said. "You did the hardest, bravest thing a wolf can do. You turned your back on a name that gave you everything and nothing, and stepped into the jaws of the unknown. Alone."
"I don't feel brave," Luna said hoarsely. "I feel... hungry. And cold. And stupid."
The Goddess' mouth twitched.
"Bravery rarely feels like the songs say," she murmured. "It feels like shaking and doing it anyway."
She stepped back, her gown whispering over the glass-dark water without a sound.
"You asked me, again and again, for a path," she said. "You thought that path would be rank. Place. A spot at someone else's side. Alpha. Luna. Mate."
Luna closed her eyes briefly, Orion's face surfacing unbidden.
The Goddess' voice cut through the ache.
"What I offer you," she said, "is none of those, and all of them. I offer you a life not defined by a chair at a table, but by the shape of the sky when you stand beneath it. Not by a title over a hall, but by the way the land itself breathes easier when you pass."
She raised her arms slightly.
The world around them responded.
Far off, mountains rose from the silver mist—dark, sharp silhouettes against the massive moon. At their base, fire glowed in some deep cleft. To the east, an endless ocean unfurled, its waves tipped in cold flame, rising and falling with slow, titanic grace.
Forests spread, older and thicker than any Luna had walked. Their leaves whispered secrets in a language she almost, almost understood.
In each direction, something-called.
Heat. Cold. The low rumble of stone. The high song of wind.
"You are not just a wolf of a pack," the Goddess said. "You are a wolf of the world. Of root and storm. Of the place where my light touches earth and refuses to leave."
Luna's breath came fast.
"I don't understand," she said honestly. "I'm... small. I can barely hold a drop of water in the air before I fall on my face. How can I be... that?"
The Goddess smiled then, full and aching, and for a heartbeat Luna saw in that expression every pup's first shaky step, every young wolf's unsure leap, every ancestor's weary joy.
"Do you think the sea began as you see it now?" she asked. "Do you think mountains rose in a day? Power is not born entire. It is coaxed. Cultivated. Chosen, over and over, instead of fear."
She lowered her hands.
The great visions of mountains and seas dimmed, folding back into mist.
Only a single path remained clear—a thin, glowing thread of light that stretched out behind Luna, back toward a faint impression of Moonshadow's walls, and another that ran ahead, out over the silver water into the unknown.
"The life they offered you," the Goddess said, "was a narrow lane. Useful. Contained. You would have scrubbed floors and carried plates until your back gave out, or until some other Alpha decided your existence was an inconvenience."
Each word was gentle.
Each word was a blade.
"The life I offer you," she went on, "is hard. It will cut you. It will starve you. It will throw you against teeth sharper than anything you have seen. But at its end, if you walk it, you will stand not as a Luna of one pack, but as a storm at the center of many. As a bridge between my first children and the wolves who forgot them."
Luna trembled.
"A storm," she echoed, stunned. "Me?"
"You feel the pull of earth," the Goddess said. "You have already, without training, coaxed water to pause and ground to soften. Air has brushed your fingertips and listened. Fire sleeps in your blood, waiting for your courage to rouse it. You are *not* one thing, Luna. You are not meant to be."
The coal in Luna's chest flared in answer, heat and coolness twisting together in some new, electric promise.
Tears blurred her vision.
"Why me?" she whispered. "There must have been others. Stronger. Smarter. Not–"
"Not a runt?" The Goddess finished for her, one brow lifting.
Luna's cheeks burned.
"Yes," she said.
The Goddess stepped closer again, until they were only a breath apart.
She reached out, cupped Luna's chin in one cool, luminous hand, and tilted her face up.
"Because you know what it is to be small," she said simply. "Because you have been starved of more than food, and yet you still ask for something greater than a full bowl. Because, when given the chance to fill that empty place with bitterness, you filled it with a question instead."
Her thumb caught a tear as it slipped free and brushed it away.
"Because you refused to disappear, even when everyone around you was more comfortable pretending you had," the Goddess finished softly.
Luna's vision swam.
"I'm... scared," she confessed, voice breaking. "Of dying out there. Of failing. Of... disappointing you."
The Goddess' hand slid from her chin to rest, briefly, against the center of her chest.
"Good," she said, and there was no mockery in it. Only a deep understanding. "Fear is not your enemy. It is a blade. Light in the right hand. Deadly in the wrong. Learn where to point it."
She withdrew her hand.
Light traced the spot where her palm had hovered, a faint, burning crescent that sank into Luna's skin and vanished.
Heat flooded Luna's limbs.
It wasn't the draining flare she'd felt pulling at earth and water. It was like someone had poured strength directly into her bones. Her muscles felt looser, less leaden. Her lungs expanded easily.
The exhaustion that had hardened around her like old mud cracked, just a little.
"You are not meant to crawl forever, Luna Stormroot," the Goddess said.
The name hit her like a thunderclap.
"Stormroot," Luna whispered. Her name. A name that was hers, not given in contempt or pity.
"You are meant to stand," the Goddess continued, silver eyes gleaming. "You are meant to walk into places that have forgotten my light and remind them. You are meant to learn the language of river and rock and sky until they call you *sister.*"
A lump rose in Luna's throat.
"Will I go back?" she asked, the question tearing itself free. "To them? To... Moonshadow. To him."
The Goddess' gaze shifted for the first time, flickering briefly toward that backward-stretching thread of light.
"Yes," she said. "But not as you left. And not for a long time."
Luna swallowed.
"Will he–" She couldn't say Orion's name. "Will he regret?"
Pain and pride moved again in the Goddess' eyes.
"Every choice has a shadow," she said. "His is long. Whether he steps into it or out of it is his journey, not yours."
The words landed heavy.
Luna managed a shaky nod.
"Then... what do I do?" she asked. "Right now. Tomorrow. I can't turn mountains yet. I can barely hold a drop."
The Goddess smiled.
"Tomorrow," she said, "you wake. You drink. You eat what you can find. You press your hand to the earth and listen again. And when the hunger and the fear and the old voices in your head tell you that you are nothing, you remember this."
She gestured around them.
The vast, impossible sky.
The silver sea.
The memory of wolves who walked on waves and left frost in their footprints.
"You are my child," the Goddess said. "Not my only one. Not my favorite. But mine. I named you Luna when you first howled under me, and I did not put that name in any Alpha's keeping. No pack's walls can hold what I have placed in you. No rejected bond can unmake it."
Luna's heart beat hard enough to hurt.
"I'm going to fall," she said. "A lot."
"Yes," the Goddess agreed. "And then you will rise. A lot."
She lifted her hand one last time.
This touch wasn't to Luna's skin, but to the space just above her brow.
Coolth brushed her there—a kiss of light.
Images crashed over Luna in a rush, too fast to grasp, but leaving impressions scorched into her mind:
Her own hands, older, wreathed in crackling energy as rain lashed around her.
A river bending its course a fraction at her outstretched will.
Flame blooming in her palm, not to burn but to shield.
Wolves—many wolves—standing behind her, not as those who stood around a runt, but as those who look to a storm and know it will break what needs breaking.
Her own voice, ringing out over a howling wind: not a plea, not an apology, but a command.
"Remember," the Goddess said, her tone suddenly distant, as if receding through a long tunnel. "You asked me to change something. I did not come to change *them.* I came to wake you."
The light around them intensified.
The sky, the sea, the Goddess' face—they all blurred into a blaze of white-silver that swallowed form and edge.
"Luna Stormroot," the Goddess' voice echoed, everywhere and nowhere at once. "Find your bones. Find your storm. The world is wider than any pack, and you were born for more than their scraps."
The words seemed to etch themselves into the coil in Luna's chest, line by glowing line.
Then she was falling.
Down through light.
Down through darkness.
Down through the thin veil between dream and waking.
Cold hit her first.
Her eyes flew open.
The birch's peeling trunk loomed above her, its white bark dappled with morning light. A bird chattered somewhere overhead. The scent of damp earth and old leaves filled her nose.
Her body lay curled in the shallow hollow at the base of the tree, blanket twisted around her legs.
For a dizzy second she thought, *It was nothing; it was just a dream; I made it all up.*
Then she realized she was... not tired.
Not like she had been.
Her limbs felt sore, yes—she had walked miles on bruises and blisters—but the bone-deep exhaustion, the leaden fog, was gone. She could draw a full breath without her ribs feeling like they might crack. Her mind felt... clear.
Electric.
She bolted upright.
The world seemed edged in finer lines. Every dewdrop on the grass glinted. Every thread of spider-silk between the low branches shone.
Her heart pounded, not from panic, but from a fierce, unfamiliar excitement.
She pressed a hand to her chest.
The coal behind her sternum burned, not painfully, but with a steady, bright warmth. It felt larger than before. More... substantial. As if something had been poured into it.
"Stormroot," she whispered.
The name vibrated in her bones.
She scrambled to her feet, nearly tripping on the blanket, and looked up through the canopy.
The moon was not visible in the brightening sky, but she *felt* it, a cool, steady presence beyond blue.
"Did that– Did you–?" she stammered, half-laughing, half on the edge of tears.
A small breeze slid through the undergrowth, curling around her ankles and tugging lightly at her hair.
It felt like fingers. Like acknowledgment.
Luna closed her eyes for a moment, letting the wind wrap around her.
"I'll try," she whispered. "I don't understand it all, but I'll... try. I'll listen. I'll learn. I'll be more than what they said."
The embers in her chest pulsed, as if nodding.
Hunger tugged at her belly.
The forest still pressed close. The dangers she'd faced yesterday had not vanished with a dream.
But something in her had shifted.
She no longer felt like a mistake stumbling through someone else's territory.
She felt—acutely, terrifyingly—*claimed.*
By the moon. By the earth. By her own blood.
She bent and rolled up her blanket, tying it more neatly to her bundle. When she lifted the straps over her shoulders, the weight felt the same.
Her back, somehow, did not.
It felt... straighter.
The Rogue Lands ahead were no less wild. No less sharp. No less full of teeth.
But as Luna stepped away from the birch and deeper into them, each footfall carried a new thread of purpose.
She was still a runt. Still packless. Still learning how to coax a drop of water to linger in the air.
And yet, beneath all that, under her scars and thin skin, under every word ever flung at her like a stone, a truth had been spoken into her bones by the very Goddess she'd begged as a child.
Her destiny was not to serve under someone else's crest.
It was to become something older than crests.
Something wider than borders.
A storm with roots in earth and eyes on the moon.
As she walked, the world around her thrummed a little more clearly. The rustle of leaves, the burble of distant water, the faint, low hum in the ground when she brushed her fingers against it—they all felt like syllables in a language she was finally, slowly, beginning to learn.
And with every breath, the coal in her chest glowed steadier.
Not just surviving.
Becoming.