When Luna woke from the dream, the world felt... sharper.
Rain still dripped from the crooked birch's branches. Her blanket was still damp. Her muscles still ached with the deep, grinding fatigue of too many days on too little food.
But something had shifted.
Not out there.
In her.
For a long moment she lay listening—to the patter of water, to the soft tick of cooling bark, to the tiny scurry of something in the leaf-litter nearby. Her senses felt overstretched, as if every sound, every smell, every brush of air against her skin had been etched in with a finer blade.
The dream clung to her like mist.
The Moon's face, impossibly close. The Goddess' luminous eyes. The feel of her touch, cool and weightless, stirring the coal in Luna's chest.
*Power stirs beneath your hurt. Use it.*
The words hummed at the base of her skull, half-heard, half-remembered.
She pushed herself upright, hissing when her stiff muscles protested. The storm had blown through in the night, leaving the forest rinsed and glistening. Shafts of weak sunlight speared through gaps in the clouds, picking out drops of water like scattered glass beads.
Her body felt wrung out.
Her mind felt... oddly steady.
She crawled from beneath the birch's low branches, dragging her bundle with her, and stood on unsteady legs.
For the first time since leaving Moonshadow, she did not immediately think about where to find food or shelter. Instead, she found herself simply... standing.
Feeling.
The earth under her bare feet was cold and damp, a mix of mud and decaying leaves. The air smelled of wet bark, fresh growth, a hint of lingering ozone from the storm.
She closed her eyes.
The ember in her chest—which had been little more than a stubborn warmth for days—pulsed.
Not in pain. Not in distress.
In awareness.
As if answering something she had finally remembered to ask.
"Is this you?" she whispered. "Or me?"
The answer came as a kind of... agreement.
Both.
She let her hand drift down to press over her sternum.
Heat bloomed beneath her palm. It wasn't like fever; it moved with purpose, tracing faint paths along her ribs, into her shoulders, down her arms.
Her fingertips tingled.
A prickle ran across the soles of her feet, as though every root and stone beneath them had given a tiny, electric shiver.
Her eyes flew open.
The forest looked the same.
Yet—
The drop of water hanging from the end of a fern frond in front of her seemed to gleam too bright. The way the wind moved through the branches overhead felt almost... intentional. She could follow its path, feel its cool fingers slide along her skin and slither over the ground.
She swallowed.
"This is just... being over-tired," she muttered. "And hungry. Your mind plays tricks when your stomach is empty."
But even as she said it, the ember answered with a firm, almost impatient thrum.
Not a trick.
She took a tentative step forward.
Her injured shin ached, but less fiercely than it had the day before. When she glanced down, peeling back the ragged edge of her bandage, she blinked.
The gash that had been angry red and swollen was now... quieter.
Still ugly. Still scabbed. But the skin around it looked less inflamed, the angry heat of infection ebbing.
"How—?" she murmured.
She hadn't had any salves. No herbs. No pack healer to murmur soft words and smear cooling paste.
All she'd done was collapse into sleep with a Goddess' touch still echoing in her bones.
She rewrapped the wound and straightened slowly.
The sky above was a patchwork of cloud and pale blue. The moon was invisible in the brightening light, but she could feel it anyway—a faint, cool presence behind the veil of day.
She drew a breath.
"All right," she said quietly. "If there's something... here, in me, I need to use it. Or I'm going to die out here as nothing but bones under some tree."
Her voice steadied as she spoke.
"Show me," she said—to the Goddess, to herself, to the humming ember. "Or... let me stumble into it. Just—just don't leave me blind."
The forest did not suddenly light up. No celestial voice boomed from the clouds.
A small breeze did curl around her, though, twisting leaves into a brief, spiraling dance at her feet before moving on.
She watched them settle.
Then she went about the business of surviving.
The next days did not become miraculously easy.
Her stomach still cramped with hunger.
Her legs still shook on long climbs.
Her sleep was still fractured, full of dreams in which the Moon Goddess' cool hand hovered just out of reach.
What changed was how the world *felt* as she moved through it.
Now, when she pressed her hand to the ground before lying down, the faint vibration in the earth came quicker, rising to meet her palm like a heartbeat.
Now, when she listened for water, it was as if some part of her could sense not just sound but... pull. The slow, patient drag of stream-beds through soil.
Once, as she picked her way across a narrow ridge, she paused instinctively.
A heartbeat later, a rock the size of her head dislodged from a crumbling outcrop and tumbled down the slope where her next step would have landed, smashing into shards against an unseen trunk.
She stared at the shattered stone, breath caught shallow in her throat.
"That could have been my skull," she whispered.
The ember in her chest fluttered, then settled.
She started paying attention—to the oddest things.
The way the leaves on one side of a tree shivered when the other remained still.
The way a small patch of ground felt strangely *alive* beneath her hand, while another, just inches away, felt merely... dirt.
The way a drop of rain that had fallen on the back of her hand seemed to hesitate, clinging longer to her skin when her focus lingered on it.
The first time she truly *saw* it happen, she was crouched beside a shallow pool, cupping water into her flask.
Sunlight, scattered through the leaves, painted the surface of the pool in pale gold shapes. Tiny insects skated across it, leaving ripples behind.
As she watched, a fat drop of water condensed on the underside of a leaf above, trembling with its own weight.
Without thinking, she reached up with a fingertip.
The drop hung there.
Her finger barely touched it.
Something in her chest gave a small, surprised lurch.
The world... slowed.
For a heartbeat, she felt—very clearly—the weight of that one bit of water. How the leaf bowed under it. How the air around it curled and shifted as the slightest breeze brushed by.
She had the sudden, absurd sense that if she *wanted* to, if she just... asked properly, she could coax that droplet to do something other than fall straight down.
She didn't *have* a word for the impulse.
She had feeling.
*Stay,* she thought.
The ember in her chest brightened, a tiny flare.
The droplet shivered.
It did not fall.
Her breath hitched.
She hadn't held it with her skin—her finger barely touched the trembling surface.
She was holding it with... something else. Some delicate thread of intention running from the coal in her chest, down her arm, through her fingertip.
Her concentration wavered with her shock.
The droplet obeyed gravity at last, breaking free and splashing against her knuckle.
She flinched, the spell shattering.
For a moment, she just stared, pulse racing.
"That didn't happen," she whispered, because saying the opposite aloud made her mind feel less like it was splitting.
But it *had.*
She'd felt it.
She sat back on her heels and closed her eyes, heart pounding.
"All right," she murmured. "Again. Slower."
She found another droplet—this time clinging to the rough bark of a nearby branch.
She didn't reach out right away.
Instead, she focused inward.
The ember.
It wasn't exactly *heat* now. It was more like... movement contained. A coiled spring. A pressure looking for a shape.
She breathed in.
The ember swelled.
She breathed out.
It settled, but did not fade.
Gently, she reached for that coiled feeling—not with hands, not with thought exactly, but with... intent.
She imagined it like a stream she could dip a cup into.
It resisted at first, sliding through her as if she had no edges.
She tried again.
"Please," she said softly, feeling foolish and desperate. "You're *in* me. If you have any interest at all in my survival, now is the time to cooperate."
A tiny pulse.
Like laughter. Or exasperation.
The next time she breathed in, the ember rose more readily. It flowed up into her chest, into her shoulders, down her arms—not like heat spreading, but like light chasing itself along invisible paths.
Her fingertips tingled again.
She opened her eyes and extended a finger toward the droplet on the bark.
"Stay," she thought again, but now with that strange, gathered pressure behind the word.
The droplet shivered.
It did not fall.
She held that thin thread of intention steady, feeling the strain of it in the back of her mind. A muscle unused being asked to tense for the first time.
Sweat beaded on her upper lip.
"Move," she whispered, barely breathing the word. "Just a little."
Her finger traced the smallest circle in the air.
The droplet trembled—and rolled.
Not down. *Around,* clinging somehow to the underside of the bark as if the world had tilted a hair to the side.
A shaky laugh burst from her chest.
She lost focus.
The drop fell, darkening a spot on her knee.
Luna sat there, chest heaving, staring at the damp mark as if it were some holy sign.
"I moved water," she said aloud, the words tasting absurd and awe-struck.
A single drop.
Nothing that would save her from hunger or claws or cold.
But it was something no pack rank could have taught her. No training session in Moonshadow's yard could have drilled into her bones.
It was... hers.
Ancient and strange and coiled inside her all along.
The rest of that day, she experimented in tiny, exhausted bursts.
She held dew-beads on leaves a heartbeat longer than they wanted to cling.
She coaxed a few drops to join together, forming a slightly larger bead.
Once, when her throat burned with dryness and her flask was nearly empty, she sat cross-legged beside a mossy rock and stared at the faint moisture glistening on its surface.
"Come," she whispered, feeling ridiculous.
She tugged at the power again.
It had its own ideas. It didn't leap into full obedience. It flowed reluctantly, like a stream asked to reverse course.
Her head pounded.
Her temples ached.
But, drop by obstinate drop, moisture gathered where she willed it, beading on a lower edge of the rock until there was just barely enough for her to press her lips to and take in a cool swallow.
Tears stung her eyes.
"Thank you," she whispered—to the water, to the ember, to the Goddess who had woken it.
By nightfall she was so drained that even crawling into a nest of fallen leaves felt like climbing a mountain.
She slept the sleep of someone who had used a new muscle too hard.
Her dreams were tattered fragments—flashes of water hanging in midair; Orion's face turned away; firelight in some distant hall she did not recognize.
She woke with a headache dulling the edges of her excitement.
The power was not limitless.
Calling it left her more exhausted than any day of physical exertion. Her body, already running on the bare minimum, balked at the additional drain.
"Slow," she muttered to herself as she chewed a pitiful sliver of meat. "You'll kill yourself trying to save yourself."
She rationed her efforts from then on.
She didn't reach for the ember just to watch drops dance.
She used it when she needed it—when the last of her water ran low and no streams announced themselves, when a climb up a muddy bank demanded just a fraction more grip than her shaking fingers could provide.
It wasn't just water that listened.
On a windless afternoon, as she crouched under a leaning pine to eat, a dry leaf tumbled down from above and landed near her hand.
On impulse, she pressed her fingertips against it.
The ember responded, curious.
She pictured the leaf rising, as if caught by a small, precise gust.
Her hand trembled as she pulled that inner thread taut.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the leaf quivered.
It rose—barely, just enough to lift one edge from the ground before flopping back.
She let out a weak, incredulous breath.
"Air too?" she whispered.
She tried again, more gently.
This time, a whisper of movement stirred around her fingers. Not a wind that rustled branches—something smaller, more contained.
The leaf rose a finger's breadth, spun once in place, and drifted back down.
She released the power with a gasp.
Her vision spotted at the edges.
Too much. Too soon.
But the image stuck with her as the day wore on: a leaf lifted not by chance but by will. Water held a heartbeat longer in defiance of falling.
It wasn't much.
Yet every story she'd ever been half-allowed to hear spoke of wolves, long ago, who had called storms, who had shaped rivers, who had danced with flame.
Elementals, they were called.
Stories for pups.
Old magic that had gone quiet when the world had grown louder with iron and crowded packs.
"I'm not... that," she told herself as she trudged through underbrush, one hand gripping a branch to steady her.
But the ember sparked in answer, sullen and amused.
A few days later, the forest offered her a test she hadn't chosen.
She had been moving along a shallow gully, using the natural dip as a path. Rain from previous days still clung in small puddles here and there, slicking the exposed roots.
Her shin had finally stopped throbbing constantly, though it complained on steep inclines. She moved more easily, confidence just beginning to take root in her steps.
Too much confidence.
A sharp crack split the air.
She froze.
The sound had come from behind and above—a branch snapping under something heavier than a squirrel or bird.
Her nose filled a heartbeat later with a scent she had smelled only from a distance before.
Wet fur. Musk. Old blood.
Wolf.
Not Moonshadow.
Not familiar.
Rogue.
She didn't turn her head. Didn't twitch.
Her heart pounded so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
The air went tight.
A low growl, soft and curious, rolled down the slope.
"Thought I caught a stray," a voice drawled. Male. Amused. "Little thing, aren't you? Far from any flags."
Luna forced herself to turn slowly.
He stood halfway up the gully's side, on a ledge of moss-slick stone. Late twenties, maybe. Broad shoulders. Dark hair hanging in clumps. Old scars crisscrossed his forearms.
His eyes were the wrong kind of bright.
Not the steady gleam of a pack wolf. The feverish glitter of someone who had learned too well that there was no one to pull him back from the edge.
He eyed her bundle. Her thin limbs.
"Lost?" he asked, smile not reaching his eyes.
Luna swallowed.
"I'm... moving," she said carefully. "Passing through."
He laughed.
"Everyone's passing through," he said. "Question is whether you pass through my valley with your skin on."
Her fingers itched for the short knife in her bundle.
She didn't reach for it.
His nostrils flared.
"You smell... different," he said, head cocking. "Not just packless. Something else. Something... bright."
His gaze sharpened, hunger of a different kind now mingling with the first.
Luna's stomach turned.
"Leave me," she said, surprised at the steadiness in her voice. "I've got nothing you want."
His smile widened, showing teeth.
"Everyone's got something," he said. "Your coat, when you shift. Those hands." His eyes flicked to her chest, where under her shirt the ember throbbed. "Your secrets."
He stepped down a flattish bit of earth, boots sliding slightly.
The gully sides towered above them, grass and roots overhanging. The way ahead narrowed; behind her, the slope steepened.
*Trapped.*
Her wolf whimpered.
The rogue's hand drifted toward his belt.
Steel glinted.
Luna's breath shuddered out.
Her fingers brushed the ground.
It wasn't a decision, exactly.
It was a *reaching.*
For the ember. For whatever it was that had held drops of water and nudged leaves. For the faint, humming awareness of the earth she'd been touching night after lonely night.
*Power stirs beneath your hurt. Use it.*
The Goddess' whisper reverberated through her.
She pressed her palm flat to the damp dirt at her feet.
"Please," she breathed—not to the rogue, but to the ground. To the root-snarled gully walls. To the thing in her that had begun to wake. "Help me."
The ember surged.
It poured down her arm into her hand, searing and cold at once, not like heat and not like light but some third thing that was the memory of both.
The earth *answered.*
Not with words.
With motion.
The packed dirt beneath her hand shuddered, a subtle tremble that traveled outward faster than sight. Hairline cracks raced through the mud in front of her, spiderwebbing, reaching the base of the slope where the rogue stood.
He frowned, looking down.
"What—?"
The ground under his boots shifted.
The wet soil, already softened by recent rain, gave up its pretense of solidity.
It liquefied.
His feet sank to the ankles in sucking muck.
His balance faltered.
He flailed, reaching for a root that tore free in his grip.
"Goddess—" he yelped, dropping into a half-kneel as the ground greedily tried to swallow him to the knees.
It wasn't a full cave-in. She hadn't dragged him down to his death. But the sudden change stole his surety. His weight, unbalanced, tilted.
He pitched forward, slipping.
Luna didn't waste the opening.
She shoved the ember's flow away from the ground—cutting off the tremor before it did something wild—and spun on her heel.
The narrowest part of the gully lay ahead, but to her right the earth sloped up in a steep, root-studded wall.
Possible.
She ran.
Pain flared in her shin.
Her hands grabbed for any protrusion—roots, rocks, clumps of grass. The soil crumbled, slick with moisture.
"Get back here," the rogue snarled, behind and below her. She could hear him wrenching his feet from the muck with wet, sucking sounds.
Her heart hammered.
She pulled.
Her fingers slipped once, dirt clogging her nails, sending her sliding a few inches back. Panic clawed at her throat.
The ember flared, unbidden.
It leapt again, not through her hand into the earth, but up into her shoulders, into her fingertips.
For the briefest moment, her hands felt... anchored.
The root she grabbed held firm where it might have torn free. The patch of soil beneath her toes compacted just enough to give her purchase.
She scrambled up and over the lip of the gully, rolling onto the flat forest floor above with a grunt.
Leaves and twigs scraped her arms. Her side ached where she'd landed hard.
Below, the rogue cursed, his words a ragged snarl.
She didn't look back.
She ran.
Branches whipped at her face, tearing at her clothes. Thorns grabbed at her ankles. She crashed through undergrowth with none of the care she'd trained into herself these past weeks.
Behind her, she heard a furious shout. A crash as someone less cautious barreled after her.
Her lungs burned.
Every breath was fire and knives.
Her legs felt like they belonged to someone else—someone stronger, maybe, than the runt who had once tottered under trays in Moonshadow's hall.
She wove between trunks, ducked under a low-slung branch, leapt over a fallen log.
"Come *back*," the rogue's voice lashed the air. "You little—"
His footfalls grew fainter.
She didn't trust it.
She ran until her vision blurred at the edges and a stitch in her side made each inhale a stab. Only when she could no longer hear his crashing pursuit did she stumble to a stop, leaning hard against a tree.
Her whole body shook.
She slid down the trunk until she was sitting on the cold ground, knees drawn up.
Her hands were filthy.
Her nails were torn and bleeding.
Her heart felt like it might escape through her ribs.
She stared down at her palms.
Dirt clung to them in a fine layer.
Beneath the grime, faint lines traced along her skin—subtle, almost shimmering if the light caught them right. Like hair-thin veins of silver, forking from her fingertips and disappearing up her wrists.
She rubbed at them, half-expecting them to smear.
They didn't.
They faded as the sensation of power receded, sinking back toward that coal in her chest.
Her shoulders slumped.
"That wasn't... luck," she panted.
Her breath fogged in the cool air.
"I made the ground... move. I held... something. Just... enough."
Adrenaline drained from her, leaving her hollow and trembling.
Tears stung suddenly at the corners of her eyes, sharp and unexpected.
Not from fear this time.
From a fierce, bewildered, almost painful sense of *proof.*
"I'm not just... nothing," she whispered to the forest, to the absence of walls. "Not just what they said. There's *something* in me. Old. Yours."
She lifted her face, looking up through the lattice of branches.
The moon was a faint, pale ghost in the daylight sky, barely visible.
Yet she felt it.
Cool. Observant.
The ember answered its presence with a small, answering throb.
Elemental.
The word rose from some deep, buried place in her memory—tales half-whispered by an old omega before Mara had shooed Luna back to work.
Wolves who commanded flame. Wolves who called rain. Wolves who spoke to stone.
Stories.
Yet she had pulled on earth and water and air today, in small, clumsy ways. Enough to buy one breath. One chance.
Enough to live where she might have died.
"Is that what I am?" she asked hoarsely. "One of them? One of... *yours?*"
A wind stirred.
It moved in the trees, in the leaves, down her spine.
It carried the faintest whisper of something that might have been amusement. Or pride. Or simply the sound of the world turning.
Not yet, the sense of it seemed to say.
But becoming.
She let her head rest back against the tree trunk, eyes slipping closed.
Exhaustion washed over her in a wave.
The power she'd used left her drained, muscles trembling, mind fogged. She could not keep doing that carelessly. Not without burning herself out from the inside.
She would have to learn.
When to pull. How much. Which threads to touch—a leaf, a drop, a grain of dirt—without unravelling into something too big for her to hold.
Power stirring within was not the same as power mastered.
But it was there.
Undeniable now.
Not a story.
Not a dream.
It pulsed in her bones and in the ground and in the thin, shining lines that sometimes, in the right light, ran under her skin.
She was still hungry.
Still cold.
Still alone.
Rogue blood and thorns.
Yet now, in that blood and under those thorns, something older had begun to wake—something that belonged not to Moonshadow or to Orion or to any rank, but to the girl the Moon Goddess had watched crying on a flat rock and decided to mark.
Luna drifted into a fitful sleep there, slumped against the tree, the earth's faint hum under her and the ember's slow glow warming her chest.
Far away, under a different slice of sky, an Alpha paused mid-sentence in the war room, fingers splayed on a map, as a strange tremor ran up from the soles of his feet to his heart.
He swallowed, glanced at the window where daylight washed the stone, and for a heartbeat imagined he saw lines of silver threading through the soil beyond.
He shook the vision off and returned to strategy.
He did not know, not yet, that the runt he had rejected had just taken her first true step toward becoming the storm he would one day have to stand before—not as Alpha before omega, not as judge before stray, but as one half of a bond before the other.
For now, she slept.
And beneath the bark and stone and cooling moss of the Rogue Lands, power turned over in its sleep, sniffed at the scent of its newly awakened bearer... and began, slowly, to rise.