The first omen came on a night so clear it hurt to look up.
Luna lay on her back in a shallow hollow, her blanket pulled only halfway over her because the cold wasn't what kept her from sleep.
It was the sky.
The storm that had tried to eat the forest days before had scoured the air clean. Stars burned with a diamond-hard brilliance, so sharp and innumerable that looking at them felt like pressing her eyes against frost.
The moon was a thin, waning crescent, low on the horizon. Its light traced silver along the rims of black branches, caught briefly in the eyes of some small creature watching from the underbrush.
The ember in Luna's chest flickered gently, not demanding, just present. She was tired to the bone, every muscle heavy from the day's climb, but too alert inside to yield.
She closed her eyes and tried to count her breaths.
One. Two. Three—
The bond tugged.
Not the faint, half-forgotten hum she'd grown used to ignoring. A sharp, sudden pluck, as if someone had caught that slender thread between her heart and Orion's and given it a jerk.
Her eyes snapped back open.
Cold flushed her limbs.
"What—?" she whispered.
Another tug.
Fainter, like an echo.
A twisting in her chest that wasn't quite pain, wasn't quite longing. A... wrenching.
She sat up abruptly, blanket sliding from her shoulders, breath misting in the chill.
For a heartbeat, she wasn't in the Rogue Lands.
She stood in the Moonshadow clearing, the Circle stones rising around her. The air smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke, of too many bodies pressed close. Orion's scent was sharp and close and wrong, threaded with a bitterness she didn't recognize.
Then that vision tore, edges unraveling.
She was back under the lonely sky, pulse hammering.
The bond steadied into its usual distant thrum, as if nothing had happened.
Her wolf whined softly inside, unsettled.
Luna pressed a hand to her sternum.
The coal behind it answered with an uneasy ripple.
"That wasn't me," she murmured. "That was... him. Or them."
She frowned, trying to chase the sensation. The tug had not been... personal. Not like the raw, open connection she'd felt in the Circle before Orion's rejection. It was broader. A disturbance shivering through a web that connected more than just two hearts.
"Moonshadow," she said aloud.
The name tasted like old iron.
She lay back down, but sleep, when it came, was thin and fractured.
Images broke over her like waves—too quick to grasp, leaving only impressions:
Torches guttering in a wind that didn't move the trees.
The Moonshadow compound's high stone walls, slick with some dark, seeping stain that refused to dry.
Wolves howling with their muzzles lifted to a blank, starless sky.
She woke just before dawn with her nails digging into her own palms hard enough to leave crescent marks.
The air felt wrong.
Not where she was—that forest smelled like forest, sharp and clean.
Something at the back of her mind, along that half-frayed bond and beyond it, sat like a storm she couldn't see, only sense.
She shook herself, forced her cramped legs to move, and did what she always did.
She survived.
Days stretched.
The land grew rougher, the trees thinning in places, rock shouldering up through soil in jagged grey outcrops. The air took on a metallic tang that spoke of distant mountains and older stone.
She kept moving, climbing when the path demanded it, circling around when cliffs rose too sheer.
She trained, in little snatches where she could.
Holding droplets longer. Calling small gusts. Drawing tiny rills of water closer to the surface when her throat burned.
But always now, at the edge of her awareness, was that... wrongness.
Distant. Pervasive.
Like the smell of something rot-sweet far downwind.
It haunted her dreams more and more.
One night, half asleep in the crook of a boulder, she dreamed she walked through the Moonshadow compound again.
Only it wasn't quite as she remembered.
The familiar central yard, where warriors sparred and pups tumbled in better days, lay empty. No paw prints marred the packed dirt.
The training dummies—rough posts with straw-stuffed sacks lashed to them—had split open. Straw spilled in slow heaps, moving without wind, slithering like shedding skin.
The great hall doors stood half-open, their iron handles slick with a black sheen that dripped in slow, viscous lines to the stone.
She moved through the scene as if underwater, feet making no sound.
Silence pressed against her ears.
No clatter of dishes from the kitchens. No low murmur of voices. No barked orders. No pups yipping.
Only the slow, steady drip.
Drip.
Drip.
She lifted her gaze.
High above, where the moon should have hung, there was only a pallid circle of light, blurred and indistinct, as if seen through gauze.
Her chest tightened.
"Goddess?" she called, voice sounding small even to her own ears. "What is this?"
A soft sound answered.
Not words.
Not a howl.
Whispering.
Like many voices all at once, speaking too quietly and too quickly for her to separate any single one. The sound seeped from the shadows pooled in the corners of the yard, from beneath the hall's eaves, from the cracks between stones.
She spun, heart hammering.
Shapes coalesced in those shadows—not fully-formed figures, not wolves, not humans. Hints of faces. Eyes like smudges of pale fire. Teeth without mouths.
They watched her.
Not with hunger.
With... accusation.
"You're not real," she said, backing up until her shoulders hit cold stone. "This is a dream. I'm somewhere in the Rogue Lands. I left this place."
The whispers rose, a sibilant susurrus.
"Luna."
She flinched.
The voice this time was clear.
Familiar.
She turned.
Orion stood at the far side of the yard, near the well. His hair was disheveled, his jaw rough with stubble. His shoulders—a place she'd once thought unshakable—slumped.
His eyes were wrong.
Not the stormy blue-grey she'd looked up at in the Circle.
Empty.
Pale, like watered milk, irises blown wide until almost no color remained. They glowed faintly, as if lit from behind by something cold.
Her breath caught.
"Orion?" she whispered.
His lips moved.
No sound came.
Behind him, the shadows shifted, thickening—curling around his ankles, twining up his calves like smoke, like vines.
He didn't seem to notice.
His mouth shaped words again.
This time, she heard them, faint and distorted, as if through still water.
"Luna...?"
The tug on the bond flared so sharply she gasped.
Pain lanced through her chest.
She took a step forward.
The shadows around his legs pulsed, tightening.
He winced—no, *twitched*, like a puppet's limb being jerked.
"Stop," she said, panic rising. "Stop touching him. Get away from him."
The shadows turned.
Not all at once—more like smoke changing its mind, redirecting.
For a terrible moment, she felt them *see* her.
A pressure brushed against the edges of her mind.
Cold.
Hungry.
Searching.
It slid along the bond like a hand testing a rope.
Her wolf snarled.
Fear spiked hard enough to steal her breath.
She reached for the ember in her chest, instinctively.
It flared in the dream as it did in waking—hot and bright, ancient and defiant.
Light rippled out from her in a wave, silver and white, pushing the darkness back.
The pressure recoiled.
The whispers turned to a skittering hiss, then faded.
The scene around her... fractured.
The empty yard, the slick-stained doors, Orion's numb, pale eyes—all broke into shards of light.
She woke with a lurch, sitting bolt upright, lungs dragging in air like she'd been drowning.
Her heart hammered so hard her vision pulsed in time with it.
It was still night.
The small fire she'd coaxed earlier crackled beside her, a few embers glowing red.
The forest around her slept, save for the quiet scurry of nocturnal life.
She pressed both hands to her chest, fingers spread.
The coal under her skin blazed.
Not in comfort.
In alarm.
Her breath came in shallow gasps.
"That was... that was a dream," she told herself, though her voice shook. "Just a dream."
The bond throbbed.
A sharp, stinging ache, like flesh pinched hard.
She squeezed her eyes shut and followed it, not daring to pull on it fully, but letting her awareness slide along its length like a hand over a frayed rope.
On the other end, she felt—
Cold.
A wall.
Something squeezed between him and the world, between him and *her*. Not severing. Damping. Distorting.
Her stomach turned.
"No," she whispered. "No, no, no."
It wasn't the familiar distance of his choice.
This felt... imposed.
Foreign.
Her wolf paced inside, restless and alarmed.
She forced herself to breathe more slowly, to not let panic stampede through her already spent reserves.
"Goddess," she said, not in accusation this time. In plea. "Show me. Tell me this is—a warning. Not... too late."
She drew her blanket tighter around her shoulders and tried to reach past the racing of her own pulse.
The night air cooled her damp face.
The moon, thinner than in her dream, hung low between skeletal branches. Its light brushed the edges of the world in a way that had begun to feel like a hand on her shoulder.
She focused on that.
On the silver weight.
On the coal that answered it.
For a moment, nothing moved.
Then her vision... slid.
Not fully into dream.
Not entirely out of waking.
Her surroundings blurred, as if she were looking through the thin, stretched skin of a bubble. The forest dimmed. The stars smeared.
Shapes rose instead.
Three.
They hovered in the air in front of her, made of light and darkness and suggestion.
The first was a wolf's skull, cracked along the brow. Black threads—like the roots of some dead vine—pushed through its eye sockets and coiled around its teeth.
The second was the Moonshadow crest, as she had seen it carved into stone over the Alpha's hall entrance: a crescent with three stars. Only now, the stars were missing. Empty dimples marked where they should have been.
The third was a crescent moon.
Not the Goddess' soft, luminous disk hovering over her silver sea.
A sliver of bone-white hanging in a void.
As she watched, a dark stain bled up from its lower edge, spreading like ink dropped in water, swallowing the light.
"No," she whispered again, throat tight.
The wolf skull sank, bone flaking away, until only the black threads remained, writhing.
They slithered toward the blank crest, winding themselves through the empty star-sockets, filling them.
The once-proud emblem sagged, lines warping.
The staining on the crescent moon pulsed, syncing to a rhythm that might have been a heartbeat.
Hers?
Orion's?
The pack's?
She reached a hand toward the images, fingers trembling.
They shimmered, edges blurring when she tried to touch them.
A voice—not quite the Goddess' and not like any wolf's—brushed the inside of her mind.
*What was bound lies bare. What was built rots at the root. Shadows eat their own.*
The words weren't spoken in any language she'd learned, but their meaning settled heavy in her bones anyway.
"Is that what's happening?" she asked the emptiness. "To Moonshadow? To him?"
The black threads tightened around the warped crest.
The stained moon dimmed further.
And then the visions broke, scattering into a fine dust of light that sank into the ground.
Luna was alone again with her fire, the trees, the thin sliver of real moon.
Her hands shook as she pressed them to her knees.
"A curse," she whispered, naming the dread that had been coiling tighter in her chest with every strange pull on the bond.
It felt right.
Not in the way a simple run of bad luck did. This had... weight. Purpose. Malice.
Memories surfaced, unbidden.
Elia muttering darkly over spilled salt about "old things that crawl through cracks in words."
An elder in Moonshadow warning pups never to say certain promises at certain times, or risk "drawing eyes you don't want."
The seer—pale, sharp-featured—looking away when Luna, younger and still doggedly hopeful, had once asked if the Goddess ever *punished* packs who strayed.
*The Goddess doesn't have to,* the seer had said, voice tight. *Other things are happy to oblige.*
Luna had laughed back then, thinking it a superstition, another adult's attempt to keep pups from mischief.
Now, under a cold sky with the taste of distant rot in the back of her throat, she didn't laugh.
She reached again, gently, for the bond.
This time, instead of pressing hard against the new, foreign wall, she brushed along its edges.
Cold.
Smooth.
Too smooth—like polished stone or old metal, unnatural in its uniformity.
She probed tentatively, looking for cracks.
Faint sensations leaked through.
A flash of anger—that felt like Orion. Fierce. Controlled. Familiar.
Then something else, layered over his like a second skin.
Emptiness.
The kind that did not grow from grief or choice.
The kind *imposed*.
Her breath hitched.
"Orion," she whispered into the night, even though she knew he couldn't hear her this way. "What did you do? What did they do?"
She thought of Selene.
Of her sharp tongue, her need to control every look, every whisper.
Of the way she'd stood in the Circle, smug and secure, as if the Goddess herself had signed her engagement contract.
If anyone in Moonshadow would be foolish enough to reach for power not granted, to bargain with things that slid through cracks... it would be someone like Selene.
Someone who took the Goddess' silence for permission.
A chill slid down Luna's spine, burrowing under her skin.
"Goddess," she murmured, fingers digging into the dirt beside her. "Is this... yours?"
The ember warmed, but not with ownership.
With... sorrow.
The sense that came with it was not, *Yes, I do this.*
It was, *No. But I see it.*
She swallowed.
"Then what—who—?"
The forest shifted.
Not around her.
In her.
The coal behind her breastbone flickered faster, as if something else had drawn near—not physically, but in whatever unseen space her new awareness occupied.
For a heartbeat, Luna felt as if she were standing again in the silver sea under the great moon.
But this time, the moon's sister hung on the opposite horizon.
Not light.
Not dark.
An absence.
A circle of nothingness, blacker than the sky around it, rimmed in the faintest gray.
From that absence, a whisper slid.
Not words.
*Hunger.*
She recoiled, breath catching.
The coal in her chest flared defensive, rebuffing the contact.
The presence—not quite there, not fully here—retreated a hair, then flowed sideways.
Looking.
Not at her.
Through her.
Toward... home.
Toward Moonshadow.
The bond between her and Orion trembled like a rope over which something heavy had just skated.
"Stay away from him," she snarled, voice low, throat an animal's growl.
Her fingers curled into fists, nails biting into skin.
The coal in her chest surged in answer, heat flaring down her arms, into her palms.
She slammed her hands down on the cold ground.
A ripple of light flashed outward, unseen by any eye but hers—silver-blue, thin but fierce.
It raced along the invisible web of connections that tied her to her birthplace, her pack, her mate, reaching for the place where that foreign smoothness had wrapped itself.
For a moment, Luna *touched* it.
The curse.
It felt like slick stone covered in oil, like ice over deep, black water. Old. Patient. Pleased.
Her light hissed when it made contact, like snow thrown on a coal.
The presence flinched, pausing.
Then it slid on, unconcerned, the way a river ignores a pebble.
Her light fizzled.
Pain lanced through her skull.
She gasped and ripped her hands off the ground, clutching them to her chest.
Blood trickled from her nose again, warm and thick.
Her head throbbed in slow, punishing pulses.
She wiped at her face with the back of her wrist, smearing scarlet.
The coal in her chest guttered low, drained from the effort.
She sagged forward, forehead touching the cold dirt.
"Not... strong enough," she rasped to no one.
To herself.
To the Goddess far above, watching.
"Yet," the ember whispered back, as best as a feeling can whisper.
She forced herself upright again, every part of her shaking.
She could not stop whatever was wrapping itself around Moonshadow.
Not here. Not now.
But she could recognize it.
Name it.
Prepare.
Her pack—former pack, she corrected herself—had always thought curses were for other wolves. For those who broke oaths, who stepped on sacred ground, who dug where bones lay too old to remember.
They'd built high stone walls and thought altitude protected them from the old things.
They'd forgotten that stone, too, came from the deep places.
That shadows loved corners.
That pride, left unchecked, was invitation enough.
Luna stared toward the faint glow in the sky that marked where the moon would rise higher later.
Her jaw clenched.
She imagined the compound's high walls.
The training yards.
The great hall.
The Circle.
She imagined, creeping through them, the same black threads she'd seen in her dream, slithering through cracks in mortar, wrapping around unsuspecting paws.
"It's coming for them," she whispered. "For him. For all of them."
Her feelings warred inside.
Anger.
A shard of satisfaction, jagged and shameful.
Fear.
Grief.
They had cast her out.
They had let her starve in her own home.
They had watched her be humiliated and turned away when she begged for a different life.
And now, something worse than any Alpha's cruelty edged into their shadows.
She thought of the pups.
Of Elia, cursing and kind.
Of omegas in the kitchens, bent over pots.
Of warriors who had never noticed her name, only their own scars.
Of Orion, standing in the Circle, choosing pride over fate like a man stepping willingly into a certain kind of small death.
She did not rejoice at the thought of larger death stalking them.
Her hands curled tighter.
"You're fools," she whispered to the distant stones and wolves. "You're proud and blind and so sure the Goddess owes you an easy path. But you're still... mine."
The words surprised her.
She swallowed.
"Not in the way you wanted," she amended softly. "Not as your servant. Not as your scapegoat. As... the one who walks away and learns the shape of the storm that's going to hit you."
The coal warmed faintly.
An agreement.
A confirmation.
The Rogue Lands were not finished with her.
Her own training was only just beginning.
But in the small, witching hours between night and dawn, under the sharp gaze of a thinning moon, the future shifted.
Luna was no longer just surviving for herself.
A shadow crawled toward Moonshadow.
An ancient hunger that was not the Goddess, that wrapped around bonds and bled color from eyes and promise from crests.
She could not yet block it.
But she could feel it.
She could follow its progress like a bruise spreading under fur.
She could grow stronger with the knowledge that, one day, she would have to stand between that darkness and the pack that had never stood between the world and her.
She lay back down slowly, the earth cool against her spine.
Sleep took her in fits and starts.
When it came fully, it brought one last, lingering image:
The Moonshadow crest, as she'd seen it over the hall, its stars now filled with black.
Above it, the moon.
Half light.
Half dark.
And between them, a thin, silver line—no thicker than a strand of hair—stretching out from that crest, away from the walls, across forest and stone, into the wide, uncaring Rogue Lands.
To her.
It hummed like the finest thread of spider-silk in a hard wind.
Fragile.
Trembling.
Unbreakable—for now.
She woke with that hum still in her ears, a ghost sound carried on the morning breeze.
Trouble was coming to Moonshadow.
And whether they deserved it or not, whether she forgave them or not, the runt they'd once shoved into corners was, slowly, relentlessly, becoming the only one who might stand a chance at breaking the curse before it broke them.