The scars of war healed faster than Luna expected.
On the *outside*, at least.
Moonshadow's walls had been patched, scorched stone replaced by fresh-cut rock that still smelled faintly of dust. The training yard, once a churned mess of blood and mud and shattered weapons, now bore only faint depressions where paws and boots had pounded the earth raw. Saplings had been planted along the inner perimeter, their thin trunks staked and tied, leaves trembling eagerly in every breeze—as if the forest itself were leaning in to reclaim what had been torn.
Wolves moved through the den with an ease Luna had dreamed of for years.
Laughter broke out in corners without flinching into silence at every creak of stone.
Pups played in the courtyards, inventing games out of old fears.
"Shadow Pack!" Jori cried, flinging himself behind a rain barrel.
"You cannot get me," another pup shouted. "Queen Luna burned you all up with her storm-fire!"
"Queen Luna would not burn pups," a third said primly, and launched into an elaborate explanation involving protective wards and thunder that only scared bad wolves.
Luna, listening from the archway, bit back a smile.
Gods, let their memories twist the ugliness into something toothless, she thought.
Let them grow up under bedtime stories, not battle plans.
Her body, too, had mended.
Elia's hands and herbs, the Moonstone's residual healing hum, and her own strange gift had combined to knit torn muscle, close gouges, smooth over the ragged edges left where Selene's last strike had bit.
The aches that remained were the ordinary kind.
A stiffness in her shoulders from long councils and longer training sessions.
A throb in her calves after chasing pups who had discovered the joy of testing the Queen's reflexes.
On the surface, Luna's life was everything she had fought for:
Peace, if not utter stillness.
Love, warm and solid at her side.
Power, acknowledged and no longer feared as cursed.
And yet—
When she slept, the Moon bled.
The first dream came a week after the last of the funeral pyres burned down to ash.
Luna lay curled against Orion, a thin breeze from the vent stirring the furs. The den was finally quiet. No late-night strategizing. No murmured grief. Only the occasional sleepy whimper from pups and the soft huff of the watch changing on the wall.
She drifted down into sleep with a sigh of relief.
She did not stay there long.
One瞬 she stood in Moonshadow's inner courtyard, bare feet on cool stone, the familiar weight of her mantle across her shoulders.
The next, the world fell out from under her.
Colors drained.
Sound flattened.
She was nowhere and everywhere at once, suspended in a darkness that was not absence but *potential*—thick, humming, like the moment just before a storm breaks.
"Luna."
The voice was the Moon's, unmistakable and everywhere, vibrating in her bones.
But it carried a quality it never had before.
Strain.
"Goddess?" Luna called, turning in the dark.
She raised her hands.
They glowed faintly, threads of Water and Fire, Earth and Air coiling around her fingers in instinctive readiness.
White light flared ahead, and the darkness peeled back to reveal a sky.
A sky wronger than anything she had seen when the stars had wept.
The Moon hung low.
Too low.
Huge, filling almost the entire dome of night.
Its surface, usually serene and linted with craters like old fingerprints, was marred.
A jagged crack split it nearly in half.
From that wound, slow and sickeningly beautiful, light dripped.
Not in rays.
In *drops*.
Pale silver tears fell from the broken seam, streaking down into the black, vanishing before they hit any visible ground.
Every drop that fell pulled the crack a little wider.
Luna's stomach dropped.
"Stop," she whispered, the word torn from her before sense could catch up.
She reached up, as if she could physically hold the broken pieces together with her hands.
Her fingers passed through cool light.
The fracture widened a hair.
Pain lanced through her chest, sharp and hot, like something inside her had been struck with a hammer.
She gasped.
"Do not touch it," the Goddess snapped, sudden and sharp, Her voice laced with a rare edge of panic. "You are not... ready."
Luna yanked her hand back.
The pain receded, but a dull ache remained, like a bruise under her ribs.
She stared at the cracked Moon, heart thudding too fast.
"What is this?" she asked, fighting to keep her voice level. "An omen? A test?"
A bitter, breathless laugh echoed.
*If only,* the Goddess said. *If this were a game, I would have better rules.*
The dream shifted.
The ground coalesced under Luna's feet, rough and pitted.
She stood on some high crag, the wind not made of air but of whispers—voices old and young, human and not, weaving around her, all saying the same word in different tongues:
*Break.*
She gasped as the sound pricked her skin like a thousand tiny needles.
"Enough," she snarled, fists clenching.
The whispers cut off.
Silence slammed in.
Only the slow, dreadful drip of light from the Moon's wound remained.
She turned in a circle, searching for the Goddess not as voice, but as form.
As She had appeared in the grove—woman-shaped, moon-eyed.
Nothing.
"Show Yourself," Luna demanded. "Please."
A figure stepped from the shadows at the edge of her vision.
Not the serene woman in silver.
Not Selene's gaunt imitation.
This version of the Moon wore no gown.
She was tall, barefoot, hair unbound, eyes bright and feverish.
Her skin shone as if lit from within—too bright, cracked in places like dry riverbeds with light seeping through.
The sight of Her made Luna's teeth ache.
This was the divine pushed to an edge.
"Do you see?" the Goddess asked.
She pointed up.
Luna did not want to look again.
She did.
The crack had grown.
Where before it had been the width of a mountain range, now it yawned like a canyon.
Through it, beyond it, other lights glimmered.
Not stars.
Eyes.
Luna's breath hitched.
"What is happening?" she whispered.
The Moon's smile was small and tired.
*The price of meddling,* She said. *Of making bargains with things that do not love wolves, or land, or the simple cycle of dark and light. Of carrying too much, too long, and pretending it costs nothing.*
Understanding sank slow.
Cold.
"Selene?" Luna asked.
Old deals.
Old shadows.
"Not only," the Moon said. *Others before her. Before you. Before Me, even, in some ways. This power you touch—it is part of something older than My own choosing. I bound it once. Badly. That binding is breaking. The crack you see is where my hold frays.*
Luna swallowed, throat dry.
"Can we mend it?" she asked. "Surely—"
Pain stabbed her chest again, sharper, as if something inside her had twisted.
She doubled over with a gasp.
When she pressed a hand to her ribs, her fingers met heat, searing through skin and bone.
Her mark burned.
The Moonstone lodged behind her sternum thrashed, a caged heart pounding too loud.
"Luna." The Goddess' voice cut through the pain, urgent now. *Listen to me. This is fear talking. Your own, and Mine. I should not have dragged you to this hinge so soon. You are still... healing.*
Luna gritted her teeth.
Forced herself upright.
The broken Moon loomed.
Each falling tear of light sent a faint tremor through her bones.
"You *had* to show me," she said grimly. "Or you would not have."
The Goddess' expression flickered.
*You are making Me regret giving you that brain,* She muttered.
Luna almost laughed, a strangled sound.
"Too late," she said.
The humor cracked.
"What do You need from me?" she asked instead. "Tell me how to fix it."
The Moon's gaze sharpened.
The rawness in Her eased back, replaced by the familiar, frustrating blend of affection and distance.
*There it is,* She said softly. *The little wolf who tried to fix everything with her teeth. Listen carefully, child: you cannot fix this. Not alone. Not now. That is not why I called you here.*
A cold dread uncoiled.
"If not to fix it," Luna whispered, "then to *what*?"
A drop of light fell slower than the rest.
It hung in the air between them, suspended.
Luna's mark flared in answer, sending a lance of cold down her spine.
*To warn you,* the Moon said simply. *Your era of simple enemies is over. No more single villains to throw yourself against until you bleed enough to call it balance. What comes next will be... quieter. More insidious. Less obvious. Cracks in faith. In stories. In how wolves understand power itself.*
The hanging light pulse-brightened.
*You will begin to see it,* the Goddess went on. *In dreams. In waking. In places where the old paths no longer hold. You will be tempted to patch it with whatever you have at paw. Do not. Name it. Watch it. Learn its true shape before you touch it, or you will only drive the fracture deeper.*
The drop of light elongated.
Shivered.
Split into two smaller drops without falling.
Luna's vision blurred around the edges, nausea roiling.
"What are You asking?" she forced out. "That I... watch the sky break? Do nothing?"
*I am asking you to endure knowing what others do not,* the Moon said. *To be haunted, yes, a little, so that when the time to act truly comes, you do not swing blindly.*
The word *haunted* spidered through Luna's chest, setting off fine cracks of its own.
"I thought..." She swallowed. "I thought after this, after Selene, after Shadow, there would be... rest. Not forever. A season, at least."
*You will have pockets of it,* the Goddess said gently. *Moments. Days. Maybe weeks. But Luna—*
Her gaze went up again, to the broken Moon.
*You chose to stand at the crossing,* She said simply. *That path does not go back into the forest. It goes forward. Into places where even I do not always know what waits.*
For a heartbeat, Luna hated Her.
Hated the vast, luminous being who had nudged her, shaped her, marked her, used her. Hated the way "choice" and "destiny" blurred in the Goddess' mouth. Hated that rest was always dangled like a fruit just out of reach.
She did not hide it.
She let the bitterness rise, acidic and sharp.
"If I say no?" she demanded. "If I refuse? If I step back from this crack in the sky and say, I have given enough. Find someone else?"
Silence.
Deep.
Then:
*Then I will listen,* the Moon said softly. *I will lose a conduit I have come to rely on. I will grieve. And I will find another. Or I will not. The world will not end because one wolf says no. It will... change along a slightly different curve.*
Luna's anger deflated in the face of that.
She had thought—part of her, the proud, terrified part—that she was now indispensable.
That her refusal would doom everything.
The idea that the Goddess would simply... adapt, almost more than anything, underscored the truth:
She was important.
She was loved.
She was not the center of all things.
That knowledge was... freeing.
And crushing.
"I do not... want to be haunted," she admitted, voice small.
The Moon stepped closer.
Her too-bright face gentled.
*I know,* She said. *I did not want to be either, once. When I first looked down and saw what wolves could do, given power and fear and teeth. But some things, once seen, cannot be unseen. Only... integrated.*
The crack in the Moon juddered.
A fine spiderweb of new lines spread from its edges.
Luna's mark seared.
Her knees buckled.
The ground rushed up—
She woke with a strangled cry, bolting upright, hand pressed hard to her chest.
Darkness.
The den.
Orion jerked awake beside her, instantly alert, hand already reaching for a weapon that was not there.
"Luna?" he rasped. "What—?"
She sucked in breath after ragged breath, struggling to separate dream from reality.
The vent above showed a sliver of sky.
The Moon hung at its usual distance.
Whole.
Her mark ached, but under her fingers, her skin was unbroken.
"Dream," she managed.
Orion's hand found her back.
Warm.
Grounding.
"Vision," he corrected gently. "Not just a dream."
His bond hummed with concern.
Fear.
Protectiveness.
He had learned the texture of her prophetic nights.
She swallowed.
"It was—" Her voice shook.
She cleared it.
"The Moon," she said. "Broken. Cracked. Bleeding light. She said... the binding is failing. Old bargains. Old... anchors."
Orion's hand stilled.
"What does that *mean?*" he asked.
She almost snapped back, How should I know?
She bit the words down.
He was not the enemy.
Her own exhaustion was.
"I do not fully understand yet," she said slowly. "Only that what we faced with Selene, with Shadow—that was the visible tip of something deeper. The... structure under how power moves. How gods and mortals... relate."
She pressed heel of palm to her sternum, wincing.
"It hurts," she admitted.
He shifted, pulling her into his lap, letting her curl against his chest.
His fingers stroked through her hair.
"Where?" he asked.
She hesitated.
He would feel it if she lied.
"Here," she said, tapping her chest. "Where the Moonstone rests. Where... She touches. It felt like something was tugging. Splitting."
He inhaled, slow and careful.
"Is it... dangerous?" he asked. "To you? To us?"
Anger flickered again.
At the Moon.
At whatever forces pulled at Her.
At the idea that after everything, there was still some new, invisible threat clawing at the edges of their hard-won peace.
"It is... not harmless," she said. "But She did not show me an end. Only a... change. A long one. A slow crack."
He was quiet for a long moment.
The den breathed around them.
Wolves slept.
Somewhere, a pup mumbled in a dream.
Finally, Orion asked, "What do You need from *me?*"
The question startled her.
She had expected him to ask what they should *do*.
He had asked what support she required.
Her throat tightened.
"I do not know yet," she confessed. "I only know..." She exhaled. "She said She will send more. Visions. Warnings. I will see things before others do. Feel failure lines before they show. She warned me not to patch them too quickly. To endure knowing without acting."
He grunted.
"That sounds like Her," he muttered. "Infuriating and probably necessary."
Luna half-laughed, half-sobbed.
"It means I may be... distant," she said. "Distracted. It may look like I am not with you, with the pack, when I am... caught in something else. I need you to pull me back when I float too far. And to trust me when I say, *Not yet,* even if every instinct in you says, *Now.*"
He was silent again, his hand still moving through her hair, down her back, anchoring her.
"That will not be easy," he admitted quietly.
"I know," she said.
"But," he went on, "I will do it. I promised to be your equal. That includes being your tether. Your question. Your reminder that you are wolf, not only... whatever they want to make you."
She sagged against him, relief loosening something tight.
"Thank you," she whispered.
He pressed his lips to her forehead, right over her burning mark.
The pain eased, a fraction.
"Also," he said, some of his usual rough humor creeping back, "I reserve the right to tell the Moon Herself, politely, to give you a night off now and then."
Luna snorted.
"I would pay in lightning to see that," she said.
A faint pulse of amused warmth brushed her mind.
*I heard that,* the Goddess murmured, less strained now, more like Her usual self. *I will... try. I forget sometimes that your nights are not as... elastic as Mine.*
"'Try' is not exactly reassuring," Luna muttered.
The Moon laughed softly.
*You, of all wolves, know that trying is where all miracles begin,* She said.
Days passed.
On the surface, nothing changed.
The sky stayed whole.
The stars held their new shapes.
Packs sent messages, not of attack or panic, but of trade, births, small disputes over boundary stones and mating arrangements.
Luna mediated.
Laughed.
Sparred.
Slipped into the grove when she could, to sit with Earth's steady hum and Water's low song and Fire's warm, watchful flicker.
The first waking vision struck while she was grinding herbs in Elia's workroom.
One瞬 she was watching pestle meet mortar.
The next, her sight stuttered.
The stone bowl became a crater.
Her hand, pressing down, became a weight cracking something fragile.
She saw the Moon again, this time not from afar but as if she herself were embedded in the scarred surface, staring across vast gulfs of dark rock.
Stars wheeled above in slow, dizzying arcs.
From somewhere impossibly below, she felt a tug—a gravitational pull that was not physical, but spiritual.
Prayers.
Millions of them.
Not only wolves.
Voices she did not recognize.
All of them pulled at the same place.
The crack.
The weight of that yearning yanked at the wound's edges.
Widening it.
Luna gasped.
"What is it?" Elia snapped, hand shooting out to steady the mortar before herbs spilled.
The vision snapped.
The workroom coalesced around her.
Her mark throbbed.
Her pulse raced.
She gripped the edge of the table hard enough to creak wood.
"I am... fine," she said breathlessly.
Elia's eyes narrowed.
"Liar," the healer said.
Luna managed a weak smile.
"Vision," she admitted. "Blunt. Unwelcome."
"Sit," Elia ordered. "Before you fall."
Luna obeyed.
The older woman's hands, efficient and firm, checked her pulse, her pupils, the warmth of her skin.
"Not fever," Elia murmured. "Yet your heart gallops like you ran from here to the border and back. Tell me."
Luna hesitated.
She did not want to spread panic.
But she had promised herself: no more hiding the hard things until they exploded.
"The Moon is... under strain," she said carefully. "Old bindings fraying. There is a... wound. Not from something as simple as an enemy's strike. From... us. All of us. All who pray. All who pull. We have made Her... carrying too much."
Elia's mouth pressed into a thin line.
"Good," she said.
Luna blinked.
"Good?" she echoed.
"Yes," Elia said briskly. "Good that you see. Good that She shows you. Good that someone up there finally admits being tired of being treated like an endless well."
Luna stared.
Elia snorted.
"Do not look at me like that," she said. "You thought She did not feel strain? You of all wolves? The one who nearly shredded herself trying to be all things for all creatures?"
Heat rushed to Luna's cheeks.
"I did not..." She rubbed her face. "I suppose part of me hoped She was... beyond such limits."
"Nothing with a will is beyond them," Elia said. "Not even gods. Limits are what keep will from rotting into tyranny. Or from shattering under expectation. If She is cracking, better She crack in front of a wolf who knows how to say no, than in front of one who would sacrifice everything blindly."
Luna exhaled.
"I do not know what to do," she confessed. "She says: *watch. Endure. Learn.* Doing nothing feels like... betrayal."
"Child," Elia said gently, "you are not doing nothing. You are holding knowledge others might not survive touching. That is *something.* And you are not alone. Do not make this another of those burdens your younger self would have tried to carry in silence."
Luna nodded slowly.
"Tell me when they come," Elia added, handing her a cup of water. "I may not see what you see, but I can at least make sure you do not crack the way She is."
The visions did not stop.
They did not come every hour, thank the stars.
Days would pass in a comfortable blur of ordinary tasks.
Luna would almost convince herself she had misinterpreted Her Goddess' warning.
Then, in the middle of a council debate about hunt quotas, the room would flicker.
Her elders' faces would blur into masks of light, no features, only mouths opening and closing in soundless argument, while behind them, a vast scale tipped under invisible weight, one side overloaded with offerings and oaths, the other empty.
Or she would be in the grove, hand on the Moonstone, and the stone would turn to a cracked mirror, showing her four different versions of herself—runt, rogue, Nexus, Queen—each tugging in a different direction, each attached to a line leading into the sky, all straining against a single, thin thread that held them together.
Each time, pain flared in her mark.
In her chest.
Each time, she forced herself to breathe, to *observe*, as the Moon had asked.
Each time, when she came back to herself, someone was there.
Orion, eyes dark with worry, one big hand engulfing hers.
Rhea, swearing under her breath but staying close, cracking jokes until Luna's breaths evened.
Rebel, in one particularly bad spell, pressing a cool cloth to her forehead and muttering something about charging the Goddess an extortionate fee for psychological damage.
Even Maera sat with her one evening on the wall, the elder's cane beside her, old eyes sharp.
"I used to dream too," Maera said without preamble as Luna blinked away the last shreds of a sky-vision in which the stars had rearranged into snarling wolves.
Luna turned.
"You... did?" she asked.
Maera snorted.
"You think you were the first Alpha to have the Moon poke at their sleep?" she said. "She is not new at this. Nor are the cracks."
Luna absorbed that.
"You saw... what?" she asked.
Maera's gaze wandered out over the trees.
"Different things," she said. "Paths closing. Rivers changing course. Wolves I had exiled waking under other skies, older and angrier. I did not understand half of it. I overreacted to the half I thought I did. Made choices out of fear of what might be, not what was."
She grimaced.
"You are wiser," she said grudgingly. "Annoyingly so. You name your dread before it names you. That alone will keep you from repeating some of my mistakes."
Luna's throat tightened.
"I sometimes feel like I am standing on a cliff edge," she said quietly. "Watching rocks crumble beneath my feet. Being told, *Just look. Do not move yet.* Part of me wants to leap. To do something, anything, rather than stay with that helplessness."
Maera nodded once.
"Sometimes, watching *is* the doing," she said. "When a dam starts to crack, you do not just slap mud on the first leak. You study the whole wall. See where pressure comes from. Where to relieve it without flooding the valley. You have more help than I did. Use it."
"Help from who?" Luna asked wryly. "The Moon? The ancestors? The packs? All of the above, half of them arguing?"
Maera's mouth quirked.
"Exactly," she said. "Let them argue. Better that than one voice in your head pretending to be truth itself."
The next vision came not with pain, but with a chill.
Luna stood in the training yard, watching a mixed group of warriors from Moonshadow and Mistveil trade holds. The air smelled of sweat and leather and friendly rivalry.
She blinked.
The scene bled.
The warriors' fur turned chalk-white.
Their eyes went blank.
Not shadow-blank, the slick, silver emptiness Selene had carved.
Worse.
Emptiness layered over *awareness*.
Like wolves walking in nightmares, seeing everything and being unable to respond.
They moved through their motions with perfect precision.
Every blow landed where it should.
Every block performed flawlessly.
No improvisation.
No laughter.
No breath wasted on jokes.
They were perfect.
They were hollow.
Luna's heart slammed against her ribs.
She opened her mouth to shout.
No sound came.
The Goddess' voice whispered, thin and frayed, at the edge of the vision.
*This is what it looks like when fear of chaos wins over trust in choice,* She said. *When leaders decide that neat obedience is safer than messy freedom. Be wary of those who offer certainty at the cost of will, Luna. They will be born from the cracks as surely as any monster with claws.*
The yard snapped back.
Warriors laughed.
One tripped.
Another swore as Rhea swept his legs.
Luna's knees wobbled.
She sat down hard on the nearest bench.
Rhea, noticing, threw her opponent aside with a casual flip and jogged over.
"Head trip?" she asked, panting.
Luna nodded once.
"Potential future," she murmured. "Not ours. Not if I can help it."
Rhea dropped beside her, shoulder bumping Luna's.
"Then we will help it," she said. "By making sure we never like the sound of 'Yes, Alpha' too much."
Luna smiled faintly.
"Remind me of that," she said. "When I am old and tired and tempted by easy compliance."
Rhea snorted.
"If you get old and cranky, I am putting you out to pasture in Greenwood," she said. "Let their trees deal with you."
Luna laughed, the sound shaky but real.
That night, sleep did not come easy.
She lay awake longer than Orion, staring up at the sliver of sky.
The Moon waxed and waned according to its usual cycle.
To any normal eye, it was whole.
She had seen the fracture.
She knew better.
Something cold and hot twisted in her.
Not just fear.
Responsibility.
Not the crushing, self-inflicted kind she had worn as a runt, as a rogue.
A clearer, more grounded awareness:
She could not stop the Moon from breaking alone.
She could, perhaps, help shape how the world responded.
Help keep wolves from tearing each other apart in the chaos.
Help remind them that gods cracked, but so did old stories—and that did not have to be only a horror.
It could be a chance.
She turned on her side, facing Orion.
He slept, features relaxed, one hand curled near his face.
Her chest ached with love.
With gratitude.
With a fierce, almost painful desire to keep *this* safe.
This simple, ordinary thing.
She reached out.
Brushed hair from his brow.
His eyes opened, sleep-blurred.
"Hey," he murmured. "Visions again?"
"Not this瞬," she said softly. "Just... thoughts."
He made a low, sympathetic sound.
"Those can be worse," he said.
She smiled faintly.
"Or better," she countered.
She hesitated.
Then, "If I ever start... chasing prophecies at the cost of pups," she said quietly, "if I ever start saying 'The Moon wills it' to justify cruelty, I need you to stop me. Even if I fight you."
He blinked fully awake at that.
His gaze sharpened.
"I will," he said without hesitation. "I swear it. Even if you hate me in the moment. Even if the Goddess Herself glares at me."
A faint, indignant rumble echoed in Luna's chest.
She snorted.
"She heard that," she informed him.
"Good," he said. "Someone has to hold Her accountable, too."
The Moon's exasperation brushed them both.
*Insolent wolves,* She muttered. *I create you, I lift you, and this is the thanks I get.*
Luna chuckled.
Love threaded through the Goddess' grumbling.
*Do not let Her guilt you, either,* Orion added.
"I will add that to my growing list of impossible tasks," Luna said.
He reached for her then, pulling her close, tucking her head under his chin.
They breathed together.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
The second heartbeat in Luna's chest—a blend now of Moonstone, star-Seed, and her own mortal muscle—slowed.
Steadied.
The crack in the visionary Moon did not close.
It would not, for a long time yet.
But the image of it no longer felt like an immediate blade to the throat.
More like a slow, grinding pressure.
A problem to be lived with and learned from, not solved in one heroic act.
The battle was won.
Peace, such as it was, had returned to the woods.
Yet in Luna's sleep and in her sudden, unwelcome glimpses behind the sky's curtain, a new saga pawed at the door.
Not of one girl against one cruel pack.
Not of one Queen against one Shadow.
Of worlds shifting.
Of gods learning their own limits.
Of wolves deciding, again and again, whether to bow to fear or to meet it with messy, stubborn freedom.
The Moon was breaking.
The Goddess was not as unshakeable as legend claimed.
Luna's peace was cracked by visions that would not let her slip into complacency.
And yet—
As she lay there in the dark, Orion's arms around her, the den sleeping, the forest breathing, the Goddess very much *there* even in Her strain, Luna understood something she had not before:
Broken did not mean ended.
Cracked did not mean useless.
It meant exposed.
It meant ripe for new shapes.
She had been broken once.
More than once.
She had thought each shatter was the end.
It had been, each time, a doorway.
"Fine," she whispered into the dark. "Show me, then. I will watch. I will listen. I will not rush. But when it is time to move, I will not look away."
In the distance, beyond sight, the vast, wounded face of the Moon turned a fraction.
A single drop of light, falling from Her crack, arced not into oblivion this time, but toward a small, stubborn blue world where a wolf watched the sky with clear eyes.
Peace, for now, wrapped Moonshadow.
Visions tugged at Luna's sleep.
The saga was not over.
It had only shifted.
From battles of tooth and claw to battles of story and structure, of meaning and myth.
Luna closed her eyes.
Let sleep take her again.
If the Moon broke in her dreams, she would be there—not as savior, not as solution, but as witness and, when the moment was truly right, as hand reaching for new shapes in the falling light.