The first scream came from the nursery.
Luna was halfway up the stair to the old shrine—her new, half-cleared den—when the sound ripped through the stone. High, shrill, not from pain but from a terror so raw it cut through all the usual noise of the pack.
She froze.
The walls themselves shuddered.
Not from outside.
From *within.*
Dust rained from a fresh crack that ripped up the plaster beside her hand, racing toward the ceiling like a black vein suddenly yanked taut.
"Goddess," Elia breathed behind her. "It's starting."
Luna didn't ask what *it* was.
She knew.
They'd pushed the curse back from the western wall, held the Bloodfangs on the border, staved off collapse again and again.
The darkness in the stone had been waiting.
Now it had decided to stop nibbling.
And *take.*
Another scream. Closer.
"Nursery," Luna snapped. "Go!"
She was already running.
Her boots pounded down the stairs, skipping steps three at a time.
The den's main corridor seethed with motion. Wolves burst from side tunnels half-shifted, fur bristling, eyes wild. An elder staggered past with blood trickling from his ear, muttering an ancient prayer Luna almost recognized.
The air tasted wrong.
Cold and metallic, like bitten tongues and old snow.
As Luna raced toward the heart of the den, the temperature dropped. Breath smoked in front of her lips. Frost feathered along new cracks in the stone.
The curse had lived in the walls.
Tonight, it was *moving.*
"Get the pups out!" Elia shouted somewhere behind her. "Pairs! Don't touch the black stone—"
A sharp *snap,* like a bone breaking, cut Elia's words off.
The corridor lurched.
For a heartbeat Luna thought the world had tilted, but then she realized: it was the *stone* under her, buckling, twisting, trying to become something that wasn't a floor.
Her feet slid on suddenly slick rock.
She snapped her hands out, palms slapping the walls.
Power surged out of her on instinct, storm colliding with the cold, crawling dark that ran through the masonry.
It recoiled like something burned.
She seized that 米粒 of advantage and shoved.
"Hold," she gasped to the stone. "Not *yet.*"
The walls shivered.
Cracks paused in their hungry climb.
Not stopped.
Stalled.
Wind whipped up around her, spiraling through the corridor, catching dust and spattering it away from wide, frightened eyes.
Orion appeared at the far end of the hall in half-shift, fur ruffed down his forearms, eyes silver-bright with the curse and something more.
"Nursery's breaking," he rasped. "Ceiling—Lina—"
Lina.
The pup she'd dragged back from shadow once already.
Luna's vision tunneled.
"Move," she snarled.
He did.
He fell in beside her without argument, their shoulders almost brushing as they sprinted.
Howls and cries echoed off stone.
From somewhere deep in the den, a low, grinding roar began—a sound too huge to belong to any living throat.
The den's heart was *cracking.*
"Luna!"
Rhea burst from a side passage, two pups in her arms, another clinging to her leg.
Her left shoulder was slick with blood; a fresh split in the wall gaped behind her, jagged and black, like a mouth still chewing.
"Get them *out,*" Luna barked. "Courtyard, open sky. Don't stop."
Rhea nodded once, eyes fierce despite the fear.
"Don't you die in here," she snapped as she ran. "I'll be so pissed."
Luna tried to smile.
Failed.
There was no space left for anything but motion.
They reached the nursery hall and the stench of the curse hit her full-force.
Rot.
Frost.
Old grief.
It poured from a great, spidering fissure that had split the ceiling above the nursery door, spreading across the stone like ink in water.
Dark mist crawled from it, spilling down the walls in slow, grasping tendrils.
Wolves clustered just outside the doorway, some trying to push in, others dragging limp forms out.
"How many still inside?" Orion demanded, voice barely leashed.
"Six," a harried omega panted. "Maybe seven. Stone fell—Lina's trapped—"
The ceiling groaned.
Another chunk of rock sheared away, crashing to the floor in a burst of dust and black-crawling shadow.
Something in Luna snapped.
Not in a breaking way.
In a *finally* way.
All the days of holding back, softening her power so stone wouldn't shatter and wolves wouldn't burn.
All the nights of tempering lightning to a healer's touch, coaxing roots instead of tearing walls.
All the careful, measured displays in council rooms full of narrow faces that wanted her either tame or gone.
She didn't have that luxury anymore.
There were pups choking on *nothing* in there.
She stepped forward.
The curse's mist recoiled, then surged, sensing a greater light.
It wanted her.
It wanted to snuff her like it had tried to snuff Lina once before.
Her wolf rose, every hackle a live wire.
*Ours,* it snarled. *Our den. Our pups. NO.*
"Back," Luna said.
Her voice came out low and strange, layered, as if another spoke through her.
Orion's head snapped toward her.
"What are you—"
"Get them *back,*" she said, louder, and the words rippled through the hall like a shockwave.
Wind crashed outward from her, a circular burst that shoved every wolf in the corridor three steps away from the nursery door.
They stumbled, caught themselves, turned, some bristling.
She didn't give them time to argue.
Her hands lifted, fingers spread.
The storm answered.
Not in careful threads.
Not in polite streaks.
In a *torrent.*
Lightning flooded her veins, a white-hot rush that made her teeth ache and her bones hum.
Wind screamed down the corridor, circling her, lifting her hair, tugging at loose mortar.
The temperature around her spiked, then dropped, then spiked again—a dizzying swing as ice and fire both vied for space in the narrow hall.
"Luna," Elia said behind her, voice tight. "Think—"
"I am," Luna snarled.
She stepped toward the nursery door.
The dark mist thickened, lashing out like too-long fingers.
It wrapped around her ankles, cold burning like dry ice.
She hissed as frost crept up her calves.
Pain.
Again.
She let it anchor her rage.
"You've taken enough," she whispered—to the shadow, to the cracked stone, to the part of herself that had once begged the Goddess not to let this place forget her.
Her voice shook.
"Not this room," she said. "Not *them.*"
The curse hissed.
If it had a voice, it might have laughed.
Luna dragged the storm *down.*
She'd always called it from above before, from sky and cloud and high, cold places.
Tonight, she reached for the well she'd found in the Moonstone Grove, the deep, humming reservoir under her own bones.
It *rushed.*
Power exploded out of her like a dam shattering.
Wind slammed into the nursery doorway, shredding the first layer of mist.
Lightning cracked from her palms, not in a single bolt but in a net, fine and bright, spreading across the threshold like a spiderweb spun from pure storm.
The curse shrieked—no sound, but Luna heard it anyway as pressure in her ears, as a sudden spike of cold that made her vision blur.
It tried to recoil.
The net of lightning held it.
"Keep them back," she ground out between clenched teeth.
Orion didn't argue again.
"Everyone off this hall!" he barked. "Fall back to the corner. Do not touch that door."
Wolves scrambled, dragging the wounded, shoving the stubborn.
Luna barely noticed.
Every heartbeat felt like an eternity.
Behind the nursery door, muffled cries rose—pups, coughing, wailing, calling for mothers who couldn't reach them.
She saw, in a flash of near-panic memory, herself as a child in that room, listening to Selene's laughter in the hall, pressing her small body against the far wall, wishing it would open and swallow her.
"Luna." The voice that whispered her name in that memory had been hers.
Tonight, another voice layered over it.
Warmer.
Ancient.
*Child.*
The Moon Goddess.
Luna's knees nearly buckled.
She felt Her like a hand between her shoulder blades, steadying, *not* answering every plea, but giving her this one: a brief, blazing connection to something beyond herself.
"Let go," the Goddess murmured.
Luna wanted to scream.
Let go?
If she let go of this careful grip, this tight control, the power would tear everything apart.
"Trust," the Goddess said, and there was iron under the warmth.
The kind of tone Luna would one day use on pups who thought they knew better.
She inhaled.
Wind filled her lungs.
Lightning filled her veins.
Her feet rooted into the stone, into the earth below.
She opened.
Not all at once.
Not to losing herself.
She opened to *more.*
Her fingers no longer felt like individual things.
They were extensions of light.
Her hair lifted completely, floating around her head like a dark halo charged with sparks.
Her eyes burned.
She felt them, silvered from within.
Later, wolves would say they'd never forget that sight: the runt between, hair flying, eyes lit with the moon, standing in front of the place where their future slept.
Luna raised her arms.
The net of lightning before the nursery door thickened.
Threads multiplied, weaving into a bright, crackling barrier.
The curse struck at it again and again, testing, hissing, pressing.
Each impact reverberated through her bones.
She gritted her teeth.
"Not... yours," she growled.
Her power surged.
The barrier became a funnel, narrowing, directing.
She wasn't just blocking the curse.
She was *channeling* it.
It had no body, not really.
It was a wrongness, a hunger.
But it moved through patterns—along weak lines in stone, through unguarded hearts, into empty spaces.
She could see those now.
Not with eyes.
With something deeper.
The lightning net pulled.
The mist responded, unwillingly at first, then with a hideous eagerness as it realized there was a path offered that did not just end in dissipation.
It poured into the threads of light, into the shape she made, coiling like smoke sucked into a chimney.
"Luna!" someone shouted behind her. "What are you—"
"Get out!" she hissed. "Everyone, *out!*"
Because she knew, suddenly, what the Goddess meant.
Let go.
She couldn't push this wrongness back into the walls.
They were full.
She couldn't dilute it across the den.
It would just scatter and seep back in.
She had to *take* it.
The realization was ice in her gut.
Take it *into herself.*
"Child," the Goddess murmured. "It began in your rejection. In your pain. In the crack between what you were promised and what you were given. It will *answer* you. It will go where you tell it."
"It'll kill me," Luna whispered.
"Maybe," the Goddess said softly. "Maybe not. You carry a bloodline that has survived such storms before."
Comfort.
Warning.
Both.
The pups behind the door coughed.
Cried.
Stone groaned.
Rock dust sifted from the ceiling, stirring in the wind.
Luna made her choice.
She dropped the barrier.
Turned it.
Lightning that had woven across the doorway now arced back toward her, twisting into a spiral around her body.
The curse's mist, already funneling along those lines, followed—rushing toward her like a river of cold shadow.
It hit her.
And , there was nothing but *cold.*
It sliced into her, through every pore, every crack in her skin, every old scar.
Her breath vanished.
Her heart stuttered.
Voices flooded her head—not words, but echoes: wolves gasping their last in dark hallways; pups whose hearts had stopped before they ever opened their eyes; elders who'd felt their minds slip away into Grey before their bodies did.
All that pain.
All that fear.
All that *emptiness.*
It wanted to fill her.
To hollow her.
To make her another echo in its collection.
Her knees slammed into the stone.
Her hands hit next, palms skidding on suddenly slick, frost-sheened floor.
She felt herself slipping.
Into cold.
Into dark.
Into nothing.
*No.*
The word didn't come from her mind.
It came from her *wolf.*
From the part of her that had howled under a Bloodfang's teeth and refused to break.
From the child who had stared up at a full moon with snow on her eyelashes and begged not for power, but for a place.
*NO.*
Heat flared in her chest.
Not fire.
Something older.
Blood.
It seared through the invading dark, pushing back against the numbness.
Not enough.
The curse writhed, filling her lungs with not-air, her veins with not-blood.
*Child,* the Goddess' voice came again, sharper now. *Your power is not a cup. It is a river. You do not *hold* this. You let it *pass.* Through. Out.*
Through.
Out.
Luna couldn't scream.
Her throat was locked.
But she could *move.*
She dragged her hands across the stone.
Fingers numb, she slammed her palms down, one on each side of the nursery doorway.
The stone there was cold and slick with shadow.
She didn't push it away this time.
She made herself a bridge.
Power—hers and the curse's tangled—rushed down her arms into the walls.
Not back into the cracks.
*Through* them.
Out.
Beyond.
The den shook.
Everyone still in the hall went down like wheat before a scythe, knocked flat by a wave of invisible force that slammed into the stone and burst outward.
The shock rippled through every tunnel, every chamber.
It raced along the old paths of the curse, through the hairline fractures in ceilings and floors, out through the foundations, down into the bedrock.
It hit the earth outside like thunder.
The courtyard trembled.
In the forest, birds shrieked and took to the air in a panicked cloud.
At the western border, the already-shivering trees bent suddenly, leaves flaring silver as a low, earth-deep *boom* rolled under their roots.
Farther, beyond the Bloodfang river, beyond the next pack's land, beyond even the old Rogue trails, somewhere in the deep wild, something *listened*.
Luna felt it.
A vast, sleeping presence stirring in response to the wave she'd just sent out.
An old, slow awareness, older than Moonshadow, older than packs, older than the first howl.
It tasted what spilled from her—curse tangled with Goddess, shadow mixed with storm—and lifted its head.
*Later,* the Goddess' voice snapped in Luna's mind, sharp with a hint of worry. *We will deal with that later.*
For now, in the hall, the immediate effect was brutal.
The dark mist that had been choking the nursery tore away from the door, sucked along the same path as the initial surge.
It fled down the walls, pouring through the cracks like smoke through chimney flues, racing outward, away from the den's core.
Inside the nursery, air rushed in.
Pups coughed.
One wailed, high and blessedly alive.
Luna sagged.
Her arms shook.
Her lungs burned as if she'd inhaled fire and ice together.
The cold in her bones didn't leave.
But it loosened.
Her breath came back in gasps.
"Luna!"
Orion's hands were suddenly on her shoulders, hot where everything else felt numb.
He hauled her back from the door, dragging her a few paces down the hall.
Her fingers scraped grooves into the stone as she went, leaving faint, glowing lines that faded quickly.
Her eyes rolled, trying to find the ceiling, the floor, anything solid.
Lights danced in her vision—spots of blue and white, like stars underwater.
"How many?" she managed to whisper.
"Pups?" Elia's voice, hoarse and shaking, answered. "All. They're—moon, they're *breathing.*"
Luna let out a choked sound.
Not quite a laugh.
Not quite a sob.
Her heart pounded against a cage of ice.
The curse was no longer in the nursery.
No longer thick in the walls around them.
But it hadn't vanished.
She could feel it.
In *her.*
In the faint, wrong chill that clung to the edges of her ribs, in the way her fingers ached like they'd been frostbitten.
"What did you *do*?" Maera choked from where she lay sprawled against the far wall, hair loose, dignity forgotten. "What *have you brought in here?*"
Luna turned her head slowly.
The movement made the world tilt.
Wolves were scattered along the hallway, some still on hands and knees, some already pushing themselves upright.
Their eyes were too wide.
Some looked at her like she'd just grown a second head.
Others with something akin to worship.
A few... with fear.
Cold, hard, familiar fear.
The kind once reserved for whispered stories about monsters in the forest.
"I took it," Luna said, voice raw. "Off them. Off the walls. Through me, out."
"Out *where*?" Gaius rasped, clutching his chest.
Luna opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Her power still hummed, overcharged and unstable, storm and shadow and something else all braided together.
"I don't know yet," she admitted.
Gasps.
Growls.
"What kind of answer—" Maera began hotly.
"She saved your grandchildren," Elia snapped. "Maybe stop biting the hand that just dragged them away from nothing."
Orion's grip tightened on Luna's shoulders.
His scent was sharp with fear.
Not *of* her.
For her.
The realization landed heavy and unwanted.
"You're freezing," he said tightly. "Your skin—Luna, your skin is—"
He broke off, swallowing.
She looked down.
Her hands shook.
Faint shadows clung to the veins under her skin, like dark smoke caught beneath thin ice.
Lightning still flickered there too, muted, restless.
Two forces that had been enemies now fought for ground in her own body.
"Storm-child," a new voice said.
Not the Goddess.
Old.
Gravelly.
Kerran, staggering down the hall, scrolls clutched to his chest.
He'd run here when the first crack sounded, arms full of the old records he'd promised her.
One had split; parchment trailed like a broken wing.
He stared at her, breathless.
"In the old stories," he said, "there were wolves who could take blights into themselves. Walk them out of the land. Carry them until the earth healed."
He swallowed.
"Half of them died," he added. "The other half... changed."
"Comforting," Luna croaked.
Her teeth chattered once, hard.
Orion pulled her a little closer to his chest, as if his body heat could chase out the wrong chill.
"We need the healers," he said. "If this thing—"
"They'll have nothing in their kits for this," Kerran cut in. "This is... beyond herbs."
"That doesn't mean we do nothing," Orion snapped.
His voice was raw with something that made Luna's heart twist.
"Luna." He leaned closer, eyes searching her face. "Stay with me."
"I'm not going anywhere," she tried to joke.
It came out slurred.
Her eyelids drooped.
The den's stone sang under her, a high, thin note that set her teeth on edge.
She felt every crack now.
Every place the curse had once coiled.
They were... empty.
For now.
She'd drained them.
Not completely—there were always embers—but enough that the oppressive wrongness that had clung to this hall, to the nursery, to the rooms beyond, had thinned to almost nothing.
She'd pushed the darkness out.
But in doing so, she'd made herself a... channel.
A vessel.
A new crack the curse—and something older—had flowed through.
Terror gusted through her.
Not for herself.
For what she might become.
If that wrongness rooted in her bones.
If the Goddess' spark that lived in her blood twisted under its weight.
"Luna," Orion repeated.
He sounded far away now, as if she were already standing at the far end of a long tunnel.
She forced her eyes open wider.
The hall swam into focus.
Wolves watching her.
Some with mouths set in stubborn lines.
Some with tears on their cheeks.
Selene, further back than the others, cloak immaculate despite the chaos, eyes wide and bright and hard to read.
Fear.
Rage.
Opportunity.
All at once.
Luna's wolf snarled weakly in her chest.
*We did it,* it whispered. *We saved them.*
"We did," Luna whispered back.
Out loud.
Her lips barely moved.
Orion's fingers dug into her shoulders.
"Hold on," he said.
The Goddess' voice brushed her mind again, softer now, tinged with something like rue.
*You asked Me once if you mattered,* She murmured. *If I saw you. If your pain meant anything in the great sky. I could not answer then, not in a way you would survive. So I watched. And waited. And when the time came, I climbed into your bones instead of into the halls that rejected you.*
Luna wanted to laugh.
Or cry.
Or howl.
All three tried to come out at once; none did.
"Not... much of a choice," she thought at the presence.
The Goddess' warmth grew, just enough to blunt the worst of the cold.
*No,* She agreed. *Not much. But you have never been one to choose the easy hunt.*
Luna's eyes rolled up.
The last thing she saw before darkness took her was Orion's face, raw with terror and awe, framed by cracked stone that—for the first time since she'd returned—did not feel like it was reaching for her throat.
Beyond him, in the widened doorway of the nursery, Lina peered out, eyes huge, soot-smudged cheeks streaked with tears.
She was breathing.
They *all* were.
The den that had once spat Luna out now held its breath over her fallen form.
The storm she'd been holding back since she was a frightened runt had finally blown through.
It had not left Moonshadow untouched.
It had scoured.
It had scarred.
It had *saved.*
And as wolves pressed forward—some in reverence, some in fear, some in angry confusion—the same question trembled in every chest:
What, exactly, had their Goddess made of the little wolf they'd thrown away?
And would that new thing be their salvation...
...or the next great storm they'd have to survive?