The moon did not rise the next night.
Not fully.
It hung low in the sky, veiled behind dark clouds, pulsing faintly like a wound trying to close. In Crooked Ash, the people stayed indoors. Candles flickered in windowpanes. Doors were bolted. Even the animals fell silent, sensing that something ancient and terrible was stirring in the dark.
Cassia stood barefoot in the clearing behind her house, the cold earth biting at her skin.
She was shaking—but not from fear.
From something blooming beneath her ribs.
Something that didn't feel like her.
⸻
Elias hadn't returned since the night before. Not in wolf form. Not in flesh. Not even in scent.
But Cassia felt him everywhere. In the air, in the trees, in her heartbeat—off rhythm now, like a drum being taught a new song. Her fingertips tingled constantly. Her dreams came while she was awake.
She tried to read, to write, to boil tea. Nothing held her.
The old mirror in the hallway had cracked, not from a fall or an impact—but from her looking into it. Her reflection had moved when she hadn't. Smiled when she frowned. Blinked when her eyes were still.
She'd stopped looking after that.
⸻
She didn't hear the Seer return.
But she knew the moment Serah stepped into her house.
"You're breaking," Serah said calmly from the doorway. "Just like the moon did, the night she was born."
Cassia turned. "What's happening to me?"
Serah stepped closer. Her long gray robes dragged against the wood floor like whispers.
"You are not meant to live in one skin. That's why you've never felt whole. The blood in your veins is older than Elias. Older than the first Pack. Older than the moon that governs them."
Cassia's throat was dry. "You keep saying that. What does it mean?"
Serah's white eyes fixed on her face.
"It means you were never meant to be hunted—or protected. You were meant to lead."
⸻
Outside, thunder rolled. But there was no storm.
The air grew heavier. Dense. Like grief before it falls.
Cassia stepped into the clearing again. She didn't know why—only that something was calling her. Not in words. Not even in feeling. It was more primitive. Like instinct. Like hunger.
And when she stood beneath the great pine tree at the center of the field, the ground trembled softly beneath her feet.
Then she heard it.
A howl.
Not Elias.
This one was sharper. Hungrier.
Warning.
⸻
The Pack was coming.
But not for her.
For him.
Elias had defied the sacred law. He had kissed a bloodless girl. And that girl had begun to awaken.
The Seer's words from the night before echoed in Cassia's mind:
"When you fully awaken, not even Elias will be able to stop what comes next."
⸻
In the depths of the forest, Elias knelt by the Wishing Oak, hands bloodied, chest heaving.
He had fought off the first attack.
Three wolves. His kin.
They hadn't tried to talk.
They had come to kill.
And when he saw their eyes—black as tar, wild with fear—he knew this wasn't just punishment.
It was cleansing.
They meant to erase her from his blood. Erase her from the Pack's memory.
But Elias was not so easily broken.
He was born of the Moonbound Line. And Cassia had named him.
That kiss had not just awakened her. It had marked him.
And no Alpha, no Seer, no elder could strip it away now.
⸻
Cassia felt the forest lean in closer.
The trees no longer felt comforting. They pulsed with tension. The moon was still absent—its light swallowed by grief or fear. She didn't know which.
And then the pain began.
Sharp. Burning. Inside her spine.
She collapsed to her knees.
The fire raced through her nerves, across her skin, down to her bones. Her breath caught. Her mouth opened, but no sound came. Her fingernails dug into the frozen soil.
She was burning from the inside out.
She screamed.
The sky cracked open above her—not with lightning, but with light. A silver-white beam pierced the clouds and struck the clearing like a blade, hitting her directly, wrapping her in it.
Serah watched from the shadows, her expression unreadable.
"It begins," she whispered.
⸻
And then, in the center of the clearing, Cassia stood.
But she was not as she had been.
Her hair was silver now—so silver it looked almost blue. Her skin glowed faintly in the dark. Her eyes, once brown and searching, now shimmered with gold and violet fire. Her spine was straighter. Her breath is slower. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was not one voice—but three, overlapping, ancient, melodic.
"I remember."
The forest bowed.
⸻
Elias felt it too.
Even wounded, miles away, blood dripping from his arms, he felt her rise.
The moon was still gone.
But a new force had taken its place.
Something older.
Something free.
⸻
Cassia's transformation was not complete—but her awakening had begun.
And the Pack felt it.
Across Crooked Ash, wolves howled—not in rage, but in mourning.
For the moon no longer ruled alone.
A new power had risen.
And she did not ask to be obeyed.
She was born to be followed.