The Rogue Lands did not pause to applaud Luna's first clumsy flickers of power.
Hunger still gnawed.
Cold still crept in with every dusk.
Predators still watched from shadow and branch.
Yet as the days passed after the gully and the rogue, the ember in her chest felt less like a stranger and more like a restless companion—always there, always pressing, as if impatient with how slow her hands and mind were to catch up.
She began to *train*.
Not with wooden swords in a packed dirt ring under an Alpha's supervision.
In secret.
Alone.
With whatever the wild would give her.
The first morning she dared to call on the ember deliberately, she did it at the edge of a shallow stream.
Mist hovered above the water, thin as breath. The air bit at her nose and fingers, a warning that true cold, deeper winter, lurked not too far ahead.
She crouched on the muddy bank, her injured shin still stiff but usable, and let her fingers trail in the current.
The water was icy, rushing around her skin, tugging, carrying bits of leaf and grit.
She watched it.
Felt it.
"It moves because it must," she murmured, echoing some half-remembered phrase from an old story. "Because the world slopes and it follows."
The ember stirred.
She drew her hand back and shook it dry.
Then, slowly, she raised it over the water, palm down.
"Just a little," she whispered. "Not a river. Not a lake. Just... this."
She focused on a single patch of stream below her palm—the size of a dinner plate.
The ember rose in response, flowing up into her shoulders, down her arm. Her skin prickled, hairs lifting as if static had crawled over them.
She breathed in.
The water in that small patch seemed to slow, as if someone had gently pressed a hand against its back.
She breathed out.
A faint, white-silver sheen ghosted across the surface.
Her heart jumped.
"Again," she whispered.
She drew in another breath, pulling harder on the ember. It flared, sending a cool burn through her veins. Her hand tingled, numb and too-aware at once.
A crackle answered from the stream.
For the span of a held breath, the water directly below her palm stiffened.
Not solid all the way through. The current still moved beneath. But the very *skin* of the stream turned thin and milky, a fragile film.
Ice.
Luna's own breath fogged in the air, a little thicker than the ambient chill warranted.
A laugh, sharp and disbelieving, escaped her.
"I—"
The ember slipped.
Her focus fractured.
The light film shattered, icy shards melting as quickly as they'd formed, dissolving back into the rush.
Her knees wobbled.
She dropped her hand, panting.
Her fingertips were numb, as if she'd held them in snow too long. Deep in her bones, something ached—the same tiredness she felt after running hard, but threaded now with a... buzzing.
As if every nerve remembered, in miniature, the crisp snap of frozen water.
She sat back heavily on the bank, boots sucking at the mud.
"That was..." She swallowed. "That was real."
Not a trick of light. Not a half-scabbed puddle she had misunderstood.
She had called ice from moving water with nothing but breath and will.
"Stormroot," she murmured, the name the Goddess had given her feeling both too large and exactly right on her tongue. "You did that."
The ember pulsed, a brief, pleased thrum, then subsided into a low, steady hum.
She did not try again right away.
Already she had learned that every use of that inner coiled force came with a cost. The more she took, the more she shook afterward, the more muddled her thoughts became.
If she burned it all in play, there would be nothing left in a moment of true need.
So she measured herself.
She turned practice into ritual.
In the mornings, after sipping a careful amount of water and eating whatever roots or berries she'd scrounged, she set aside a small sliver of energy for training.
Water.
Air.
Earth.
Fire remained—so far—asleep. A presence she sensed only as heat pressed deeper than the day's chill.
On one cold dawn, when frost had rimed the edges of every leaf and turned spiderwebs into strings of diamonds, she knelt in a small clearing and cupped her hands.
Frost crackled faintly under her knees.
She breathed, calling the ember.
"Gather," she whispered.
Not to the ground.
To the air.
The ember flowed up this time, rising along her spine, filling her chest, spilling into her arms. Her palms tingled, then cooled, as if someone had pressed snow into them without wet.
The air above her hands... thickened.
She couldn't see it.
She felt it.
A small, swirling weight. A knot of... movement.
She tipped her cupped hands slightly, as if emptying them.
Wind followed.
It wasn't a gust. Not yet. Just a brief stream—stronger than a normal exhale—rushing from between her palms and into the clearing.
It rustled the dead leaves in front of her, making them jump and skitter.
Luna grinned, sudden and wild.
She hadn't *blown.* Her mouth had been closed.
She'd poured the ember's pressure into the air instead of the ground.
It had listened.
Afterward, her arms trembled so badly she had to hug herself to stop the shaking. Her head ached dully behind her eyes.
But as she sat there, blue lips pressed together, heart pounding, exhilaration burned through the fatigue.
She was learning.
Clumsy, yes. Weak, yes.
Learning.
If she tried to force too much, the world reminded her of her limits—viciously.
One late afternoon, grey clouds massing low on the horizon, she huddled under the overhang of a rocky shelf and stared at the tiny fire she had managed to coax into existence with Elia's gifted knife and a flintly stone.
The flames were pathetic.
They licked half-heartedly at a few pine needles and a bit of dry bark, too small to truly warm her hands, too fickle to trust.
Her wet clothes clung to her bones from an earlier stumble into a swollen creek. Cold had sunk its teeth into her, gnawing relentlessly.
She held her hands out toward the wavering light.
"More," she muttered through chattering teeth. "Please."
The ember stirred.
Hot, this time.
Not the cool radiance of ice, not the rushing flow of air.
Something deeper. Thicker.
She eyed the little flame, then her own hands.
Every childhood warning she'd ever been given rose up.
*Don't play with fire, pup. Don't get too close. Don't—*
But something in her remembered another image from the Goddess' reflections: wolves with embers in their eyes, walking through flame without being consumed.
"Not playing," she whispered. "Learning."
She drew on the ember.
It obliged too quickly.
Heat flooded her limbs, making her vision blur at the edges. Her palms burned—not with pain, with overfullness, as if light were trying to pour out through skin too thin to hold it.
She pushed her hands a little closer to the small fire.
"Grow," she hissed, voice shaking. "Take it. Feed."
The ember spilled.
For a heartbeat, the fire *roared*.
Flames leapt up, bright and hungry, devouring the bark, reaching greedily for the stray needles and stray twigs scattered nearby. Heat slammed into Luna's face, searing her lashes, making her eyes water.
She jerked her hands back.
The ember, now spilled, was no longer hers to direct.
The fire found a patch of dry moss and leapt to it.
Panic clenched her chest.
"Stop!" she gasped.
The flames did not obey words.
They obeyed fuel.
The moss blackened, crackled, flared.
Smoke billowed, thick and sudden, clawing at her throat.
She scrambled to her knees, grabbed for her blanket, and beat at the bursting tongues of orange and gold.
Ember-sparks bit at her wrists as the flames snapped, offended at the smothering.
"Stop, stop—" she choked, coughing on smoke, eyes streaming.
She seized a nearby branch, its end still damp from the creek, and dragged heavy, wet soil from the bank onto the creeping fire's edge.
Dirt hissed as it hit the flames.
They sputtered.
She threw more, scooping with both hands now, heedless of the mud that coated her arms.
Slowly, reluctantly, the fire shrank.
It fought every inch, reaching for new fuel, but the moss and twigs nearest were already charred or buried. Lacking anything else to devour, it gave up, collapsing inward into angry, smoking embers.
Luna fell back on her heels, chest heaving, smoke-stung lungs burning.
Her blanket was singed along one edge.
The rock overhang above her was blackened in one small patch.
The area immediately around her, though, had not become the roaring inferno those first leaping flames had promised.
Tears of smoke and fear and frustrated triumph blurred her vision.
She stared at the shrinking embers, then down at her shaking, mud-smeared hands.
"That," she coughed, "was *stupid.*"
The ember in her chest lay quiet, spent.
No helpful thrum. No reassurance.
Empty.
She felt wrung-out, hollow, in a way no amount of physical exertion alone had ever produced. Her limbs were weak. A faint tremor ran through her muscles, as if she'd been shivering nonstop for hours.
Power had its teeth on her, too.
"Not again," she rasped. "Not like that."
She sat there for a long time, watching the embers cool and darken, until the smoking black patch in front of her was just another scar on the forest's skin.
Later, after the tightness in her throat had eased and her head had stopped spinning, she crawled forward and pressed her palm to the damp dirt beside the blackened moss.
The ground hummed at her touch.
Not accusing.
Just... itself.
"Sorry," she whispered. "I'll be... more careful."
The earth vibrated faintly under her hand, as if acknowledging.
Lesson learned.
After the fire incident, she approached that aspect of the ember with more caution.
Fire was there—sleeping coals waiting to flare—but it was greedier than water, less patient than air, less forgiving than earth.
It wanted to leap.
She did not always have room for leaps.
So most days, she focused on subtler things.
She tried to feel the difference between calling the ember to her hands and calling it to her feet.
When she drew it toward her legs and pressed her soles more firmly into the ground, the soil seemed to offer a touch more support. Roots under the surface... noticed her. Once, as she climbed a steep incline, the loose gravel under her heel *paused*, as if thinking better of collapsing.
She made a game of walking across muddy slopes without slipping, trusting the ground just enough, learning when to ask and when to accept that sometimes, she would fall.
She tried, on a misty morning, to pull warmth into her chilled fingers without any external flame.
She sat cross-legged in a hollow, wrapped in her blanket, and breathed.
In.
Out.
She pictured coals deep in her belly, banked but not dead.
She coaxed them.
Slowly, oh so slowly, warmth seeped into her hands from the inside. Not enough to banish the cold entirely, but enough to take the sting from her numbed fingertips.
She smiled into the fog, breath puffing.
Another evening, as twilight bled into full night and fear of unseen eyes prickled her neck, she tried something more... delicate.
She had found a small thicket of low shrubs, their branches forming a crude canopy if she curled just right. It wasn't much, but it was cover.
Crouched inside, listening to the forest deepen, she pressed her hand lightly to the ground.
"Hide me," she whispered—not knowing if she was speaking to moss or dirt or the quiet, watching consciousness that now lived just beyond her awareness.
Her other hand drifted up to brush a leaf above her head.
She pulled on the ember, just a little, splitting its flow—part down, into the earth, part up, into the air hugging tight to the thicket.
The power didn't like splitting.
It tugged, trying to rush one way or the other.
She gritted her teeth.
"Please," she whispered, sweat breaking on her brow despite the chill. "Just... this once. Both."
The air around the thicket grew... thicker.
The scent of damp leaf and earth intensified, as if the space inside the shrub was suddenly *more* of itself—stronger, richer.
The ground buzzed faintly.
Her own scent, sharp with fear and sweat, seemed to... blur.
Not disappear.
Bleed into the background.
Like ink spread thin over already-dark paper.
Footsteps approached not long after.
Light ones. Careless. Another rogue, perhaps, or some other wolf wandering without a pack's escort.
Luna held her breath.
The steps slowed as they neared her thicket.
Paused.
She felt rather than saw the presence just outside—the wild, tangy musk of unwashed wolf, the restless shift of weight.
A sniffing sound, short and dismissive.
"Just an old den," a low voice muttered. "Empty."
The footsteps moved on.
Luna did not move for a long time.
When she finally let go of the ember, releasing its tenuous split, she sagged, limbs boneless with relief and fatigue.
She hadn't vanished.
But for a brief moment, the world had looked elsewhere.
Each of these tiny acts—holding a drop, stirring air, stilling mud, thickening shadow—was a thread.
Alone, they were fragile.
Together, slowly, they wove something like control.
She failed often.
Sometimes the water splashed in her face instead of freezing.
Sometimes the breath of wind she'd meant to send outward whipped back into her eyes, stinging them with grit.
Once, trying to firm the slippery stones in a narrow crossing, she pulled too hard and the earth bucked under her, sending her sprawling into the shallows.
She surfaced sputtering, cursing, hair plastered to her face, mud in her teeth.
"Maybe you were wrong," she told the empty air, half-glaring up at the hidden moon. "Maybe you picked the wrong runt."
The ember in her chest did not sulk.
It pulsed with simple insistence.
Try again.
She did.
Days folded into one another.
Her world narrowed to three sharp imperatives: *eat, move, practice.*
She ate what she could—roots, berries, the occasional scrawny rabbit if she managed to set a crude snare just right. Once, shame-faced and near delirious, she stole a strip of cured meat left unwisely unattended on the edge of a rogue camp she skirted at a distance, the guilt burning even as the salt hit her starving tongue.
She moved because to stop was to invite cold and teeth.
And she practiced because the alternative was to remain small. A leaf on the surface of a river, instead of the current shaping its path.
Power stirring within needed to be courted like a shy animal and respected like a dangerous one.
Sometimes, when she pressed her hand to the ground, the hum of the earth came gladly.
Sometimes it felt... irritated.
*Not now,* it seemed to say, in sensations rather than words. *Too much. You are not the only thing that needs moving.*
In those moments, she let go.
She was learning that forcing the world bent did not work.
Asking, aligning her will with what the soil or the water already wanted to do—that had a better chance.
She remembered the Goddess' words in the silver-space under the vast moon:
*You are a wolf of the world. Of root and storm. Of the place where my light touches earth and refuses to leave.*
She began to notice where that light lingered.
Places where moss grew thicker, springs bubbled clearer, the air tasted... sweeter.
She gravitated to those places when she could, practicing there.
In one such hollow, where a thin sheet of water slid down a rock face into a shallow pool, she stood with her feet submerged to the ankles, her breath steaming faintly in the chill.
The water flowed around her skin, numbing, insistent.
"Listen," she told herself.
Not to her hunger.
Not to her fear.
To the water.
She closed her eyes and let her awareness stretch.
The ember rose, not as a sharp flare this time, but as a long, slow exhale moving through her bones.
She felt the pull of the stream—down, over the stone's lip, into the pool, out through a crack on the far side, onward.
Persistent.
Patient.
Unending.
She didn't try to stop it.
She didn't try to freeze it.
She imagined, instead, a hand resting on its shoulder, gently shifting it a fraction to the side.
"Just here," she murmured. "A little different. Just now."
The water shivered.
A small tongue of current veered, curling around her ankle rather than battering straight into it.
The pool's surface rippled in new patterns, little eddies forming where none had been a moment before.
She opened her eyes and watched.
"I didn't... change you," she whispered to the stream. "Just... nudged."
The water ran on, unconcerned.
But for a few heartbeats, it ran as she had *asked*.
The ember glowed warm, not drained.
That, she realized, chest tight, was the difference.
When she fought the world—forcing ice, forcing fire—it burned her. When she moved with it, just enough to direct, not control, it lent her its strength.
She had spent her whole life being pushed.
By pack hierarchy.
By Selene's sharp tongue.
By duty, by hunger, by the invisible weight of being unwelcome.
Out here, no one pushed *for* her.
If she wanted to move, she had to learn to push and pull with things far older than pack rules.
She slept better on nights after practice, even when her body ached.
Her dreams grew less jagged.
Sometimes she caught flashes of river-light, of leaves spiraling in perfect circles, of her own hand wreathed in a faint glow as she pressed it to stone.
Sometimes she felt the Goddess' presence at the edge of awareness, watching, a soft pressure like the weight of moonlight on skin.
She woke each morning with her heart beating a little steadier.
The loneliness did not vanish.
There were still moments—sudden, sharp—when the need for a familiar scent, a shared breath, a warm flank pressed against hers in sleep, became almost unbearable.
Those were the nights the howls cut deepest.
When rogue voices rose in the distance, broken and wild, something in her wolf howled back silently, throat working with no sound.
She wrapped her arms around her ribs and waited for the ache to pass.
In those moments, she almost reached along the bond to Orion.
It hummed there, a half-frayed thread, distant but unbroken.
He was still alive. Still breathing under some other sky. Sometimes his emotions flared through in muffled bursts—frustration, cold resolve, flickers of regret that were not hers.
She never pulled.
Not even on the worst nights.
"You chose your path," she whispered to the unseen bond once, huddled under a fallen log as rain drummed overhead. "And I'm... choosing mine."
The ember in her chest thrummed agreement.
Not with dismissal.
With focus.
Element by element, failure by failure, Luna was beginning to remember what her blood already knew.
She was not just a runt scavenging scraps at the edge of someone else's fire.
She was a thin, stubborn line between ice and flame, earth and air.
A place where the world itself might, one day, lean and listen.
For now, she was still mostly a girl in torn clothes, cheeks hollow, hands raw.
But under her skin, beneath every bruise and scar, power had awakened.
It turned over in its sleep when she touched water.
It opened one eye when she pressed her palm to stone.
It flicked an ear when she whispered to the wind.
And slowly, carefully, secretly, it began to answer her.