The Rogue Lands did not care that Luna could nudge a drop of water or coax a breath of wind.
They cared that she was small, alone, and edible.
They tested her anyway.
It began with hunger.
Not the steady gnaw she had carried for weeks, but a sharp, mind-clouding desperation that hit after three days of scarce forage and no successful snares.
Winter crouched at the edges of the forest now. Nights bit harder. Small creatures moved quickly, frantic to stash what they could. The easy berries of late summer were long gone. Roots, if she could find them, were thin, woody.
Her body, already lean, burned itself for fuel.
Her reflection in still pools no longer showed the round-cheeked kitchen girl Moonshadow had ignored. Hollowed eyes stared back instead, cheekbones cutting sharp angles under taut skin.
On the fourth dawn, weak and dizzy, she stumbled out of a low hollow to the edge of a clearing and froze.
A deer grazed there.
Young, its antlers just buds under its fur. Its coat was thick, patchy with winter growth. It tore at the tough grass with quick, hungry bites, hooves silent on the frosted ground.
Luna's stomach clenched so hard she thought she might be sick.
Years in the pack kitchens had taught her how to carve meat from a carcass, not how to bring the carcass down.
Packs hunted in formation—two or three wolves driving, others flanking, others waiting to hamstring or go for the throat.
She had none of that.
She had Elia's short knife.
She had a half-built body and a coal in her chest.
"And you said you wanted to be more," she muttered bitterly under her breath. "More than an omega. More than a runt. More than hungry. Prove it."
Her wolf shifted restlessly inside her, scenting prey.
She had not shifted since leaving Moonshadow.
Part fear—rogue wolves were more likely to fight or claim a lone shifted female.
Part instinct—her human hands were better for manipulating the small, careful nudges of power she'd begun to coax from the world.
But right now, her human body was... insufficient.
She took a slow breath.
"Just this once," she whispered to her own bones. "We need meat. We need... teeth."
The ember stirred in agreement.
She stepped back behind the cover of a pine trunk, closed her eyes, and let herself fall.
The shift came, as it always had, with a flash of pain and a rush of relief.
Bones shortened and lengthened in dizzying sequences. Skin rippled, sprouting fur that prickled as it broke through. Hands curled into paws, fingers fusing, nails blackening into claws.
Her world resettled lower to the ground.
Smell exploded.
The deer's scent, which had been a faint, tempting line in the air before, was now a *storm*—warm body, damp fur, the faint iron of blood beneath skin.
Her own wolf-heart hammered.
The forest around her sharpened into edges and motion and layers of scent.
She stepped forward on four paws, muscles bunching and stretching in old, familiar patterns.
She was still smaller than most wolves she'd grown up with, her coat a muted mixture of ashy grey and pale cream, patchy from hard months. Scars showed through where fur had thinned.
But her eyes burned a sharp, steady silver-green.
Closer, she told herself. You have no pack to drive it to you. You *must not* miss.
She sank into a low stalk, each pawfall placed with care, keeping to patches of damp, soundless earth and soft grass.
The deer raised its head once, chewing, ears flicking.
She froze.
A light breeze drifted from it to her, not the other way.
Luck. For once.
She inched closer, muscles burning with the strain of restraint.
Twenty paces.
Fifteen.
The ember in her chest—now diffused through a wolf's frame—hummed.
She did not have time for delicate manipulations. No ice, no wind, no shift of earth.
But she could ask, even now, for a fraction more from her own body.
She reached inward, teeth gritted.
*Now,* she thought. *Please. Give me enough to run on.*
Heat pulsed through her limbs, a quick, scorching rush.
Strength flooded tired muscles.
The world narrowed to the line between her and the deer's throat.
She exploded from cover.
The deer's head snapped up, eyes rolling white.
It bolted, legs piston-fast.
Luna's paws bit into the ground.
She flew.
Underbrush blurred beneath her. Cold air burned in her lungs. Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs.
She lengthened her stride, calling on the ember again.
Not to fling outward.
To burn through her own veins.
Her body answered, surging forward with a speed she had never found in pack runs.
She gained.
Slowly.
Surely.
Her jaws opened, breath tearing from her throat in harsh pants.
Ten paces.
Five.
*Now.*
She leapt.
Her front paws hit the deer's hindquarters, claws scrabbling for purchase. Her weight was not enough to topple it outright, but it stumbled.
Her teeth closed on its flank.
Blood burst hot, metallic, over her tongue.
The deer screamed—a high, torn sound—and kicked.
Pain exploded along her ribs as a hoof connected.
She lost her grip and crashed sideways, tumbling.
World and sky spun.
She hit hard, sliding on damp leaves, ribs howling.
For a moment, blackness edged her vision.
She forced air into her lungs.
The deer staggered away, blood streaking one hindleg.
"NO," the wolf in her snarled, wordless.
Luna scrambled upright, paws slipping, sides heaving.
She called the ember again, desperate, heedless of cost.
Her muscles seized in protest.
She pushed.
The earth under her paws firmed, giving her a better launch.
She sprinted.
The deer limped now, its stride uneven, but panic lent it speed. It veered toward a stand of bracken and low, thorny bushes.
If it reached that tangle, she might lose it.
She had one more chance.
The world telescoped again.
Her heart pounded in her ears.
The ember burned, hot and bright and dangerous.
She aimed for the back of its neck.
She leapt.
This time her jaws found purchase.
Fur. Flesh.
She clamped down with all her strength, teeth closing around windpipe.
The deer bucked, wild.
Her body whipped, slammed against its shoulder.
She held on.
She felt cartilage crush.
Felt the shudder that ran through the animal's frame.
Felt its desperate, starving heart kick and falter.
It crashed to its knees.
She went with it, jaws locked.
Snow-damp earth rushed up.
Then—
Stillness.
Only their ragged breathing.
Then hers alone.
The deer's life left it in a long, rattling sigh.
Its scent changed, that subtle, awful shift from living to meat.
Luna let go, staggering back, sides heaving.
Her ribs screamed where the hoof had caught them. A warm wetness seeped down one flank—her own blood, not the deer's.
The ember in her chest guttered, faint.
She shifted back, collapsing to her knees beside the carcass, skin slick with sweat and fur clinging to her in damp patches.
Her fingers shook as she pressed them to the deer's cooling neck.
"Thank you," she whispered hoarsely.
She meant it.
To the deer. To the wild. To the wolf in her that had found enough strength, with the ember's help, to do what needed doing.
Then she reached for her knife.
It took nearly an hour, half-blind with exhaustion and pain, to dress the kill enough to drag sections of it beneath the low shelter of a nearby overhang.
Her human arms were weaker than a wolf's jaw, but more precise.
By the time she was done, she was spattered in blood, fingers numbed from cold and slick work.
The first bite of raw meat almost undid her.
Her stomach, shrunken from weeks of scarcity, cramped in protest.
But as she chewed, slow, deliberate, she felt something deep inside her uncurl.
Her muscles soaked in the protein like cracked earth drinking rain.
The ember flickered.
Warmed.
When she finally crawled into the overhang's shadow, ribs banded in strips of torn shirt, she fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
The Rogue Lands did not stop testing her because she'd won a single kill.
They simply changed the questions.
Three days later, with strips of deer meat drying on a makeshift rack and a little extra strength in her limbs, she woke to the sound of thunder.
Not the high, distant rumble of a summer storm.
This was closer. Lower. A deep, continuous growl that seemed to come from the earth itself.
Her eyes snapped open.
The overhang vibrated faintly against her back.
For a wild moment, she thought some enormous beast must be dragging itself through the forest.
Then she heard it: the crack and crash of stone shifting, of trees groaning under sudden strain.
A rockslide.
Her heart lurched into a gallop.
She scrambled out from under the overhang just as a shower of small stones pattered down where her head had been.
Above, the narrow ravine she'd camped near shuddered.
Chunks of earth tumbled from its lip, clattering down.
Larger rocks followed, bounding and smashing into each other, sending sprays of dirt into the air.
"Move," she gasped to herself. "Move, MOVE."
Her legs obeyed before her thoughts had fully caught up.
She sprinted away from the ravine, deeper into the trees, dodging trunks and fallen logs.
Behind her, a huge slab of stone broke free with a roar.
The ground shook under her feet.
A spray of pebbles peppered her back.
Her breath tore at her throat.
A tree ahead of her lurched as its roots pulled from the shaking earth.
She skidded to a halt, nearly slamming into its trunk.
It toppled.
Straight toward her.
She threw herself sideways.
Too slow.
Instinct, honed in recent weeks of coaxing and pleading with the world, flared.
She reached, not with hands but with the core of her, toward the earth beneath the tree.
*Wait,* she begged. *Just a heartbeat. Not on me.*
The ember in her chest surged, burning white-hot.
The soil under the falling trunk heaved.
Not enough to stop its momentum.
Enough to twist it a fraction.
The massive oak crashed down barely a hand's-breadth from where she lay, branches whipping, a spray of leaves and broken twigs raining over her.
The wind of its fall slapped her face.
The ground shook again, then settled into a thrumming stillness.
Dust hung in the air, dulling the light.
Her lungs heaved, drawing in gritty breaths.
Her ears rang.
Slowly, cautiously, she rolled onto her back and stared up at the fallen tree.
Its main trunk lay angled, its bulk blocked from crushing her entirely by the small, sudden hump of packed earth she'd forced up.
Her heart hammered.
She reached out with a trembling hand and touched the raised soil.
It crumbled under her fingers, already beginning to relax back into its old shape.
"Thank you," she whispered hoarsely.
Her gratitude went in three directions at once: to the earth, to the ember, to whatever shard of desperate will in her had found the right thread to tug.
Her ribs ached from the earlier deer hunt. Now her shoulders and back felt bruised from her dive.
Pain layered on pain.
Cold seeped into her sweat-damp clothes.
She pushed herself upright, every muscle complaining.
The ravine she'd camped near was half-collapsed now, one side shorn away, rocks piled at its base in jagged heaps.
Her old overhang was gone, crushed under tons of stone.
"If I'd slept longer..." she murmured.
She hadn't.
She was here.
Alive.
The Rogue Lands had dropped a hill on her head and she had not died.
*Because you asked.*
The thought didn't feel like her own.
It felt like a whisper from that coal behind her sternum.
She blew out a shaky breath.
"Fine," she muttered. "One to me, Rogue Lands."
They did not take the taunt kindly.
The next trial came with teeth.
She smelled them before she saw them.
She was picking her way along a narrow game trail that skirted the edge of a marsh, boots squelching, when a sour, musky stench crawled up her nose.
Not wolf.
Something lower to the ground, heavier, rank.
Wild boar.
A sounder's worth.
The hairs on the back of her neck prickled.
Boar were no joke—even to wolves in a hunting party. Their tusks could gut a careless hunter. Their bulk turned charges into battering rams.
Alone, on foot, with her powers still a set of uncertain strings? She wanted no part of them.
She slipped off the trail, moving as quietly as she could into the thicker undergrowth. The ground here was a mat of roots and dead leaves, sucking at her boots.
Grunts drifted through the trees.
Closer.
She tasted panic, sharp and metallic.
*Hide.*
She remembered the night in the thicket, how she had thickened the air around her to make her scent bleed into the background.
She crouched behind a fallen log, heart hammering, and pressed one hand to the soft earth, the other to the underside of a low branch.
"Hide me," she breathed, once more.
The ember responded, rising in a slow, steady wave.
She split it carefully—down and up, soil and air.
Her muscles trembled with the strain.
The smells around her intensified: damp wood, fungal rot, the faint sweetness of decaying leaves. They pressed into her, as if the world were laying a blanket of itself over her skin.
Hooves squelched nearby.
A massive, dark shape moved between the trunks.
The lead boar's snout snuffled, plowing through the leaf litter, seeking roots.
Others followed, smaller, weaving in and out of sight.
One sow came so close Luna could see the bristles on her flank, each tipped with mud.
The boar's small, dark eyes passed over Luna's hiding place.
Its ears flicked.
It snorted once, loudly, and moved on.
The sounder trundled past, grunting, tearing up the ground with uncaring force.
When their scent finally faded, Luna sagged, sweat cooling on her skin despite the chill.
She'd held the ember's split for what felt like an eternity.
When she let go, her head swam, black dots popping at the edges of her vision.
She sank to the dirt, chest heaving.
"Two," she panted, though a laugh at the count nearly turned into a sob. "Two to me."
The Rogue Lands did not keep score.
But she did.
It gave her something to hold onto as days blurred into challenges she hadn't wanted and victories she hadn't thought herself capable of.
Sometimes the trials were... quieter.
An icy rain that soaked her through and dragged her temperature down, leaving her fumbling with numbed fingers to coax warmth from the coal in her core.
A night of howls, far too close, that forced her to test how small she could make herself in a pocket of rock and shadow.
A stretch of barren scrub where the only water lay in thin films on stones, demanding the most delicate coaxing to gather enough to drink.
Each time, she reached.
For roots she could not see, for currents she could barely feel, for the heat and breath and patience of the world itself.
Each time, something answered.
Not always as she wanted.
Rarely as quickly as she'd liked.
But enough.
On an evening when the sky burned red along the horizon and the air hummed with an undefined expectation, she crested a low rise and saw, ahead of her, the first signs that she was not the only one struggling to survive this stretch of wild.
Smoke.
Thin, grey, rising above the tree line.
Not from a lightning-scarred trunk.
From a campfire.
Voices drifted with it—rough, shouting laughter.
Rogues.
Her body went cold and hot all at once.
Part of her—the part that had once pressed against other omegas in cramped sleeping quarters, sharing warmth and whispers—ached at the sound of others.
The wiser part tightened her grip on caution.
She dropped into a crouch, slipping behind a screen of scrub, and peered through the branches.
The camp lay in a shallow bowl in the land, ringed by trees. A makeshift lean-to sagged on one side, its frame of scavenged branches patched with stitched-together hides. A fire burned low in the center of a churned patch of dirt.
Four wolves in human form lounged near it.
Luna recognized one of them with a small jolt.
Not from any true meeting.
From Elia's curses.
Darrin. Broken-nosed, shoulders thick, a jagged scar slashing across his chin. He sat with his back to a tree, sharpening a knife the length of Luna's forearm.
Beside him, a narrow-faced female with cropped hair tended a blackened pot, stirring its contents with a stick.
The other two—Kellan, the nervous young one she'd glimpsed at the stream days ago, and a wiry, tattooed man she didn't know—were trading blows in a brief, vicious spar, fists thudding against flesh.
This was not a starving, desperate pack of one.
This was a knot of rogues who had carved a temporary claim into the land, teeth and knives saying *for now, this is ours.*
Her heart thudded.
She could go around.
It would cost her hours, possibly a day.
Her legs ached at the thought.
Her remaining dried meat weighed light in her pack.
Her water flask sloshed with only a mouthful.
In the center of the camp, beside the fire, lay a bundled pile of something—cloth, leather.
Supplies.
*If you wanted to survive,* a cold, practical voice in her whispered, *you'd take.*
She didn't move.
The Goddess had woken something in her other than power.
Conscience.
She would not steal lightly from those as tenuous on the earth as she was.
But if they hunted her instead?
Her jaw tightened.
She crawled backward, keeping low, every sense stretched.
She would circle. Skirt their edge. Trust her feet and the coal in her chest more than the flickering temptation of someone else's fire.
The path she took instead drew her straight into the next trial.
The land here rose and fell in steep, sudden swells, as if some ancient hand had clenched it and then let go.
As she picked her way along a narrow ridge to avoid the camp, a bank of dark clouds rolled in faster than seemed natural.
The wind shifted, cold and sharp.
She smelled rain.
Then she tasted something else on the air.
Metal.
Ozone.
Lightning.
Her skin prickled.
The world hushed for a beat.
Then the sky split.
Light—white-blue and blinding—speared down, smashing into a lone, tall pine only fifty paces to her left.
The crack of impact hit a heartbeat later, so loud it made her teeth ache.
Fire blossomed along the tree's trunk.
In an instant, it leaped from branch to branch, hungry.
Flames licked outward, tasting at neighboring trees, at dry needles piled thick on the forest floor.
Her heart lurched.
"Not again," she rasped, remembering the over-eager flames under the rock shelf. "Not like this. Not *this* big."
Wind, drawn by the sudden heat, gusted.
It fed the fire.
Smoke billowed, thick and choking.
One tree ignited.
Then another.
A line of flame began to crawl across the forest, rolling low over the needle bed, reaching for deadfall and scrub.
She could run.
Turn and flee the direction the fire spread.
Part of her screamed at her to do exactly that.
But her path—her only clear way around the rogue camp—lay directly ahead, where the first tongues of fire were already licking.
And the land itself... keened.
Not in words.
In sensation.
Heat. Dryness. A desperate, crackling thirst for something to quench and cool.
No packs would ride in with wet blankets.
No warriors would form a line to cut firebreaks.
It was just her.
Her and a coal in her chest.
Her and whatever fraction of the world might listen to a runt who had chosen to walk away from every safety.
Her and a stretch of forest about to turn into an inferno.
She swallowed hard, throat burning with smoke.
"All right," she croaked to the sky, to the Goddess, to herself. "You want to see what I can do? Here. Now."
She ran toward the fire.
The air was already hot enough to sting her exposed skin.
The crackle of burning needles and sap was a thousand tiny screams.
She coughed, eyes streaming.
She stopped a few paces back from the nearest line of flame—no higher than her knees yet, but racing.
The ember in her chest vibrated.
She slammed her bare feet into the dirt, toes curling, anchoring herself.
She spread her arms, palms out.
She reached.
Down.
Up.
In.
Water first.
Not from her pitiful flask—she couldn't afford that.
From the ground.
From the air.
The soil here was not bone-dry. Autumn rains had sunk into it days ago. Beneath the topmost, crisp layer lay moisture.
She dragged the ember's light down her legs, into her feet, into the soles pressing into the earth.
"Up," she rasped. "Please—up."
The power surged, force ripping through her in a way that made her cry out.
The ground heaved.
Not violently this time—slowly, as if something inside it was... exhaling.
Dark patches bloomed in the dry soil ahead of her.
Water—thin, but real—seeped up, drawn from deeper layers by her desperate pull.
Steam hissed as it met the advancing fire.
The flames slowed, confronted with damp fuel.
Not enough.
The ember buzzed wild, wanting to spend itself in every direction at once.
Her vision swam.
She yanked part of it upward instead, into her chest, into her arms.
Air.
The sky above boiled with stormclouds, but the rain held back, as if the clouds were stubbornly clinging to their hoard.
She lifted her face, sucked in a breath of scorched air, and screamed.
Not words.
A howl.
It tore out of her, ripping the smoke and heat, laced with something older than language.
*Give.*
The wind answered.
It slammed into her from behind, nearly knocking her forward into the fire.
She planted her feet, dug into the dampening soil, and *bent*.
She imagined her arms as channels.
Her body as a reed through which the wind could blow.
Not to fan the flames outward—gods, not that.
Sideways.
She leaned her weight, focusing the ember's flow not just *into* the air, but into shaping its path.
The gust split.
One stream of wind crashed into the leading edge of the fire, slapping it back against already-burning trunks, starving its forward crawl.
Another stream rode above the flames, raking smoke upward, away from Luna's stinging eyes.
The strain of it made her whole body quiver.
Her teeth ached with it.
Her knees threatened to buckle.
Her nose bled—she tasted iron, hot and sharp, at the back of her throat.
"Hold," she rasped. "Just... a little... longer."
Water seeped.
Wind hammered.
Fire snapped and hissed and flared.
For a few terrible, glorious minutes, she was nothing but a conduit: a thin, shaking line through which the world's own forces flowed, nudged, redirected.
Then the clouds above broke.
As if her howl had finally cracked something open, fat, icy drops began to fall.
At first, only a few—sizzling when they hit flame.
Then more.
Within heartbeats, sheets of cold rain slammed down, hissing and roaring, smothering low fire, beating new sparks back into submission.
Luna's legs gave out.
She collapsed to her knees, then to her hands, palms sinking into mud that hadn't been mud a second before.
Rain soaked her hair, plastering it to her skull.
Smoke and steam curled around her.
Her chest heaved.
The ember lay quiet, emptied.
Not extinguished.
Banked.
The flames dwindled, their hungry crackle replaced by the drum of water and the creak of cooling trunks.
A few trees still burned in their crowns, high up, but the forward rush of the ground fire had been broken.
"Three," she whispered, voice a rasp, lips barely moving. "Three, Rogue Lands."
Lightning flashed elsewhere, distant now.
Thunder rolled, softer.
She knelt there in the rain, shaking so hard her teeth knocked, hardly feeling the cold over the vast, echoing emptiness where the power had surged through her.
Every part of her hurt.
Muscles.
Head.
Bones.
She had the wild thought that she might just... tip forward, face into the mud, and sleep and never rise.
But the image of the fire, and her own scream, and the way the world had *moved* because she'd asked—it burned brighter than any pain.
She lifted her head.
The air tasted cleaner now—wet earth, scorched bark, new rain.
She dragged herself to her feet, stumbling.
Her knees threatened to buckle.
She caught herself on a blackened sapling, bark crumbling under her fingers.
"Still here," she croaked to the storm. "Still... walking."
The Rogue Lands' answer came in the form of a sudden, sharp howl—far away, but clear, cutting through the patter of rain.
Not a pack chorus.
A single voice.
High.
Lonely.
Her wolf's ears perked instinctively, every muscle tensing.
She stiffened.
Answering would be foolish.
It would mark her.
But the pull of it, deep in her gut, was nearly irresistible.
She ground her teeth, nails biting into burnt bark.
"No," she whispered. "Not yet. I'm not... ready. I'm not *done* learning how not to die."
The howl faded.
Silence, broken only by rainfall, settled again.
She moved.
Slow, staggering, but forward.
The Rogue Lands were not done with her.
They would never be done.
They would keep throwing hunger and stone and tusk and flame at her until they either swallowed her or accepted that she would not go down easily.
She had walked away from a pack that named her nothing.
She had watched ice bloom at her touch, felt wind split around her fingers, dragged water up from hidden places in the earth, and shouted at a storm until it listened.
She was bruised and bloodied and half-starved.
She was also, in every slow, agonizing step, becoming exactly what the Moon Goddess had whispered she could be.
A creature of root and storm.
A wolf of the world.
The Rogue Lands tested her.
She did not always win.
But she did not break.
Not now.
Not yet.
Not with power stirring beneath her hurt, answering—more and more each day—when she called.