"Where one beast hunts, the pack waits. The lone flame that survives the first strike rarely escapes the second." , from Field Notes of the Broken Frontier.
The howls came again.
Not one. Many.
They rose in layers, overlapping, reverberating through the trunks until the forest itself seemed to tremble. It was not mere sound but fracture, like cracks spreading across glass, threatening to shatter the world in pieces. Deep, mournful, ravenous. The kind of howls that stripped courage from bone, that made even the roots seem to recoil into the soil.
Leo pressed his back against the cedar, breath ragged, ears straining. He tried to count them, to separate the cries from one another. Three? Four? No, more. Too many. A chorus rolling across ridges and valleys, a tide of hunger given voice.
The wolf he had faced was not alone.
