The Shadow Pack was not supposed to exist.
Whispers of it traveled in half-truths and broken lullabies. A pack that had defied the moon, turned their backs on the goddess, and vanished into the dark folds of the Rogue Lands. Parents warned pups of their cruelty. Elders claimed their blood had blackened with betrayal. No one dared speak of them outside shadowed corners.
But Luna found them.
Or they found her.
It began with a scent.
Faint. Bitter. Like smoke that had once been sacred.
She caught it on the wind while gathering wild gingerroot near a cliffside ravine. It wasn't animal. Not rot. Not warg.
Wolf.
But wrong.
Luna rose slowly, nostrils flared, the hairs on her arms standing.
A second later, the wind shifted—and she felt it.
A presence. Cold. Ancient. Watching.
She turned, and there he stood.
A man draped in tattered black leathers, his eyes sunken and rimmed in silver. No pack symbol adorned him, only a braided chain of bones around his neck. His aura was quiet. But it reeked of death.
"You walk far for one marked by the moon," he said softly.
Luna's hand tensed near her belt, fingers grazing the hilt of her blade. "Who are you?"
He tilted his head. "A question better asked of yourself, girl."
His voice was low and gravel-edged, like it had been sharpened by centuries of silence.
"You reek of bloodline old and broken," he murmured. "The kind my pack once feared. And once hunted."
She stood straighter. "I don't fear hunters anymore."
The man smirked.
"Then you've never met mine."
They came in silence—four more wolves cloaked in dusk-gray, circling her like smoke. Their steps made no sound. Their eyes glinted with a sickly gleam. None of them looked fully alive.
The man stepped forward, bowing with mock grace.
"We are what remains of the Shadow Pack," he said. "Exiled. Forgotten. Cursed."
Luna's voice did not shake. "What curse?"
He smiled.
"One born of ambition. Of pride. We tried to reach where the moon refused to shine. To bend the divine to our will." He tapped the chain of bones around his neck. "We paid with our children. With our names."
He looked at her with something like hunger.
"But then you walked through our lands. And the moon trembled."
They took her.
Not as a prisoner.
As a guest.
A test.
She was blindfolded and led through jagged stone valleys and ash plains where nothing grew. The land here groaned beneath every step, like it remembered war. Her blindfold was removed only when they reached it:
A village half-swallowed by the earth, carved into caves and cliffs. Tents of black hide flapped in unnatural wind. Fires burned blue. Wolves with hollowed cheeks and sharp eyes watched her silently from the shadows.
And yet… none attacked.
The elder, the man who had first spoken, led her to a broken altar.
A slab of obsidian etched with ancient runes. At its center: a single claw, preserved in stone.
"The claw of the last true moonborn," the elder said. "Torn from her before the curse was sealed."
Luna stared at it.
The claw shimmered faintly—blue flame licking its edges.
Familiar.
"I've seen that in a dream," she whispered.
"Of course you have," the elder said. "Your blood remembers."
They tested her with silence.
With stories.
With pain.
She was shown the graves of their lost children, each one twisted by the curse—those born without spirit, without sense. Born cold. She heard their songs—low chants sung in dying tongues. She was given food made of root and ash, water drawn from beneath the bones of the mountain.
And always, the same question:
"Do you believe your light makes you safe?"
To each one, Luna answered with stillness.
But inside, something cracked.
She was light. And fire. And ice.
But the Shadow Pack had once been those things too.
Before they fell.
Before they were forsaken.
On the third night, she was taken to a sacred spring—black and still.
The elder motioned her forward.
"Look."
She did.
Her reflection was not her own.
Not just.
In the water, her face merged with others. A woman with glowing scars. A child with eyes rimmed in frost. A warrior cloaked in fire. They shifted through her, like masks worn by one soul across centuries.
Then one image held:
A wolf—white as bone, surrounded by a swirling eclipse.
"Who is she?" Luna asked.
The elder's voice was hollow.
"She was meant to destroy us."
Luna turned to him. "Did she?"
"No," he said. "She became us."
That night, she dreamed again.
But not of the Moon Goddess.
Of the curse.
A great beast rose from a shattered mountain, eyes blind and weeping, mouth open in a soundless howl. It swallowed the stars. It wore her face.
And the moon turned its back.
She woke screaming, her fingers sparking with silver light.
The next morning, the elder took her to the edge of their territory.
"You are not one of us," he said. "But the blood remembers."
She nodded slowly.
"You walk two paths now. One leads back to vengeance. One leads beyond it."
"What lies beyond vengeance?" she asked.
He met her eyes, something sorrowful and sharp behind them.
"Forgiveness."
Then he turned.
"May the goddess never forget what she made when she made you."
As Luna crossed out of the Shadow Pack's land, the forest bloomed again—trees green, air warm.
But something inside her had changed.
She carried their sorrow now.
Their curse.
Their warning.
She might have been born of the moon…
…but even the moon had shadows.
And she had walked through them.