One Year Later
The messenger arrived at dawn, exhausted from running three territories without rest.
"The Eastern Packs request aid," she gasped out. "Mass emergence. Hundreds of wolves manifesting shadow-touch at once. They don't know what to do."
I looked at Marcus across the breakfast table where Luna was teaching her baby brother—yes, brother, a surprise that still made my heart full—how to catch shadow-butterflies.
"Go," he said simply. "Take the integration team. I'll hold things here."
This was our life now. Racing to packs where the old ways were crumbling, teaching what we'd learned through pain and triumph. Sometimes we succeeded. Sometimes we could only minimize the damage as wolves chose fear over growth.
But change was spreading. Unstoppable now.
"Can I come?" Luna asked, though at four-and-a-half she already knew the answer.
"When you're older, little moon. For now, your job is teaching Sol not to eat shadows."
Our son—barely a year old—giggled and tried to grab another butterfly made of darkness and light. Unlike Luna's dramatic power, his gift was gentle: he made others feel safe. A healer of emotional wounds, the Silencer had proclaimed. The next evolution.
Three days later, I stood in the Eastern Pack's territory, watching their emergence unfold. It was chaos—wolves discovering suppressed gifts, shadows seeking their other halves, traditionalists fighting change.
"Show them Luna's way," I instructed our team. "Partnership, not domination. Choice, not force."
It took a week. We lost some—wolves who chose exile over evolution, shadows that dissolved rather than wait for acceptance. But more chose hope. Chose wholeness.
The Eastern Alpha, weathered and proud, finally asked the question I'd been waiting for: "How do you bear it? Feeling everything, all the time?"
"You learn that feeling everything includes joy, not just pain. That shadows dance as often as they hunger." I smiled. "And you realize that being whole—messy, complicated whole—is better than being half of yourself perfectly."
When I returned home, I found Marcus teaching combat classes to mixed groups, the Silencer offering philosophy lessons, and Luna mediating a dispute between two pups about whether shadow-puppets were "real" or not.
"Everything's real if you feel it," she declared with four-year-old certainty.
Out of the mouths of babes.