Chapter 3 - The Red Moon
By sunrise, Nora had packed one bag.
It contained three changes of clothes, a small pouch of silver coins her father had left behind, and a leather-bound journal filled with her mother's herbal recipes. The cabin was quiet, smelling faintly of dried lavender and stale tea.
Elena stood by the front door, wringing her hands, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen from a night of silent weeping.
"Where will you go, Nora?" her mother asked, her voice cracking. "The northern territories are all under Ryan's jurisdiction. If you go east, you'll hit the Frostpeak mountains. If you go west, there are rogues."
"Anywhere they don't already know what I'm supposed to be," Nora said steadily, slinging the canvas bag over her shoulder. "I'm tired of being a disappointment to people who never even bothered to know me, Mama. I'm tired of waiting for a ghost."
"Come with me," Elena pleaded. "We can leave together. To the human towns down south."
"No," Nora shook her head, a faint, sad smile touching her lips. "If you come, Ryan’s pack will hunt you down for abandoning your duties. I am nobody. They won't waste resources tracking a wolf-less outcast. I'll be safer alone."
Before her mother could argue further, Nora embraced her tightly, breathing in the familiar scent of woodsmoke and chamomile. Then, she stepped out the door before the morning sun had even crested the horizon.
She walked south.
Day after day, she put distance between herself and the Silverfrost Pack. Her human legs ached, her feet blistered, and her meager food supplies dwindled by the third afternoon. She foraged for berries, drank from cold mountain streams, and slept beneath the roots of fallen trees, listening to the wild sounds of the deep forest. She didn't care about the dangers. Being hunted by wild beasts seemed infinitely more appealing than living another day under the crushing weight of Ryan’s pity and rejection.
On the fourth night, the world changed.
Nora had made camp in a hidden hollow deep within the uncharted southern woods—a place the pack maps marked as dead territory, rumored to be cursed.
As midnight approached, the sky didn't darken into indigo. Instead, a strange, suffocating pressure settled over the forest. Nora woke up gasping for air.
She staggered out of her makeshift bed of leaves, looking up at the sky.
The moon wasn't silver. It was blood-red. A deep, violent crimson that cast an eerie, apocalyptic glow over the entire canopy.
"No..." Nora whimpered, collapsing to her hands and knees as a searing, white-hot agony erupted inside her bones.
It felt as though every single bone in her body was snapping simultaneously. She screamed, her voice tearing through her throat until it was raw and hoarse. The pain was beyond anything humanly imaginable—it was a biological rebellion, a cellular explosion that felt like her soul was being ripped out and replaced with molten iron.
She arched her back, clawing at the dirt, her fingernails breaking off as thick, dark soil filled her palms.
What is happening to me? she thought wildly, her vision blurring into a haze of crimson and black. Am I dying?
May you like
No. She wasn't dying.
She was waking up.
