Winter in Nightfall didn’t end so much as change shape.
The snow didn’t vanish; it just got thinner at the edges, crusting over instead of falling fresh every night. Icicles shrank. The air bit a little less deep. Somewhere under the frozen skin of the forest, water started moving again.
Life in the pack shifted with it.
Patrols pushed farther. Training drills went longer. The pups, no longer limited by waist‑high drifts, became even more impossible to keep indoors. Aria discovered that “pup duty” in early thaw meant chasing small, muddy wolves away from flooding streams and half‑melted ponds.
She also discovered that she didn’t mind.
She’d been in Nightfall long enough now that the hall no longer felt like a guest house. Her room smelled like her: pine, smoke, ink, faint traces of th
