The idea of the ceremony hung over the next days like a cloud too high to touch and too heavy to ignore.
No one in Nightfall mentioned it directly after the messenger left. But Aria could feel the shape of it in the small pauses when someone said “South,” in the way a few older wolves glanced toward her and then away as if checking for cracks.
She didn’t break.
She woke early, read to pups, chopped wood — not well, but with a determination that made Mara bark out a laugh and snatch the axe from her before she lost a toe. She trained, ran the ridge loop, came back with burning lungs and frozen eyelashes.
Every time the bond twinged, she noted it like a weather report: south, ache, still alive. Then she went back to whatever she was doing.
On the third evening after the messenger, she f
