Its name was Asha.
It told me this slowly, the way it told me everything, not from uncertainty but from the particular difficulty of a voice that had not been used in a very long time, relearning the mechanics of speech. Like a river finding a channel that had been dry for decades and pushing through the accumulated silt of it, word by careful word.
Asha. The first moon-born healer. Not the last one before me, the first. The original. Born before the pack system existed in its current form, before the territories were drawn and the Alphas established and the hierarchies calcified into the shape they wore now. Born at the beginning of something that had been running for centuries and would, apparently, end with me.
Or not end. Continue. In a different form.
She had existed in the Betwee
