Cassie stood at the woods' edge, shivering as the cold winter wind wrapped around her cloak. Her fingers clasped the twisted trunk of a tree, holding her, standing her up as the pine and earth-swaddled snow smell rolled around her. Greyer Pack lands. Lands she had sworn to herself she would never set foot in again. Lands she once called home.
She looked ahead, the faint outline of the great Northern ridge visible in the distance. There, across the river, the ancestral lands began. Her lands. If not by title, then by fate.
"I won’t run anymore," she whispered. “If I’m cursed to walk this line between light and shadow… then I’ll choose the fire.”
Mia’s words from the night before echoed in her head:
"There’s power in your blood, Cassie. Power you’ve tried to forget. But you’re waking up
