Luna Lost

The Legacy

Chapter 12 — The Legacy

Long before Luna’s father learned that wolves were monsters, humans and werewolves had lived beside one another. They shared settlements, traded goods, worked the same land and raised families within the same communities. The wolves spent most of their lives as humans because, essentially, that was what they were. Human. The wolf was another part of them, something carried in their blood and passed through their families.

People knew which bloodlines carried the ability to shift. It wasn’t hidden, and it wasn’t always feared. In many places, it was respected. Wolves could travel farther, heal faster and survive injuries that would kill an ordinary human. Their heightened senses made them exceptional trackers and hunters, while their strength made them valuable protectors.

Humans offered skills the wolves didn’t possess in return. There were friendships between them, marriages, children born from families whose histories became so intertwined that no one particularly cared where human ended and wolf began. For generations, coexistence wasn’t an achievement. It was simply life.

Then some of the wolves began to believe being different made them better.

They were stronger. Faster. Harder to kill. They could hear conversations humans whispered and follow trails humans couldn’t see. They could become creatures powerful enough to tear an ordinary man apart. Why, they began to ask, should creatures with those advantages live by rules created for weaker men?

Most wolves wanted nothing to do with them. It didn’t matter. History rarely remembered the ones who wanted peace as clearly as it remembered the ones who spilled blood.

The rebellious wolves began taking what they wanted. Food at first, then land and homes. Those who resisted were threatened, beaten or killed. Some of the peaceful wolves fought against their own kind, while others tried desperately to remain outside the conflict, believing the violence would eventually burn itself out.

Instead, humans learned to fight back.

The first hunters weren’t raised to hate wolves. They were ordinary people trying to survive them. They studied the creatures attacking their settlements and learned how to track them, recognize transformations and restrain bodies far stronger than their own. They discovered the effects of silver and developed weapons and fighting techniques specifically designed to compensate for the advantages wolves possessed. Some peaceful wolves even helped them.

But wars rarely stayed clean.

A hunter killed the wrong wolf. A wolf retaliated. A human family was slaughtered in revenge and another pack was blamed. Someone’s father died. Someone’s child disappeared. Each death became justification for the next until, eventually, dangerous wolves became simply wolves, and human defenders became hunters.

Generations passed until almost no one remembered that they had once lived together at all.

Luna’s father was born into one of those hunter families. By the time he was old enough to understand the stories, there were names in his family journals stretching back hundreds of years. Men and women who had tracked rogues through forests, defended settlements and died protecting people they loved. Their weapons were passed down beside their names, and their sacrifices became sacred.

He was eight the first time his father knocked him down hard enough that he couldn’t breathe. He remembered dirt against his cheek and blood filling his mouth where his teeth had cut his lip. Mostly, he remembered looking up and seeing his father standing over him.

“Get up.”

His arms buckled beneath him. “I can’t.”

“A wolf won’t care.”

His mother watched from several feet away. She didn’t intervene or tell her husband he had gone too far. His father simply waited.

“Get up.”

So he did.

That was how he learned love. Pain made you stronger. Fear made you careless. Weakness got you killed. Family duty came before what you wanted. His parents weren’t cruel for the sake of cruelty; they were preparing their son to survive the only world they understood.

By twelve, he could track through dense forest without breaking a branch beneath his boots. By fourteen, he recognized prints, territory markings and the early signs of transformation. By sixteen, he could clean and use every weapon his family owned.

When he was tired, his father said, “Again.” When he was hurt, his mother wrapped the injury and sent him back. When he was frightened, they reminded him that fear wouldn’t stop claws from tearing through his chest.

Again.

And he loved them for it.

Then the world began changing.

Werewolf packs became organized beneath stronger Alphas. Rogues who attacked humans were increasingly dealt with by their own kind. Packs established laws forbidding unnecessary violence against humans, and quiet agreements began forming between communities that had spent generations avoiding one another.

Attacks decreased. Hunters became less necessary. Some families celebrated that.

His didn’t.

“A wolf is a wolf,” his father told him. “It doesn’t become less dangerous because someone taught it manners.”

Luna’s father believed him because the alternative forced him to confront questions he didn’t want to answer. If hunters were no longer necessary, what had his family sacrificed everything for? What had generations of bloodshed meant? Why had he surrendered his childhood to surviving a war everyone suddenly wanted to pretend was over?

Some hunter families abandoned the tradition entirely. Their children went to university, old weapons disappeared into storage and journals collected dust. Others began calling families like his outdated. Some called them extremists.

He hated that word. Those people hadn’t seen what he had seen. They hadn’t learned the names. They hadn’t bled for any of it.

Then he met Luna’s mother.

She didn’t fall in love with a monster. She fell in love with a protector. He was strong, confident and fiercely loyal. He checked doors before bed and noticed exits whenever they entered a room. If someone she loved needed help, he appeared before they finished asking. He made her feel safe.

Eventually, he showed her the journals, the weapons and the scars. Then he told her about the wolves. She could have left, but she didn’t. She listened. She learned. Eventually, she trained beside him.

She believed him when he said everything he did was about protecting people because, back then, it was.

When Luna was born, he held his daughter and saw every generation that had come before him. Legacy stopped being a word written inside old books. It became tiny fingers wrapped around his thumb.

He imagined teaching her everything his parents had taught him, only differently. He wouldn’t be as hard on her. He would prepare Luna without frightening her. She would understand the responsibility without carrying the weight he had.

Then Luna was bitten.

She had been so small. He remembered blood running down her arm, her little body shaking against him and the crescent-shaped wound beneath her wrist. A wolf had touched his daughter, and every lesson he had ever learned screamed the same thing.

Find it.

Kill it.

But Luna’s wound behaved strangely. The scar changed, barely enough that anyone else would have noticed, but he did. He watched it obsessively and searched journals written by relatives who had been dead for centuries.

Nothing matched.

Eventually, desperation drove him somewhere his father would have considered unthinkable.

To the shaman.

The old man examined Luna’s wrist for what felt like an eternity, turning her little arm beneath the light before finally looking at her father.

“Do not fear what has begun.”

His stomach dropped. “What has begun?”

“Not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“When the time comes, she will understand.”

He stepped closer. “I asked what happened to my daughter.”

The shaman’s expression remained calm. “Not yet.”

He hated those words. He would hate them for years because a father couldn’t protect his child from something he didn’t understand.

So he did the only thing he knew.

He prepared her.

Balance became games. Games became lessons. Lessons became training. As Luna grew older and the questions surrounding her scar remained unanswered, the training became harder.

Whenever Luna fell, an old voice returned from somewhere inside him.

Get up.

Whenever she complained, whenever she became afraid, whenever she wanted to stop, the answer was the same.

Again.

He told himself he wasn’t becoming his father. He was protecting his daughter. There was a difference.

There had to be.

But as the years passed, the reasons tangled together until even he couldn’t separate them. Was he training Luna because she carried hunter blood? Because a wolf had marked her? Because the shaman’s words terrified him? Or because somewhere beneath all of it, he still believed the world was foolish for trusting wolves again?

Protection became fear. Fear became duty. Duty became control.

Years later, when Luna stood across from him demanding to know what he had prepared her for, he saw suspicion in her eyes. He heard the accusation when she asked if he was lying, and he did what generations of his family had done whenever fear threatened to interfere with duty.

He raised the staff.

“Again.”

Because he loved his daughter. He had always loved his daughter. And if love meant preparing someone to survive whatever might eventually come for them, then every bruise, every secret, every exhausted muscle and every unanswered question had been worth it.

At least, that was what he needed to believe.