THE LUNA HE THREW AWAY

Chapter 13

“I had something I hadn’t finished yet,” he said. His voice was quieter than before, and for a moment his eyes drifted past me, focusing on nothing I could see. Whatever he'd left unsettled, it weighed on him still, shaping the silence that followed.

I waited.

“That’s it?” I said, when nothing else came.

“That’s it.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only answer I have.” He looked at me, and for once his silver eyes weren’t searching. They were just honest. “Most wolves go into the Void with nothing left. No pack, no bond, no reason to come back. The Void doesn’t kill you. It just stops giving you reasons to stay.” He paused. “I had a reason.”

“What was it?”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“I’ll tell you when you’re ready to hear it,” he said.

Something in his voice made me stop asking. I wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but I finally understood that whatever it was, he didn’t share it easily. He wasn’t avoiding the question. He was just careful. I was starting to see the difference.

I looked at the sapling I’d been bending for an hour. It was standing straight now, no sign of what I’d done to it.

“You’re haunted,” I said. Not an accusation. Just an observation.

He didn’t deny it. “Most people who’ve been in the Void are.”

“Does it go away?”

“No.” He picked up a stone and turned it in his hand. “You just get better at carrying it.”

I thought about my father. I thought about the pool, the room, and Aldric’s face staying blank when the two men walked in. I thought about the letter in my pocket. You are not a mistake. You are the correction.

I thought about carrying something for fifteen years without knowing what it was. It turned out to be grief, anger, and a bloodline I never knew I had.

“I think I’ve been doing that my whole life,” I said. “Carrying things without knowing what they were.”

Fen looked at me. “I know.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“I’m not trying to comfort you. I’m agreeing with you.” He stood up and brushed his hands off. “That doesn’t happen often, so you should appreciate it.”

I almost laughed. Almost.

“Again,” he said.

I stood up.

At the edge of the Hollow, I sensed Kael shifting his weight against the root. He was still watching, still silent. I didn’t know what to do about him being here, about him taking a bolt for me, or about how my feelings for him kept changing every time I thought I understood them. Sometimes seeing him made something in me ache, like there was a thread pulling me toward him, whether I wanted it or not. Other times, I remembered the distance between us, everything he’d hidden, and I wasn’t sure if the ache was for him or for myself. The confusion made it hard to look at him for too long.

I pushed it aside. I had a sapling to bend.

“Focus,” Fen said, not harshly.

“I am focused.”

“You’re thinking about him.”

“I’m not”

“You are. Your eyes turned sideways.” He tilted his head toward the tree line. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s also not your problem right now. Right now, your problem is that.” He pointed at the sapling.

I looked at the sapling.

I thought about will. I pictured a current, not a flood. I focused on what I really wanted—not the anger, not the grief, not the years of being told I was nothingjust the clear intention: bend.

The air shifted. The sapling bent. I held it steady and controlled, the power moving like water through a channel instead of bursting through a dam.

I held it for thirty seconds. Released it slowly.

It straightened without a tremor.

Fen was quiet for a moment.

“That,” he said, “is what it’s supposed to feel like.”

I stood there with the feeling still in my chest: not the crash, not the flood, not the wild surge from the Hall. This was different. For the first time, it felt like it belonged to me.

It scared me more than all my failures put together.

Failures had always felt like losing control. This felt like having it. And having control meant I was responsible for what I did. No more accidents. No more saying it just happened. It was just me, and the choice of what to do next.

I turned to Fen. “That’s the scary part, isn’t it? When it actually works.”

He looked at me for a moment, something shifting behind his eyes that I didn’t quite have a word for.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the terrifying part.”

Behind us, from the edge of the Hollow, Kael spoke for the first time all morning.

“She’s ready,” he said. Quietly. Not to Fen. Not to me. Just into the air, like a thing he was figuring out as he said it.

Fen didn’t look at him. “She’s getting there.”

“No.” Kael’s voice was even. “She’s ready.”

I didn’t turn around. I looked at the sapling, standing straight and unmarked, and I thought about my father in that room, refusing. And I thought about what it meant to finish something someone else started.

“Tell me what’s next,” I said to Fen.

He picked up the stone he’d been turning over and set it down on the root beside him.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we go find Cass.”

He didn’t have to say more. Cass had always been the one who could see through every riddle, the one we looked to when the path ahead was impossible to read. If anyone would know what to do next, or what this new power meant, it was Cass. Even Fen’s voice, flat as ever, carried something like hope when he said the name.