*Flashback*
Three months, and she hadn't shifted.
She knew it was wrong. She could feel it in the gap between herself and Sable — not a silence, exactly, but a distance. The wolf was there. Present. Aurelia could feel her in every spar, every drill, every moment when instinct fired faster than thought. Sable's reflexes lived in her human body like muscle memory, like a language she could speak but only in translation.
But the wolf wouldn't come forward. And Aurelia wouldn't ask her to.
She knew why. They both knew why. The last time Sable had been fully present — fully *herself*, four legs and fur and the raw, unmediated experience of being a wolf — she had been dying in a canyon with the Maw's teeth in her neck. The shift had become a door with something terrible on the other side, an
