Silver moon

The Years Between the Moons

The first lesson Rowan learned after the cellar was this:

The moon always came back.

It did not matter how far he ran.

The forest learned him quickly. Roots tore at his bare feet, branches lashed his face, and thorns stitched his skin closed with blood. He ran until his lungs burned and then until they stopped burning, until breath became something mechanical and distant, like the ache in a broken bone you learn to ignore.

He did not know where he was going. He only knew he could not stop.

Behind him lay the village, already waking to rumour and rage. Ahead of him lay trees that did not ask questions.

By the time he collapsed beneath a pine heavy with frost, dawn had fully claimed the sky. Rowan curled in on himself, small again without the wolf’s borrowed strength, shivering violently. His body ached in places he did not yet have names for. His mouth tasted of copper and rot.

He pressed his fists against his eyes until stars burst behind them.

Mama, he thought, and then stopped thinking altogether.

When he woke, hunger had replaced grief.

That, too, would become familiar.

The second lesson was this:

People noticed blood.

Rowan tried towns first. He was still young enough that pity sometimes outweighed suspicion. He learned how to bow his head just so, how to cry quietly, how to say his mother had died and his father long before that. None of this was a lie. It was simply incomplete.

Some people fed him.

Some people tried to touch him.

Some people asked questions he could not answer without shaking.

And some people always eventually noticed the scars.

They noticed how quickly he healed. How dogs growled when he passed. How he flinched at the sight of chains.

When the moon came, Rowan learned to disappear.

He hid in haylofts and culverts, in abandoned wells and hollow trees. He learned that the earth itself could be used as a shield if you dug deep enough. His hands blistered and bled as he clawed at soil, scraping out shallow graves he hoped would hold him.

They never did.

The change always found him.

It did not grow gentler with time.

Bones still bent. Skin still tore. The wolf did not ease its way into him, it claimed him, with the same ruthless certainty each month. Afterwards, Rowan would wake naked and shaking, surrounded by evidence he tried not to look at too closely.

Sometimes, it was deer.

Sometimes, it was sheep.

Once, it was a man.

Rowan spent three days vomiting beside a river after that. He scrubbed his hands until the skin peeled away. He bit his own arm until the taste of himself drove out the memory of another man’s blood on his tongue.

He did not scream.

He learned not to.

The third lesson was this:

Memory was a liability.

The wolf did not care for faces. It remembered scents, fear, and movement. Rowan learned that if he held onto people too tightly, if he allowed himself to remember their voices, their kindness, and the shape of their smiles, the wolf would remember them too.

So he stopped learning names.

He stopped staying long enough to be missed.

He slept under bridges, in ditches, in barns where rats watched him with bright, intelligent eyes. He stole bread and dried meat and learned how to snare rabbits with wire and prayer. He learned to read the sky, to count the days by the ache behind his eyes and the way his dreams sharpened as the moon drew closer.

He learned to hate the quiet nights most of all.

On those nights, when the wolf slept and his body was his own, the guilt came.

It sat with him by the fire and asked him questions he could not answer.

How many?

Who will you hurt next?

How long before you stop pretending you’re human at all?

Rowan never answered.

He instead learned how to prepare.

By fifteen, he had chains.

He stole them from a blacksmith’s shed on the edge of a mining town. They were thick and heavy, meant for anchoring carts, not children. Rowan dragged them into the hills piece by piece, hiding them beneath brush until the moon swelled and brightened and left him no more time.

He wrapped the chains around himself with shaking hands, threading them through rocks and tree roots, biting back sobs as iron kissed skin.

“Hold,” he whispered. “Please.”

They did not.

The chains slowed him. That was all. They bought hours instead of minutes. When the wolf came, it tore at them with furious desperation, snapping links and ripping bark from trees. When Rowan woke, the chains lay twisted and broken around him, his wrists raw, his throat hoarse from howling.

But fewer animals died.

That felt like something.

By eighteen, he had learned to improve.

He dug pits. He wedged himself between boulders. He chained himself in caves so narrow the wolf could barely turn. He starved himself for days before the moon, hoping hunger would dull the bloodlust.

It never fully worked.

But it worked enough.

Enough to keep him alive.

Enough to keep others alive, too, most months.

Rowan stopped counting the failures.

The fourth lesson came later, and it nearly killed him.

It was this:

Kindness was not always a trap, but it was always a risk.

He was twenty when he met Tomas.

Tomas lived alone in the high country, a shepherd with more dogs than sheep and a laugh that came too easily. Rowan stumbled onto his land half-dead from fever, the moon already clawing at his insides.

Tomas fed him stew and let him sleep by the fire. He did not ask questions. He did not flinch when Rowan recoiled from touch. He simply existed in a way that felt dangerously like peace.

“You can stay,” Tomas said one night, handing Rowan a cup of weak wine. “For as long as you like.”

Rowan said nothing.

When the moon rose, he ran.

Tomas followed.

Rowan screamed at him to stop. He begged. He threatened. He lied.

Tomas did not listen.

The wolf took him before Rowan could finish the prayer he was trying to remember.

Rowan buried Tomas himself.

He left the dogs.

After that, he stopped accepting shelter.

Years blurred.

Rowan grew into his body the hard way, lean muscle carved by hunger and running, scars layered over scars. His hair grew long because he had never stayed anywhere with scissors. His eyes learned to scan horizons constantly, cataloguing exits.

He learned which regions had hunters and which had worse. He learned the smell of silver before he ever saw it. He learned that some men hunted wolves not because they had lost anything but because killing made them feel clean.

Those men terrified him more.

Sometimes, from high ridges or deep woods, Rowan watched hunters pass. He saw their discipline, their rituals, their grim certainty. He imagined stepping into their firelight and ending it, ending the chase, ending himself.

He never did.

Cowardice, he told himself.

Survival, the wolf corrected.

By the time Rowan reached the valley where Mara lived, he had made one final rule:

He would never stay.

Not for a person. Not for warmth. Not for love.

The valley was supposed to be another stopping place green, quiet, unremarkable. He meant to rest, steal what he needed, and move on before the ache behind his eyes grew too sharp.

Then he met her.

And then, worse

He met her father.

Rowan did not know, yet, what that man was.

But somewhere deep inside him, the wolf went very still.

And the moon, watching from above, waited.