Luna Priestess

Rising Ember

By the third morning, the whole pack had changed.

I noticed it before I understood it. Wolves who’d been loud and easy at breakfast the first day went quiet by the second.

Doors got shut more, and Voices got lower. I passed two pack wolves in the hallway standing way closer than they needed to be, foreheads almost touching, and they jumped apart the second they saw me, like I’d caught them doing something.

“Ember Moon,” Rhys said when I asked him about it over breakfast. “It’s close. You can always tell a pack a few days out. Everyone gets a little feral.”

“I know what the Ember Moon is. I grew up in the Temple.”

“You grew up outside it,” he said. “Knowing what fire is and standing next to it aren’t the same thing.”

I didn’t love that answer, mostly because part of me thought he was right.

The Ember Moon happens twice a year. Every wolf talks about it like weather...something that shows up, gets survived, and leaves.

The pull between unmated wolves gets sharp enough to hurt if you ignore it too long. Some wolves pair off. Some just white-knuckle it until the moon passes.

Priestesses don’t feel it. That’s one of the first things they teach you at the Temple, right next to your letters and your prayers. It’s the deal the Goddess makes with us.

She takes the wanting out so she can put the Sight in. An empty vessel, the old texts call it. I used to think that sounded sad. By twelve I’d decided it sounded like a relief.

I’d never felt so much as a flicker of it, not once, not in any Ember Moon I’d lived through.

This one felt different starting on day two.

It started small. Restless, under my skin, easy to blame on nerves and a strange bed and everything that had happened since the summit.

By day three, it wasn’t that easy to explain away anymore. There was a heat low in my stomach that just wouldn’t leave, and it got worse in a room full of pack wolves, and worse still whenever Kaius was anywhere near me.

I tried to ignore it. I’ve spent my whole life ignoring things I wasn’t supposed to want. It always worked before.

It wasn’t working now.

“You look flushed,” Rhys said, catching my arm outside the dining hall on the fourth morning. He narrowed his eyes at me, doing that thing where he reads me faster than I want him to. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You look...” He stopped. Sniffed, once, almost without meaning to, the way wolves do without thinking. Something shifted in his face. Surprise first. Then something more careful.

“What,” I said.

“Nothing.” He let go of my arm like it had gone hot. “Rest before the ceremony tonight.”

He walked off before I could ask what he’d smelled. I had a bad feeling I already knew.

I found a mirror in my room and stared at myself longer than was probably healthy.

My cheeks were flushed, obvious even to me. My eyes looked too bright.

When I pressed a hand to my throat, my pulse was going faster than it should’ve been for someone standing still in an empty room.

I told myself it was nerves. The ceremony tonight. The Council. Kaius.

Any of a dozen things that had nothing to do with the Ember Moon, because the Ember Moon doesn’t touch Priestesses. That’s the whole point of what I am. Nineteen years of training built on that one rule.

I sat on the edge of the bed and reached out of habit, for the Sight, same as I’d done a dozen times a day since it went dark. Still nothing.

But under the nothing, where the Sight used to be, there was something else now.

Warm and Restless. It felt less like the Goddess and more like every other unmated wolf I’d passed in that hallway all week, a little feral, a little sharp, all of them counting down to a full moon whether they were ready for it or not.

I understood, sitting there, cold all over, even with the heat in my skin, exactly what that was.

I was starting to Haze.

Priestesses don’t Haze. It’s not possible. A week ago, I’d have laughed at anyone who said otherwise. I could’ve quoted the Temple texts on exactly why an empty vessel can’t fill with something it was never built to hold.

But here I was. Flushed, restless, counting days like everyone else in this pack house, and I didn’t need the Sight to tell me what that meant.

Whatever the Goddess took from me in that summit hall, it wasn’t just my Sight. She’d left the door open behind her.

And something else had already started walking through it.

I pressed both hands over my mouth to keep quiet. Outside my window, three days out from the full moon, the first low howl went up across the valley.

My whole body answered it before I could stop it.