I couldn’t sleep that night.
Even after returning home, after sitting silently across the dinner table from my father, after he gave me another one of his soft, reassuring smiles that made my chest ache more than I wanted to admit—I just couldn’t shut off my mind. My body was tired, my limbs heavy from everything I’d carried all day, but my thoughts were relentless. That vision, the one by the stream, haunted me.
My mother.
It was her. I knew it. Even without seeing her face clearly, I felt it in every inch of my bones. Her presence lingered in that vision like the ghost of a song I hadn’t heard since childhood.
And the wolf. That golden-eyed wolf.
There was something primal and powerful about it—something familiar, even though I had never seen it before. And somehow, it was tied to m
