The Luna They Buried Came Back for the Crown
by Rhea Wolfe
They buried her in the snow and named another Luna before the ground froze over her. A year later she walked out of the trees with a mark on her throat — and it wasn't his.
They buried me alive on the Long Night, and the whole pack walked an hour into the birches to watch. My wolf wouldn't answer at the Rite. I told them why — I told four hundred wolves I was carrying the Alpha's child — and the healer who had her hand on my belly looked them in the eye and called me hollow. Ashenmoor's law about hollow wolves is four sentences long and every child can recite it: put it in the snow field before dark. My brother carried the shovel, because grief is family work. My mate stood at the treeline and never came closer. He released me from the pack. He never spoke the rejection, and I want you to remember that, because the old woman who keeps the law book remembered it for a whole year. Something dug me out. It carried me north over a ridge nobody crosses, into a pack Ashenmoor burned to ash forty-one years ago and has lied about ever since. I came back out of that forest one year to the night, on my own feet, with my daughter's white hair on my coat and a mark healed into my throat that nobody in that valley could read. It isn't his. They named a second Luna over me while I was under the snow, and the law has exactly one remedy for two Lunas. It happens at dawn. Which of us do you think spent the year training?
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