Shadowwyn Moor addir melek

A wolf of the spring, she repeated, the words rolling off her tongue with measured cadence. The title tasted foreign, yet familiar. Her voice was neither flattered nor dismissive, carrying the kind of evenness one might expect from someone accustomed to wearing masks of indifference. A wolf does not ask permission to survive. They do it, and that is that. Why title the act? Did not everyone try in their way to keep alive? To give up and to die — names and titles, they died with you. Persistence rewarded itself.

Her sharpness came not from indignation but from curiosity—a probing, exploratory blade seeking the soft spots in his intentions.

He wasn’t one of them—not running with Saatsine after the caribou, not bowing under the banner of the Sun Eater, not grounded in the shared roots of their traditions. Wake was an other, a man from some other place, some other life, and his presence here felt as alien as the call of a bird long extinct. She did not know how to treat him. Politeness seemed too weak a tool, and aggression unnecessary. What remained, then, was caution—abundant, deliberate caution.

Yet there was no denying her curiosity. Wake spoke like someone carrying a secret too grand to keep and too dangerous to share. It drew her in despite herself. Sulukinak knew her survival depended on suspicion, on keeping a sharp edge between herself and the unknown, but Wake’s strangeness gnawed at her defenses.

You speak like a man looking for something, she said. But not as a hunter. Not of caribou, not of wolves, not of anything that bleeds. A small, fleeting smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth, the closest she came to amusement. What is it you think you’ll find here, Wake? And do you think it’s looking for you too?

She tilted her head slightly, meeting his bird-of-prey gaze with an unflinching stare of her own.