I take her hand and raise it to my lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. "My luna," I murmur against her skin.
As if in answer, moonlight spills through the high windows of the great hall, silver and beckoning. The ceremony complete, we leave through the main doors as the last light fades from the sky, walking together toward the clearing beyond the fortress walls where the pack gathers for rituals that require more space than stone can offer. The wolves follow at a respectful distance, their presence a warm pressure at the edge of my awareness. Anticipation pulses between us, mine and Iris's tangled together until I cannot tell where my excitement ends and hers begins.
The clearing opens before us, a natural amphitheater ringed by ancient pines. Moonlight floods the space with silver radiance, and I feel the pull of it in my bones, the call that every wolf knows from the moment they first draw breath. The instinct to run, to hunt, to howl at the sky and feel the night answer back.
Beside me, Iris gasps.
"I feel it," she whispers. "The moon. It's like it's calling my name."
"That's the wolf. She's ready."
"How do I..." She trails off, uncertainty flickering across her features. "I don't know how to shift. What if I can't?"
"You can." I turn to face her, taking both her hands in mine. "The wolf knows what to do. You just have to let her."
"Let her take over?"
"Let her guide you. The first shift is always the strangest because you don't know what to expect. But the wolf has been preparing for this since the bite. She knows the shape she wants to wear. All you have to do is stop holding on so tight and let her show you."
Iris nods, though fear still shadows her eyes. I kiss her forehead, her cheeks, the corners of her mouth, anchoring her to me one last time before everything changes.
"I'll be right beside you," I promise. "I'll shift first, show you what it feels like. Then you follow."
"Okay." She takes a shaky breath and squares her shoulders. "Okay. I'm ready."
I step back and let the change take me.
Silvery mist swirls around my body as the transformation sweeps through me in a rush of familiar sensation. Bones reshape, muscles realign, skin gives way to fur. The shift takes less than a heartbeat, human form dissolving into wolf between one breath and the next. I shake out my coat and look up at Iris, letting her feel exactly what the transformation entailed. No pain. No struggle. Just release.
Her eyes widen as my experience floods into her awareness. Then her expression changes, determination replacing fear, and I watch her reach for the wolf inside her.
The mist comes for her slowly at first, silvery tendrils curling around her ankles, her wrists, her throat. She gasps at the strangeness of it, the sensation of her body becoming something other than solid. Her wolf rises to meet the call, and for onesuspended moment, Iris stands caught between forms, neither fully human nor fully wolf.
Then she lets go.
The mist swallows her whole, and when it clears, a wolf stands where the woman had been. She is smaller than me, leaner and more compact, built for speed rather than brute strength. Her fur gleams dark auburn in the moonlight, the color of autumn leaves and dying embers. She sways on legs that don't yet feel like her own, and a sound escapes her throat, half whine, half wondering cry.
The pack watches in respectful silence. This is sacred, the birth of a new wolf, and even those who doubted her hold their breath as Iris finds her footing.
She turns in a slow circle, ears swiveling, nostrils flaring, taking in the world through senses that paint it in colors she has never known. The moon pulls at her, and she lifts her muzzle toward it, drawn by an instinct older than language.
When she opens her eyes fully, they blaze gold-bright with the intelligence of the woman who wears this new shape.
I approach slowly, giving her time to adjust. The world is different through wolf eyes, colors muted but movement sharpened, scent painting pictures that human noses could never comprehend. She watches me come, and when I press my forehead to hers, wolf to wolf, mate to mate, her joy crashes into me like a wave breaking against stone.
Then I turn toward the forest and run.
She follows without hesitation, her paws finding their rhythm within strides, instinct taking over where experience falls short. We race through the trees side by side, moonlight filtering through the canopy, the night air thick with scents that paint stories across the landscape. Prey has passed this way recently, rabbit and deer and smaller things that will make herwolf's mouth water. The territory stretches before us, miles of mountain and forest that belong to our pack, that belong to us.
I have run these paths a thousand times, but tonight they feel new. Tonight I see them through her wonder, experience them as the gift they are rather than the responsibility they represent. For so long I have carried this burden alone, the weight of leadership pressing down on shoulders that had no one to share the load. Now Iris runs beside me, and the loneliness I pretended not to feel dissolves like morning frost.
We run until our muscles burn and our lungs ache, until the fortress is miles behind us and the moon hangs fat and full directly overhead. Then we stop at the crest of a ridge that overlooks the entire valley, the whole of our territory spread below like a gift from the night itself.
Iris lifts her muzzle and howls.
The sound is raw and untrained, nothing like the practiced calls of wolves who have sung to the moon their entire lives. But it is hers, the first true voice of her wolf, and the pack scattered across the territory answers her call. Howls rise from the fortress and the forest and the distant peaks, dozens of voices joining hers in a chorus of welcome.
Luna.The word ripples through the pack bond from a hundred sources at once.Luna. Luna. Luna.
