LUMINARA MOONSTONE's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Luminara walked until her feet ached, and still the pull dragged her forward. It tugged behind her ribs like a hooked line. She crested a low rise and stopped. A campfire burned in the hollow below, exactly where the pull wanted her. A man stood beside it, watching the dark as if he already knew she had come. She crouched in the brush and studied him. A torn tent sagged behind him, patched with bark. A bedroll lay near a stone, a blade resting beside it. A tall pole rose at the edge of the camp, a stretched fox hide swinging from it, hung with a necklace of claws. He was waiting. He had been waiting a long time. Luminara pushed against the lock on her shape. Her bones shifted, slow and stubborn. Fur poured down her arms. She dropped to four paws as a white wolf and circled wide through the trees. Her paws pressed soft prints into the dirt around his camp. The pull yanked harder the farther she strayed from her humanoid form. Her wolf shape buckled. She stumbled, shrank, and stood blinking as a small goat. Then the pull snapped her back. Pale hair, blue dress, wings folded tight. She bit down on a cry and slipped behind a tree before he turned. She came back. Three nights, while he was off checking snares, she crept through his camp. She read the carving on his blade handle. She found a letter tucked in the bedroll, signed in a careful hand. Flint Foxclaw. She held the name in her mouth like a stone. On the fourth night, she shaped a small fox from a sliver of wood with her magic, smoothing it between her palms. She set it on his bedroll. Beside it she scratched four words into the dirt. I know your name. Then she walked into the trees, and the pull, for the first time, felt like a thread she was holding too.