Moonscar

The plains opened before them on the morning of the eighth day, and Lira stopped walking without meaning to.

She had read about the Moonscar Plains in the old texts — the codex described them in the precise language of boundary markers and territorial records, which was useful but not evocative. Standing at the tree line looking out at the actual place, she understood why the Moonborn had chosen it.

The plains were vast. Not the manicured vastness of open farmland, but the wild, complicated vastness of a space that had been contested and abandoned and reclaimed by nature so many times it had stopped belonging to any particular story. Tall grass moved in the wind. Ancient stone formations broke the flatness at intervals — the remains, she recognized from the codex descriptions, of the old Moonborn council structures. Three ridgelines converged in the far distance, one from each direction of the pack territories that bordered this space: Silver Ridge to the north, Ironveil to the east, Eastern Hollows to the west. The plains existed in the gap between all of them.

Neutral ground. Nobody's land.

For three more days.

"It's bigger than I imagined," Fen said from somewhere behind her left shoulder.

"The codex said forty square miles," Wren said. She had moved up beside Lira and was looking at the plains with a builder's eye — measuring, calculating, already working a problem. "The old council structures are mostly foundation. Stone's still good, from the look of it. A foundation is faster than starting from nothing."

"Two days before the full moon," Sable said. "Enough time to walk the boundary and identify the claim points." She looked at Lira. "The Oath requires you to mark three points. North, south, and center. Each one witnessed."

"I know." Lira had read the claim ritual until she could recite it backward. "We start tomorrow morning. Today, we make camp."

They moved onto the plains with the particular quiet of people who understood that they were doing something that couldn't be undone. The grass was knee-high and silver-green and it bent around them as they walked into it, closing behind them like water.

Cade, who had been largely silent for the entire journey, suddenly said: "Are we really doing this?"

Lira looked back at him. He was seventeen and trying to look like that was a detached, practical question and not the question of someone who had stopped letting themselves want things.

"Yes," she said.

He was quiet for a moment. "What if the big packs come?"

"Then we deal with that." She held his gaze. "But we don't refuse to exist because someone powerful might object to it. That's how they keep you small, Cade. By making you ask permission to take up space."

He looked at her for a long moment. Something moved through his face — the specific movement of a young person encountering an idea that reorganizes everything.

He nodded.

They made camp at the center of the plains, near the largest of the old foundation stones. Wren immediately began a structural assessment, pressing her palm against the stone with the concentrated attention of a craftsperson. Fen and Cade gathered fuel. Sable walked the perimeter in a slow, measured circuit.

Lira stood at the center of what would become the Moonborn Pack's territory and let the wind off the convergent ridges move through her hair — the silver-streaked dark hair that she had spent her whole life being told was unusual, strange, off — and breathed.

Three more days.