Chapter Three: Leaving Mooncrest

Lyra’s POV 

My hands wouldn't stop shaking long enough to fold anything properly.

I gave up on folding and just shoved things into the bag instead — a spare dress, my mother's old hairbrush, the small carved wolf Elias gave me when I was seven. Things that fit in my arms. Things that felt like mine, back when I still believed I had a place here.

The candle on my desk had burned down to almost nothing. I didn't light another one. Dawn was close enough that the dark had started thinning at the edges of my window, gray instead of black.

"You don't have to do this alone."

I spun around, heart slamming, and found Mira standing in my doorway with her own satchel already packed.

"Mira." I pressed a hand to my chest. "You scared me half to death."

"Sorry." She stepped inside and shut the door softly behind her. "I couldn't sleep. I figured you couldn't either."

"I have maybe an hour before I need to leave." I turned back to my bag, hands still trembling. "There's nothing to figure out. I just need to go."

"Where?"

I stopped.

That question had been circling in my head since the Elder's ruling, and I still didn't have an answer. Mooncrest was the only home I'd ever known. Beyond its borders, I knew almost nothing — a few pack names, a handful of trade routes, stories about kingdoms too far away to matter.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Away. That's the only plan I have right now."

Mira crossed the room and gripped my hands, stilling them. "Then let me come with you."

"No." I said it faster than I meant to. "Mira, you have a life here. A position. People who need your healing."

"I have people who need me alive, Lyra, and you're one of them." Her eyes were fierce in a way I rarely saw from her. "You think I'm going to let you walk out of here by yourself after everything that happened tonight?"

"I think," I said carefully, "that if the Council decides being close to me makes you a liability too, I couldn't live with what might happen to you."

She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again, some of the fire dimming into worry instead.

"At least let me walk you to the border," she said finally.

"Okay." I managed a small, exhausted smile. "That, I'll accept."

We finished packing in near silence after that, the only sounds my own ragged breathing and the soft rustle of fabric. Every few minutes, I caught myself glancing toward the door, half expecting Selene to appear and say something, anything, even if it was cruel.

She never did.

I slung the bag over my shoulder just as the sky outside shifted from gray to the faintest blue. Mira opened my bedroom door, and we both froze.

Something sat on the floor of the hallway, just outside my threshold. A folded cloak, dark gray, plain enough to belong to anyone and no one. No pack crest. No embroidery. Nothing that marked where it came from.

"That wasn't there before," Mira said quietly.

I crouched down and lifted it carefully, half expecting some kind of trap. Tucked into its folds was a small strip of parchment, the handwriting unfamiliar, hurried.

*Wear this past the border. Trust no one wearing Mooncrest colors tonight. Not even family.*

No signature. No name.

"Who left this?" Mira looked up and down the empty hallway like the answer might still be standing there.

"I don't know." I turned the parchment over, searching for anything else, any mark or clue. There was nothing. "But whoever it was knew exactly when I'd be leaving."

"That's not comforting."

"No," I agreed. "It's really not."

I should have thrown the cloak aside. Some stranger's warning, delivered in secret, should have felt like exactly the kind of danger Selene would have told me to avoid. But something about the words — not even family — settled into my chest like it already knew things I didn't.

"Are you actually going to wear it?" Mira asked.

I looked down at the plain gray fabric, then back at the door I was about to walk through, leaving behind everyone who was supposed to protect me and hadn't.

"I don't know who to trust anymore," I said quietly. "Not Kael. Not Seraphine. Not even my own parents tonight."

"Lyra—"

"But someone left this for me," I said, pulling the cloak over my shoulders. It settled heavier than it looked, like it had been made for someone expecting a long, hard journey. "And right now, a stranger's warning is the only kindness anyone's shown me since the ceremony ended."

Mira didn't argue after that.

We slipped out through the back of the house, avoiding the main paths where early risers might already be stirring. The forest at the edge of Mooncrest territory was still dark, thick with mist that clung low to the ground and muffled our footsteps.

"This is as far as pack law lets me go," Mira said, when the border markers came into view — old stone pillars half-swallowed by moss, marking the line between Mooncrest and the wild lands beyond. "I'm sorry. I wish I could walk you further."

"You've done enough." I pulled her into a fierce hug, feeling the parchment's warning settle heavier in my mind with every passing second. "Thank you. For everything."

"Send word when you're somewhere safe," she said, pulling back, eyes bright with tears she was clearly fighting not to let fall. "Promise me."

"I promise."

She hesitated at the border markers, watching as I stepped past them, out of Mooncrest, out of everything I'd ever known. The mist swirled around my ankles like it was trying to hold me back.

I turned once to look at her small figure fading into the gray morning light, and lifted a hand in farewell.

That was when I heard it.

A howl — long, deliberate, cutting through the mist from somewhere close behind me, far too close to be an accident. A second howl answered it from the opposite direction, then a third, forming a slow, tightening circle around exactly where I stood.

Mira's face went white. "Lyra—"

"Go back," I said, my voice barely above a whisper, every instinct screaming at once. "Mira, go back now."

She didn't move fast enough.

Because somewhere in the mist, unseen but unmistakably close, something was already hunting me — and dawn had barely broken over the border I'd just crossed alone.