All Chapters of Moonshadow: The Full Saga: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The den had never been this quiet.Not after a battle.Not after a funeral.Not after the rejection I’d thrown like a knife in this very stone.Silence pressed into the old shrine room until it felt like a third presence between us—me, Luna, and the unspoken.Candle smoke curled in the cold air. Wax dripped slow rivers down old carvings of the Goddess, now half-buried under stacks of scrolls, herbs, and the strange chalk sigils Luna had marked on the floor.She sat cross-legged on a worn fur in the center of the room, bare feet against the stone circle she’d claimed as hers. Shadows clung under her eyes; a thin, dark tracer ran along the veins at her wrist, like ink under skin.The curse she’d dragged into herself.Because I hadn’t been strong enough to stop it in the walls.Because I hadn’t listened to the moon when She’d tried to give me the one wolf who might have saved us sooner.My hands were sweating.It was ridiculous: I’d faced rogue alphas, Bloodfang teeth at my throat, walls

The council chamber had never smelled so much like fear.Not the sharp, honest kind that came when rogues howled at the borders or cracks groaned in the walls. This was sour, hidden—a sweat-slick unease seeping from fur and skin as elders, warriors, and omegas crowded into the old stone hall.Luna stood with her back to the Moonstone pillar in the center of the room, the faint, icy hum of it running up her spine. She’d come into this chamber once as a trembling omega with a tray, eyes down, shoulders hunched, Selene’s laughter snapping at her heels.Tonight, she stood as the storm-queen they whispered about.And the woman who had once broken her between these very stones was about to be stripped bare.“Everyone is here,” Elia murmured at her elbow.Luna’s gaze swept the room.The elders sat on the half-circle of carved stone benches, Maera at the center, her lips tight, eyes hollowed out by too many sleepless nights and too much cracked rock.Warriors lined the walls, some in full arm

The forest at the border was quieter than the den had ever been.No walls groaned.No pups cried.No elders argued over where to place their fear.Just trees, standing like old sentinels, and the slow slide of moonlight across their trunks.Luna sat on a fallen log just inside the tree line where Moonshadow’s scent began to thin. One step behind her, the air still tasted like home: woodsmoke, old stone, familiar wolf. One step ahead, the night opened into the Rogue Lands, wild and unscented, the way it had been when she first left.The same stretch of darkness.A different heart beating in her chest.The moon hung low, fat and pale, snagged in the branches like a caught lantern. Light spilled over her bare feet, the scars on her toes silvering, the faint dark lines in her veins glinting with something not quite shadow, not quite starlight.Behind her, faint and distant, the den breathed.She could feel it now, even this far away. The stone was linked to her like an old, gruff relative

The first storm of autumn broke at dawn.Not the wild, screaming kind Luna had once called down in fury, but a slow, deliberate rain, falling straight and steady from a sky the color of old steel.The den walls sighed with it.Water slid into cracks, over scars, through gutters Luna and the stone-masons had carved by hand. It soaked the earth, sank into roots, turned the training yard to slippery mud.Luna stood beneath the half-open roof of the archive hall, bare feet damp, watching the rain blur the forest beyond the gate.Behind her, the air smelled of dust and ink and old leather. Scrolls lined the shelves, some so ancient they seemed to hum faintly when she passed, as if still holding the echo of the hands that had written them.“You are going to get a crick in your neck,” Kerran muttered from his table. “Staring at the same patch of dreary sky like it owes you answers.”Luna glanced back at him.“You said the old records were incomplete,” she reminded him. “I am waiting to see i

The dead were not buried until dusk.The rain slowed to a fine, clinging mist as if the sky itself were exhausted.In the gouged earth beyond the wall, Moonshadow’s warriors and omegas moved among the broken bodies—pack and rogue both—lifting, carrying, laying them out in careful rows.Luna walked among them.Barefoot.No armor.No symbols of rank.Mud sucked at her heels, cold and thick.Blood—hers, theirs—streaked the once-green field in dark lines.The flood she had called had left behind not just wreckage, but a strange, uneasy quiet. Birds had not yet dared return. The usual forest chatter was muted.Death had a sound of its own.She knelt by a slender form on the edge of the pack’s row.The boy could not have seen more than sixteen summers.His eyes were closed.His face was oddly peaceful, despite the jagged tear across his throat.His hands were calloused in the way of someone who had worked more than his share for his age.“Tau,” Rhea said softly, kneeling on the other side.