The shift did not hurt. That was the very first thing I understood, not thought, but understood, in the specific way the biology understands reality long before the human mind catches up. I had been braced for absolute agony. Every fragmented account I had ever half heard about shifting wolves described it as a primal torment, bones dynamically fracturing, the flesh rewriting itself, a violent transition that extracted a heavy cost before it ever granted power. I had prepared for that physical cost the way you prepare to force open a door you know is going to be impossibly heavy. The door was not heavy at all. It was the absolute, beautiful opposite of heavy. It was the physical sensation of something that had been pressing helplessly against the inside of me for eighteen years suddenly possessing room, not breaking out, not violently tearing through, but simply expanding into the space that had always been there waiting for it. My palms remained flat against the floor. The ston
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