The night Asher was born, the moon hid behind a storm.
Wind clawed at the timber walls of the Crimson Pack’s healing house, and thunder rolled like an angry god demanding tribute. Inside, beneath the scent of blood and rain, a young woman fought for her breath. The midwife’s hands moved quickly, but the life within the mother slipped away faster than any prayer could follow.
When the child’s cry broke through the din, sharp and startled, the storm outside seemed to pause. Her mother’s hand fell limp, her eyes turning to glass. The silence that followed was heavier than grief itself. Someone whispered, almost reverently, Another life for another.
By dawn the tale had already begun to twist. The healers spoke of a moon that refused to shine, of lightning that split the sky the moment the baby drew breath. They said she had stolen her mother’s life; that she was born beneath a curse the gods themselves dared not look upon.
Her father, Cain, buried his mate beneath the black-thorn tree at the forest’s edge. The thorns tore his palms as he worked, yet he did not stop until the last stone was laid. He never looked the same again. Some nights Asher would hear him whisper her mother’s name to the wind; other nights he sat before the empty cradle, eyes hollow, as if afraid of what slept—or didn’t—inside it.
When Asher turned three, he finally lifted her into his arms. His fingers trembled, not from anger but from the weight of memory. “You look like her,” he murmured. “Too much like her.” The words should have been tender, yet they sounded like a farewell.
A year later, fever took him. The pack called it mercy. He left behind two daughters: Abigail, proud and sharp-tongued at twelve, and Asher, a silent child with wide silver eyes that reflected every flame and frightened everyone who met them.
Abigail stood beside their father’s pyre, her fingers curled into fists, her lips moving with a whisper only the smoke could hear. “She takes everything,” she said. “First Mother, now Father.” In that moment something cold settled behind her gaze, and the story of the curse took root like ivy on stone.
Asher’s childhood became a quiet war she never understood. Abigail wore fine linen, laughed in the courtyards, and charmed the Alpha’s sons with smiles as polished as mirrors. Asher carried water, scrubbed floors until her hands cracked, and learned her letters only by crouching outside the tutor’s window. The pack’s children threw pebbles when she passed. “Moon-bane,” they called her. “Ghost-spawn.”
She tried to make herself smaller—walking softly, speaking only when addressed—but even silence seemed to offend them. Sometimes she studied her reflection in a bucket of water and wondered what they saw: a ghost, a reminder, the girl who had taken too much from the world.
Yet the forest gave her refuge. Beneath the canopy, where sunlight turned green and the air smelled of moss and rain, she could almost forget the whispers. The wolves that roamed there watched her without malice; their eyes glowed with recognition, as if they sensed something in her blood that even she could not name.
Once, when she was ten, she found a raven caught in a trap meant for rabbits. Its wing was broken, feathers slick with rain. She freed it carefully, binding the wound with a strip torn from her dress. “Fly when you can,” she whispered. The bird tilted its head, meeting her eyes as if in promise before it fluttered into the darkness.
When she returned, Abigail was waiting at the door, the Alpha’s son Brant lounging beside her. “Where have you been?” her sister asked, though the answer never mattered.
“I went to the woods,” Asher said quietly.
“To speak with your demons?” Abigail’s voice dripped honey and poison. “Or to curse another soul like Mother’s?”
Brant laughed, slow and cruel. “Maybe she’s trying to turn herself into something worth noticing.”
Heat burned up Asher’s neck, but the words she needed refused to form.
Abigail stepped close, her breath warm against Asher’s cheek. “Listen, little sister. People like you don’t belong in the light. The pack tolerates you because I ask it. Step wrong, and you’ll learn how cold the forest can be.”
That night, lying on her narrow cot, Asher listened to the storm scrape its claws across the roof. The wind moaned through the shutters like a woman in pain, and she thought of her mother’s last breath. She promised herself she wouldn’t cry. Years passed. The promise held.
By sixteen, Asher had learned to wear silence like armor. She worked in the Alpha’s kitchen and slept in the attic above the servants’ quarters. Rumors trailed her like a second shadow. When wolves fell sick—Asher was blamed. When hunters lost their way—it was her fault. When a newborn failed to survive the night, they said the curse had claimed another life to keep its strength.
Only the old healer, Mara, sometimes spoke for her. “The girl’s hands are gentle,” she would tell the others. “If power lives in her, it’s the kind that mends, not destroys.” But kindness was a fragile thing in a fearful world, and even Mara’s voice could not stand against Abigail’s growing influence.
Abigail, now twenty-four and radiant, had become one of the Alpha’s favored attendants. Her beauty was the pack’s pride; her words, its law. Asher kept to the shadows, but shadows have ears, and one afternoon she carried a basket of herbs to the council hall and heard her name inside.
“She frightens the pups,” a woman said.
“The curse will bring ruin,” another muttered.
“Perhaps it’s time to send her away.”
Then Abigail’s voice, smooth as still water: “If exile keeps our pack safe, I will speak to the elders myself.”
The basket slipped from Asher’s hands, herbs scattering like green rain across the floor. The murmurs stopped. She turned and ran before anyone could see the tears burning her face.
Outside, the sky had darkened again—the same bruised color it had worn the night she was born. Thunder rumbled over the hills, slow and warning. She thought she saw movement near the forest’s edge: the raven she once healed, circling the black-thorn tree where her parents slept. Its cry sliced through the wind like a blade of sorrow.
Lightning split the clouds and illuminated a path leading out of the pack’s territory—toward the mountains no one returned from. The rain came down in silver sheets. Asher stood beneath it, heart hammering, torn between terror and something that felt disturbingly like hope.
Somewhere in the roaring storm, a voice—soft, distant, yet unmistakably familiar—seemed to whisper her name.
Come.
She could not tell if it was the wind or fate itself calling her, only that her feet trembled with the urge to follow.
