Moon bound Hearts: The Wolf and the Crown Prince

CHAPTER 1 - THE NIGHT OF THE RED MOON

The harvest moon had always been a quiet thing in the borderlands-an orange coin hung low and wan, watched by farmers and foxes and the old women who kept the hearth fires. But the night the sky bled, the chest-deep silence of the valley broke into a sharp, electric hum. The moon over the western ridge turned a slow, impossible red, and the animals woke as if some distant bell had tolled.

Lyria felt it first in the bones of her hands. She had been kneeling by the dried well, scraping the last of the morning's roots into a woven satchel. Her breath made small ghosts in the cold air. A thread of heat slid under her skin, and she paused; fingers curled around the rough bark of the basket.

The others kept their eyes on their tasks. In the encampment, the elders muttered about omens and bad luck, while the children ran squealing between wagons, daring one another to touch the moonlit grasses. Lyria watched them with the patient, guarded look of someone who had learned the rhythms of waiting. She was not like the others-no one had let her forget that. Half-wolf, they called her in whispers. A silver shadow with a human laugh at the edge of things. The name was meant to wound, and sometimes, in the small hours, it did. Tonight, some other thing pulsed beneath the old hurts: a promise and a threat braided into one.

She rose slowly and let the hush of the field settle around her. The red moon washed the world in a darkly beautiful light, and for a moment the past and the present felt as thin as the skin of a cicada. The scent on the wind shifted-pine smoke and damp loam and something older, mineral and metallic, like the taste of lightning. Lyria's ears, more wolf than human-twitched. She turned toward the corpse of birches at the hill's crown.

That was where they said the border began: a crooked line of trees that no one crossed after dusk. Beyond them lay the old forest, the place of half-remembered stories and the land that bled into Neverland. People spoke of Neverland as a child's map-bright and impossible the old ones' eyes grew distant when they named it. "Not for the living," they would say. "Not for those who walk in two forms."

On the hill, wind came whispering through leaves, and something in the hush called to Lyria like a name. She stepped toward it without deciding to. Her feet found the hidden path, the one threaded through bracken and foxglove, and the world narrowed to the press of soil and moonlight.

She was not afraid of the woods. The forest had been her nursery; its bones had taught her when to run and when to keep still. But tonight was not the same quiet the trees usually offered. The trunks seemed to lean, curious, expectant. Shadows moved like