Near midnight, Noah paced the concrete terrace of his house, his hands buried in his pockets.
"What am I supposed to do with my future?" he muttered to the empty air. "What if I never get a job… what should I even be learning?"
A quiet sigh escaped him. These thoughts always waited until dark to surface—uninvited, relentless, louder when the street below went silent.
He stopped near the railing and looked up. Above the rooftops, the moon hung pale and sharp against the dark.
"The moon looks beautiful," he murmured, his shoulders dropping a fraction. "I can't help but keep staring at it."
From somewhere downstairs, a voice called up. "Noah, it's getting late. Come down—and make sure to lock the door."
"Sure, I'll be there in five minutes!" Noah called back.
He lingered a moment longer, letting his gaze drift across the night sky—stars scattered like salt across an endless black sheet. For the first time all evening, the knot in his chest loosened.
*Maybe the nightmares won't come back tonight,* he thought.
Noah latched the terrace door behind him, padded downstairs in the dark, and slipped into bed.
*Tick…*
*Tick…*
*Tick…*
The sound didn't belong to his wall clock. It was slower. Deeper.
*Tick… Tick… Tick… TickTickTickTick—*
*DONG.*
"Hmm… it's getting colder…" Noah murmured in his sleep, pulling the blanket tighter.
The bed seemed to tilt beneath him. The air twisted, heavy and suffocating, and then a razor-sharp chill slammed into his chest.
Noah's eyes snapped open.
There was no ceiling above him. Only a canopy of black branches and a sky choked with stars. Snow crunched beneath his palms as he scrambled upright, his thin sleep shirt useless against the biting wind. A dense forest stretched in every direction, and towering above it all loomed the jagged silhouette of a mountain.
"Where am I?" His breath plumed white in the dark, quickening with every ragged beat of his heart. "Just a second ago, I was in my bed… what is this place?"
He spun in a circle, snow soaking through his socks. *Is this a dream?* He clenched his fists, feeling the frostbite sting his knuckles and the sharp grit of frozen bark under his heel. *No. Dreams don't hurt like this.*
Then, through the trees, a howl rose into the night.
*Awoooo.*
Noah froze. Another answered it, closer this time. Then a third.
His instincts took over before his mind could catch up. He bolted uphill toward higher ground where the trees began to thin, snow spraying behind him, branches whipping at his face. *Anywhere,* he thought, lungs burning on the freezing air. *Just find somewhere to hide.*
As he crested a snowy rise, he skidded to a halt.
Standing atop a jagged boulder ahead was a figure.
At first glance, its silhouette looked human—broad-shouldered, standing upright on two legs. Then it turned toward him. Its head was that of a massive wolf, framed by patchy, matted fur. Long, curved claws—three or four centimeters of pale bone—glinted at the ends of its fingers and feet. Its eyes were too large, pulsing with an eerie, predatory glow.
It tilted its head back and loosed a long, rattling howl.
Above it, the moon loomed—five times larger than the one Noah knew, impossibly bright and terrifying.
Before Noah could tear his eyes away, he noticed movement in the brush around him.
Eyes. Glowing pinpricks in the dark. Dozens of them, closing in from every side.
A pack had encircled him—and the humanoid beast on the rock wasn't chasing him. It only watched, commanding the ring from above.
Noah broke left toward the only gap still open and sprinted blindly into the dark. The pack erupted behind him, snarls and pounding paws tearing through the snow.
He burst out of the treeline—and nearly pitched straight into nothingness.
A cliff. Far below, a dark river cut through a rocky valley, its distant rush barely audible over the wind.
Noah spun around. Glowing eyes pressed out of the trees, low growls vibrating through his ribs. Two choices: stay and be torn apart, or jump.
Then he spotted it. Seven or eight meters down the sheer rock face, a narrow, snow-dusted ledge jutted out beside the dark mouth of a cave.
There was no time to think. Noah stepped off the edge.
He hit the slope hard, scraping down frozen rock before slamming onto the ledge. Agony flared across his back, driving the air from his lungs in a wet gasp. The world tilted. Dragging himself by his elbows, he crawled just inside the cave's mouth as the distant howls faded—or his hearing did. Darkness swallowed him whole.
***
*Tick… Tick… Tick…*
Cold. Pain.
Noah's eyes fluttered open. His thoughts felt thick, sluggish, as if wading through mud. Then the memories crashed back—the wolves, the cliff, the fall.
He was lying just inside the cave entrance, though it wasn't completely dark. Strange stones embedded in the rock walls gave off a faint, steady luminescence—flecks of red, blue, and green scattered like embers in stone.
He pushed himself up with a groan. His back throbbed viciously, bruised and stiff, though nothing felt shattered. Looking out the cave mouth, he saw the pale rim of dawn beginning to bleed across the sky.
*A moon five times too big. Werewolves.* Noah pressed a trembling hand to his forehead, forcing himself to breathe. *If I stay here, I'll freeze or starve. People settle near water. If I can reach that river below the cliff…*
The cave sloped downward behind him, disappearing into deeper shadow. Something about the stillness made the hairs on his arms rise—an uneasy sense that the cavern wasn't empty—but climbing back up the sheer cliff was impossible.
Keeping one hand on the glowing wall, Noah limped deeper into the tunnel. For a long stretch, there was only the drip of water and the crunch of his own footsteps. At last, pale morning light bled around a bend ahead.
He stepped out into the lower valley.
Thick forest surrounded him once more, though the air here felt milder. He moved downhill toward the sound of rushing water, his back aching with every jarring step. Around him, the snow thinned into patches of damp green moss and unfamiliar shrubs bearing strange, bulbous fruit. Squirrels, birds, and foxes darted through the undergrowth—alongside creatures with too many legs or odd, feathered tails that he couldn't name.
Finally, he broke through the brush onto the bank of a wide, clear river.
Noah dropped to his knees and cupped icy water to his mouth, wincing as his bruised ribs protested. *Follow the water,* he told himself, pushing back up. *Sooner or later, there has to be a village.*
He followed the current downstream for over a mile. At first, fish darted beneath the surface and small animals drank along the opposite bank. Then, gradually, the riverbank went quiet. No birdsong. No rustle in the reeds.
*Something's ahead.*
Noah slowed, stepping carefully behind a thick pine—and froze.
Fifty paces downstream, the wolf pack was drinking from the shallows. And standing knee-deep in the water beside them was their alpha.
Noah held his breath, easing backward step by step. He couldn't survive another chase like this.
Suddenly, the werewolf's head snapped up. Its nostrils flared, sampling the wind.
*Blood,* Noah realized, his stomach dropping. *It smells the scrapes on my back.*
The alpha loosed a sharp, commanding howl. Instantly, the pack fanned out across the bank, noses pressed to the earth, sweeping directly toward his tree.
Noah turned and ran.
He veered sharply away from the river, cutting a wide arc through the forest, hoping to break their trail and rejoin the water miles downstream. Every step sent a hot spike of pain through his spine, his breath sawing in his throat.
Behind him, a triumphant howl split the morning air.
They had his scent.
Ahead, the roar of water grew louder—not the gentle rush of a river, but the thunder of a waterfall. Noah burst toward the clearing, looking back over his shoulder for a split second—
A gray blur lunged from the undergrowth.
Noah threw himself sideways just as jaws snapped shut on empty air. He scrambled up, heart hammering, realizing too late that the pack had herded him.
He never saw the alpha coming.
A massive force slammed into his side like a falling boulder, lifting him off his feet and hurling him toward the mist-slicked rocks at the waterfall's edge.
Noah skidded across wet stone, gasping in agony as the giant shadow loomed over him. Everything else—the roar of the water, the barking pack—seemed to dull into silence.
Before he could roll away, the werewolf lunged and clamped its jaws onto his shoulder.
White-hot pain exploded down Noah's arm as teeth sank through muscle and grazed bone. He screamed, thrashing blindly, his fingers clawing at rough fur and slick rock. Death was inches from his throat.
With every ounce of strength left in his body, Noah drove his thumbs toward the beast's glowing eyes, braced his boots against its chest, and shoved backward—straight off the waterfall's lip.
Both of them plunged into open air.
Weightless for one terrifying second, twisting together above the churning white plunge pool below—and then the world shattered against stone.
The impact knocked everything out of Noah in a single, blinding flash. Water roared over his head, dragging him down, spinning him in freezing darkness.
*I'm sick of that howling,* was his last drifting thought as his vision went black.
***
The river eventually spat them onto a rocky shingle downstream.
The werewolf lay twisted and still, its jaw shattered, its chest crushed from taking the brunt of the boulder beneath them. Beside it, Noah lay sprawled half in the shallows, blood blooming from his torn shoulder and a gash above his brow. His left hand was bent at an unnatural angle, wrist broken.
Silence settled over the bank, broken only by the steady roar of the falls.
Then—
*Tick.*
A faint, pale light pulsed beneath Noah's skin.
*Tick… Tick…*
Thin threads of silver-gold light drifted from the dead alpha's chest, curling across the wet stones and sinking into Noah's wounds. Wherever the light touched, time seemed to stutter backward. The jagged tear in his shoulder drew partially shut, the bleeding slowing to a dull seep. A soft crack echoed as the shattered bones in his left hand shifted back into place, leaving the wrist swollen and bruised, but whole.
He wasn't fully healed—the cold, the exhaustion, and the deep aches remained—but death stepped back from his door.
The light faded, leaving only silence.
Some time later, boots crunched over the river gravel.
*Tick… Tick… Tick…*
Noah's eyes cracked open to blurred shapes standing over him—men in leather and bronze, holding iron-tipped spears. They stared down in stunned silence at the mangled corpse of the werewolf, then at the bruised young man lying beside it.
One of them lowered his spear tip slightly and spoke in a tongue Noah didn't know.
"Salvē."
The man glanced back at his companions, his voice tight with disbelief.
"Hode paresti, zēi."