You fell into a rift,” he said, his low voice making eddies in her stream of memory. “That’s why the hunters didn’t find you, but we did. The wolf wants you to live. We want you to live.

For there is one thing a vagrant knows–never call nowhere Nowhere, and never call Anywhere yours, for Anywhere is always someone else’s.

And I shall not fear the solitary fate of death,For as surely as we are born, the weight of death grows inside us all. But while there grows one true death, lives upon lives are collapsed within us, sleeping, folded as wings.

Snow-laced pines loomed tall and motionless as sentinels around her. Something moved among them, half-smothered in the dark. Dianna glimpsed slivers of its lupine form. A chill slithered through her as she rose to her feet.

Then let her be a strong girl,” she said. “Let the earth shape her into a wild thing, and let her dance like the wind and stand like a stone. Let your fears not become hers.

We are the few who survived their attacks and found each other.

Dianna looked at the moon. That night it was barely a crescent cradling earthshine, a white wisp of silk or a sliver of creamy birch bark. Incomplete, but there. It would grow, as night-blooming jasmine would grow, or a blot of spilled milk, or a hillside gathering snow.

Cheers to trails yet traveled and tales yet told. May we learn the ways of long waters, of vast lands where feet have not yet fallen. Cheers to you, my steadfast family, bound by the path we share. May Faeralis protect and keep us. May fate be on our side.

Though kin scatter the earth like seed and grow apart, their paths are rooted in the same ground.

We’re the same,” she said. “So, let’s be friends.