The Weight of the Crown
The mist hadn't burned off yet when Marco crested the ridge, and the world still belonged to shadows and the low copper light of a sun that hadn't fully committed to rising. His body moved in that in-between state pack folk called the half-shift — not man, not wolf, something older than either — spine elongated beneath his skin, claws blunt but present at his fingertips, senses stretched wide enough to catch the tremor of a rabbit's heartbeat two hundred yards off. He liked this form best. It was honest. It didn't ask him to choose a single shape and stay inside it.
The Thornwood stretched below him in every direction, black-green and breathing, mist pooling in its hollows like something poured there on purpose. The ancient trees along the border — the ones the old stories called the Sentinels, though nobody remembered anymore whether that was myth or just habit — stood with their roots half-exposed, gnarled and silver in the weak light, older than the pack itself, older maybe than the mountains that cradled this whole territory. Marco had run this ridge every dawn since he was fourteen. His father had run it before him, and his father's mother before that, an unbroken chain of…