NEVA POV
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The compound yard filled with morning light the way it did every day, entirely ordinary, except today the ordinary light fell on something the whole story had been building toward.
I stood at the edge of the yard, near the garden bed where Elara's soil had been worked into Ashveil's earth, and I looked at the gathered crowd — everyone who had built this family, everyone who had chosen, at some point in the story, to stay.
Corva presided, the oldest wolf present, the lineage keeper who understood exactly what this moment meant in the full arc of everything that had come before it.
Ryke stood across the yard, waiting, and when our eyes met I felt the bond do the thing it always did — not new, not electric in the way I might have expected months ago, but settled. Certain. Th
