The seasons turned, and Crescent Hollow held.
That was the thing I learned that no war ever teaches you: that holding a throne isn't a single victory but a thousand ordinary days, each one a small choice to rule the way you swore you would instead of the way that would be easier. Winter came, and the stores held no skimmed grain now, no hidden faction, just a pack fed through the cold by a Luna who knew those stores in her body and made sure every wolf, high and low, had enough. Spring came after, and the pack that had thrown me away in the rain planted its fields under a rogue-blood king and a servant-born Luna, and did not fall apart, and did not rise in revolt, and slowly the way all real things happen, one ordinary day at a time became something Damien's Crescent Hollow had never been
