Prologue

The forest weeps the night I am cursed. It has rained for three days; soft at first, then unrelenting, as though the sky itself is mourning something it can not name. Leaves hang heavy on the trees, bowed by the weight of water and sorrow. Beneath the canopy, the air is thick with the scent of crushed fern and bruised petals, a perfume so dense it coats the back of my throat like honey gone to rot.

I know what is coming before it arrives. The knowing lives in my bones — that hollow resonance only divinity can produce, that vibration in the marrow that says something older than you has turned its gaze your way. My mother taught me to read the forest the way mortals read scripture. Every bent branch, every shift in wind. Tonight the oaks groan as though their roots are being pulled from below. Tonight the rain tastes of iron.

I am standing in the grove where I was born. Not born the way humans understand it — screaming, bloody, dragged from flesh into light. I arrived the way storms arrive. One moment the clearing held nothing but moonlight and moss. The next, I was there, already breathing, already aware, the earth beneath me warm and humming as though it had been waiting. My mother tells me that the deer knelt. That the wolves circled the clearing in silence, heads low, as if bowing. She tells me this with a voice like river water over smooth stone — cool and steady and ancient.

Artemis. My mother. Goddess of the hunt, the wild, the untamed places where civilization frays into something honest. She never wanted a child. She swore against it — swore it to the stars and the deep places and the other gods who would listen. But Pan, my father, had a way of unraveling oaths. Not through force. Never force. Through music. Through the slow, insistent melody of his pipes that could coax flowers from frozen ground and make rivers forget which way they flowed.

I am the daughter they were never supposed to have.

The grove remembers. I feel it remembering now, the soil pulsing beneath my bare feet like a second heartbeat. Every blade of grass leans toward me. Every root stretches. This is what it means to be born of nature — to be claimed by every growing thing, to feel the sap in trees as though it runs through your own veins. When I press my palm against the bark of the oldest oak, I feel its rings like memories, centuries coiled tight inside the wood. It knows me. It has always known me.

But tonight something is different.

The oak shudders when I touch it.

I pull my hand back, staring at the bark where my fingers rested. The wood has darkened — not rotted, not burned. Darkened. As though my touch drained some essential light from within it. The leaves above me rustle even though the wind has died. A warning. The forest is warning me.

"Amara."

The voice arrives before she does. It slides through the grove like oil through water — slick, iridescent, wrong. It is a beautiful voice. That is the cruelest part. Hera's voice is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard, and it makes every cell in my body recoil.

She steps from between two birch trees as though she has been woven from the rain itself. Her robes are the colour of thunderclouds, grey and violet and shot through with veins of light that pulse like distant lightning. Her hair is dark as the spaces between stars. Her face — I cannot look at her face. Not because it is terrible. Because it is perfect. So mathematically, devastatingly perfect that it registers not as beauty but as geometry. As architecture. As something designed to make you feel small.

"Daughter of the oath-breaker." She says it the way one might name a disease. Clinical. Final.

I do not run. My feet will not let me. The soil has gone cold beneath my soles — the first time in my life the earth has refused to warm for me. The rain strikes my shoulders and it stings. Rain has never stung before. Rain has always felt like greeting.

"Hera." I keep my voice level. My mother taught me that the hunt is won before it begins, in the stillness before the chase. Show nothing. Become the forest. Become still.

"You should not exist," Hera says, and there is something almost like grief in her tone. Almost. The way a shadow almost resembles the thing that casts it. "Artemis swore. She knelt before me and she swore. The virgin goddess. The untouchable. And yet—" Her eyes find mine, and I feel the weight of them like hands around my throat. "Here you stand."

"I did not choose to be born."

"No." She steps closer. The grass beneath her feet does not bend — it withers. Brown veins spider out from each footstep, spreading like fractures in ice. "But you were born nonetheless. A contradiction. A stain on the order of things. And I—" She raises one hand, and the rain around us freezes. Not ice. Frozen in motion. Each droplet suspended in the air like a thousand tiny mirrors, reflecting her face from every angle. "I am the keeper of sacred bonds. Of marriage. Of oaths. Of the promises that hold the cosmos together."

She says this and the ground beneath me begins to hum. Not the warm, living hum I have always known. This is deeper. Mechanical. As though the earth itself is being rewound.

"What are you going to do?" I ask, and I hate that my voice cracks on the final word.

Hera smiles. It is the worst thing I have ever seen. Not cruel — precise. The smile of someone who has calculated every consequence and accepted them all.

"I am going to make you honest," she says.

She moves her hand and the suspended rain drops do not fall. They shatter. Each one breaks apart into light — gold and white and a searing, impossible violet — and the light rushes toward me like a living thing, like a swarm, like a thousand burning needles finding every pore and pressing inward.

The pain is not pain. It is beyond pain, past it, through it, into some territory for which no language was built. I feel myself being taken apart. Not my body — my body remains, trembling, rooted to the blackening soil. My self. The invisible architecture of who I am, the gossamer threads that connect goddess to girl to wolf to daughter to the forest and the moon and the deep green silence of growing things. I feel them stretch. I feel them fray.

And then I feel them snap.

It happens in a sequence so precise it must be deliberate. First — the connection to my divine memory. The knowing of what I am when I walk on four legs. I feel it peel away like bark stripped from a living tree, and beneath it there is nothing. Blankness. A white void where understanding used to live. Hera is taking my wolf-self's knowledge of its own divinity. When I shift, I will not know what I am. I will be animal and only animal, running without purpose, hunting without understanding why.

Second — the rejection. This one is subtler, slower, and infinitely worse. I feel it begin in the roots beneath me. The oak that has known me since my first breath pulls its roots inward, retreating from my feet. The grass wilts where I stand. The ferns curl their fronds tight, turning away. The rain, when it begins to fall again, falls around me. Not on me. Around me. As though my body has become something the water refuses to touch.

Nature is letting me go.

I open my mouth and the sound that comes out is not a scream. It is the sound a tree makes when it is split by lightning — a deep, splintering crack that resonates far below the audible, that vibrates in the stone and the soil and the bones of the earth. The grove shakes. Leaves tear from branches and scatter upward, fleeing toward a sky that is no longer weeping but howling.

Hera watches. She does not flinch. She stands amid the devastation of my undoing with her hands folded, her perfect face serene, her robes untouched by the chaos. She watches me the way one watches a necessary surgery — with clinical attention and absolute conviction.

"You will carry both forms," she says, her voice cutting through the storm like a blade through silk. "But they will never be whole. In wolf form, you will forget. You will run and hunt and breathe and have no memory of the goddess within you. The divine will sleep so deeply it might as well be dead. And in goddess form—" She pauses, and for one fractured second I think I see something flicker behind her eyes. Something that might be remorse if remorse were capable of existing in the same body as this much power. "In goddess form, the world you love will reject you. Every flower will close. Every animal will flee. The forest that raised you will not know your name."

I am on my knees. I do not remember falling. The soil beneath me is grey — the colour leached from it as though my curse is already radiating outward, a poison bloom spreading from the point of impact. My hands press into the dead earth and I feel nothing. No pulse. No warmth. No ancient, patient heartbeat answering my own.

For the first time in my existence, the ground is silent.

"Why?" The word comes out broken. Not a demand. A plea. I hate myself for the pleading but I cannot stop it, cannot swallow it back down. The emptiness where the forest's love used to live is a wound so vast I can feel myself listing toward it, pulled by its gravity, by the sheer horrifying weight of absence. "She broke the oath, not me. Punish her. Punish my father. Why—"

"Because you are the proof." Hera's voice is quiet now. Almost gentle. The gentleness of a closing door. "You are the living evidence of a broken vow, and as long as you exist in wholeness, the oath means nothing. The order means nothing." She turns. The rain parts for her. "I do not enjoy this, child."

I want to believe she is lying. I search her voice for the lie the way I would search a forest for a hidden trail — desperately, thoroughly, with every sense I possess. But there is no lie. There is only Hera, walking away between the birch trees, her robes dissolving into mist, her presence fading like a note held too long.

The grove is quiet.

I kneel in the dead circle of earth and I breathe. In. Out. The rhythm of it mechanical now, stripped of the organic ease I have always known. My lungs fill with air that tastes of ash and copper. My skin prickles where the rain refuses to land. Above me, the canopy has drawn back — branches bending away from my body as though I am flame and they are dry timber.

Somewhere deep inside me, something shifts. The wolf. She stirs in the place where my two forms overlap, in that liminal space between woman and animal where identity blurs. She does not understand what has happened. She cannot. That is the curse's design — she will never understand. She presses against the inside of my ribs like a second heart trying to beat its way free, and I feel her confusion, her instinct to run, and beneath it all the vast, terrifying nothing where her divine knowledge used to live.

I could shift now. I could let the wolf take me, let her muscles and her speed carry me away from this grey circle, this dead ground, this silence. I could run until the burning stops. But if I shift, I will forget why I am running. I will forget what was taken. I will forget myself.

So I stay.

I stay human — goddess — whatever I am now, this fractured thing kneeling in rain that will not touch her, on earth that will not hold her. I press my palms flat against the grey soil and I whisper to it. Nonsense words. The old language my mother used when she spoke to the rivers, the one that sounds like wind through pine needles, like water over stone, like the slow creak of a forest settling into sleep.

Nothing answers.

I whisper louder. I push the words into the ground like seeds, willing them to take root, to crack through whatever barrier Hera has placed between me and the living world. I speak until my voice is raw and my hands are numb from pressing against cold, dead earth, until the rain has soaked through everything I am wearing and my hair hangs in dark ropes against my shoulders.

Nothing.

The first sob takes me by surprise. It rises from somewhere below my stomach, below my ribs, from some place I did not know existed — a reservoir of grief so deep it must have been carved the moment the curse landed, waiting to be filled. It tears through me with the force of a river breaking its banks, and I fold forward, forehead to the ground, and I keen.

The sound I make is not human. Not divine. It is the sound of something in between — something caught, something fractured, something that belongs to two worlds and is being denied both. The trees do not lean in to listen. The wind does not carry it gently away. The sound hits the forest and falls, absorbed by nothing, answered by nothing.

I weep until there is nothing left.

When I finally raise my head, the grove looks different. Not because it has changed — because I have. I see the same trees, the same moss, the same silver threads of rain falling through the canopy. But where before these things felt like extensions of myself — my limbs, my breath, my blood made visible — now they are simply scenery. Beautiful. Distant. Other.

The forest weeps, but not for me.

I stand on legs that feel borrowed. My body is whole — Hera did not touch my flesh. That is the refinement of her cruelty. I am intact. I am beautiful, even, the way I have always been beautiful — hair the colour of autumn's last ember, eyes green enough to make emeralds ashamed, skin that holds moonlight the way water holds a reflection. All of it present. All of it meaningless.

What use is a body built to harmonise with nature when nature can no longer hear the song?

I take one step. The grass beneath my foot browns and curls. I take another. A beetle on a nearby stone changes direction, scuttling away. Overhead, a nightingale that had been singing — singing through the rain, through Hera's arrival, through the curse itself — goes silent and lifts from its branch, wings beating hard into the dark.

I walk to the edge of the grove and I stop. Beyond it, the forest stretches in every direction — vast, ancient, alive. My home. My inheritance. The only world I have ever known or wanted to know. It is still beautiful. The rain gives everything a lacquered shine, turns bark to obsidian and leaves to dark jade. Somewhere deep within it, I know, there are wolves running. My kin. My other self's family.

I cannot stay here.

The knowing settles like a stone in my chest. I cannot stay in the grove because the grove will die around me. I cannot walk through the forest because the forest will flinch at every step. I cannot be what I was — the daughter of wild places, the girl who grew up sleeping in the crooks of ancient oaks, who learned to run by chasing rivers, who spoke to wolves before she spoke to gods.

I am exile now. Exile in my own skin.

The wolf surges inside me. She does not know what I know. She only knows that she wants to run — that running is the answer to every question she has ever been asked. And perhaps, tonight, she is right. Perhaps running is all that is left.

I close my eyes. I breathe in the wet, green, impossible scent of the forest I am losing, and I hold it in my lungs like the last breath before a dive into dark water.

Then I let her take me.

The shift is not gradual. It is a falling, a collapsing inward, bones rewriting themselves in the space between one heartbeat and the next. My spine curves. My hands meet the earth as paws. My vision sharpens until every raindrop is a crystal architecture, every shadow a map. White fur blooms across my skin like frost across a window, and the world expands — smells and sounds rushing in to fill the places where thought used to live.

The wolf does not know she has been cursed.

The wolf does not know she is a goddess.

The wolf knows only this: the night is wide, and she is fast, and somewhere ahead the darkness opens like a mouth.

She runs.