Moonbound Legacy

The first time I shifted, I was six. Not because my wolf was ready, but because they forced it out of me. I remember the pain. Not the kind you feel when you scrape your knees or stub your toe. This pain was sharp, deep, and cruel. Bones broke. Skin stretched. My screams echoed through the night as the elders chanted around me like I was some kind of cursed thing. Maybe I was. Maybe they saw something in me then that I still couldn't see in myself. My name is Riley. Or at least, that's what my only friend, Emma, decided to call me. My pack never named me. Said I was cursed. Said no mother would claim me, and no father would acknowledge me. I was just "the orphan." Raised on the edge of the Black Hollow Pack’s territory, I lived in a leaning shack behind the Omega quarters. It was a moldy shed with a sagging roof and a rusted latch that barely kept the door shut. They gave me leftovers—what they scraped off plates and didn’t feed the dogs. I never got training, not officially. When the full moons came, they chained me up in the root cellar of the old barn, as if the cage could hold in something dangerous.