She was walking down the iced-up forest path. Feet cold, fingertips blue and frozen, lungs filled with the chilling air that mother Earth had breathed into her.

She was alone, a sole warrior. She didn’t need others, she didn’t want others of her own kind. She had the wolves. They had welcomed her into their pack, cared for her and loved her like no human ever had. They howled in the nights when she cried herself to sleep on the moss pillow she had made herself on the first night, they stayed and guarded the perimeter when she drifted off.

There was no need for the exchange of words, they understood each other on a deeper level, primal.

There was an ancient bond that connected her to the feared forest beasts.

When she looked deep into their glassy grey eyes, she never saw threat. She saw pain, she saw fear, she saw creatures who wanted to find their place and to belong.

Back when she used to live in the village she was terrified of them. Everyone told her horror stories of wolves killing their cattle, their sheep, their chickens. Destroying their farms.

However, no one knew that this was never driven by malice, but by fear. The wolves were scared of the winter, they didn’t slumber like the bears, they didn’t have access to shops and pantries like the villagers. They were alone in the battle for survival, alone against the terrors that awaited them in the dark cold depths of the year, alone against whatever the all mighty mother nature threw at them.

She knew all this now and she was no longer afraid. Covered in the sheep skins she had taken from her father’s farm on the day she fled, carrying the corpse of a dead deer she had found on the top that left a trail of fresh ruby-red blood on the crystal white snow behind her, she felt different.

She was no longer brown-eyed Tikki, the little girl everyone found strange and too blunt for their liking. She wasn’t the loner of the village. She was part of the forest, at one with the universe, the queen of the wolves.

The Luna.