The Alpha's Vulnerability

The deepest month of the Arctic winter was known among the elder skalds as the *Moon of Black Frost*. During this cycle of twenty-eight days, the sun barely scraped the southern horizon for three brief hours of bruised indigo twilight before plunging the mountains back into twenty-one hours of pitch-black, sub-zero darkness. For the wolf shifters of Valgard, it was a season of ancient superstition—a time when ancestral spirits were…