On four legs, the child ran. She ran more easily on her four legs than her mother could run; her whole life, she had been running, walking, jumping on four legs, it was the only way she knew how to exist. There was nothing she had needed to forget first to be able to really move like this.

  The mother, though… it had been years and years of this living, but even so, it still felt strange in some part of her mind, somewhere far in the back. So as hard as she was trying to run, as hard as she was trying to keep up with her daughter, she was falling behind.

  But that didn’t matter, did it? It didn’t matter if she could keep up with her daughter or not. It didn’t matter what happened to her herself. What mattered was that her daughter escaped, that her daughter survived. So she ran, and her daughter ran.

  Her daughter ran, and ran, and ran— she ran just as her mother had begged her to run, with just her eyes she’d begged, and so the child scampered across the tangled roots of the mountainside, over the jutting rocks and between the thick trunks of the trees.

  Behind them… he was coming closer.

  The child was young, but she had seen many things in her short life around this mountainside. She had seen all sorts of different creatures— birds, fish, and insects, creatures with four legs like her own, and even creatures with two legs, that came sometimes through the lower foothills to hunt, or on their way to somewhere else. She had seen the fastest foxes chasing such creatures, and she had seen the fastest deer running from them, and not even once had she seen anything running so fast as this shadow was running now, after her and her mother. Even the she-wolf with the beautiful death-black tail and silver fur, the uncatchable ghost of the mountainside, had never moved so quickly. This was a thing beyond nature. He was coming closer and closer. He was nearly upon them.

  She did not look back, she just kept running. She did not know where she was running to, if there was anywhere that she was running to at all, but what else was there to do? So she just kept running. But the mother, the mother stopped and turned with a great below— she took a strong stance and she readied her claws and her teeth to strike and to mangle, to stop this shadow in his tracks as her daughter continued on to safety.

  The shadow did not stop. The shadow did not so much as slow, or try to veer right or left around her. He simply jumped, with a strength beyond his own, and he went soaring up and up and up, straight over her head, and soft as a leaf he landed behind her and continued onwards, after the child.

  Panicked, the mother began to run again— but this was not her body, and for all of the fear in her blood, she could not make herself move at such a speed. Nothing could, there was no creature of the mountainside or anyelsewhere, and she knew it. It was an insult, how fast he moved across the Earth. It was sour poetry. It was pointless to follow him, she would never catch up in time.

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  But still, she ran, she ran as only a mother could run. Awkward and slow, but unrelenting. There was nothing she could do, but she could not do nothing. She thought to beg the Moon for help, but why? It was the wrong Moon tonight. It was the Full Moon tonight, a Moon that didn’t care, that wouldn’t answer, even just to say no. Her lungs ached and her legs were stiff, and she ran and she ran, that’s all there was. She ran with love that she had never asked for, love she never would have chosen, but now could never abandon, could never forget.

  She ran for nothing at all. She ran for no reason. What was happening was happening, and that was that.

  A little yelp in the distance. An end to things.

  When she finally reached the clearing on the far side of the mountain, where the white flowers grew, where the chase had ended, there was only one figure waiting for her. Tall and twisted, staring up into the sky. Not at the Moon— the Full Moon, tonight. He couldn’t be bothered with Her, not this Moon, and She couldn’t be bothered with him. The two of them had never meant anything to each other.

  But just beside the Full Moon, glittering new…

  He smiled, or perhaps he made a face that would have once been a smile. “Beautiful,” he murmured, loud enough for the mother to hear. He knew she was standing there. He knew she was staring at him. “Don’t you think?”

  He wanted her to look up at it. He wanted her to see it. And the last thing she would have wished in all the world was to give him what he wanted. But she could not help herself. Up she looked. And there it was, there they were. Glittering new.

  Her heart erupted with molten rage. She reared up onto her back two legs, and for just a moment she felt like herself again, like she once had been— and so much more than she had been. She felt her own mass and power, her danger like she had never had before. Her teeth and claws, her heavy muscles and thick fur like armor. She felt like she could tear across the clearing and disembowel him, simple as that, like tearing off a piece of bread.

  But the truth was, by now, she had all-but-forgotten the taste of bread. And when she tried to move herself across the clearing on just those back two legs, she tottered awkwardly, and fell down onto all fours again. This was not her body. This thing, this would never truly be her body. Nevermind all the years on this mountainside, hunting and foraging and sleeping unbothered by all the lesser creatures. Nevermind the pulsing life she had sprouted from the tree of her soul. Nevermind the pulsing life, the living thing she had broken off from herself, the living thing she had pushed out from inside herself with agony and determination, with this body, this body, the living thing in the same shape of this body. Nevermind the torn-off vessels of the heart of this body, draining away as she gazed up again into the sky, and again she saw it.

  This was not her body. For all its power, there was nothing she could do with this body.

  She cursed the Thunder. But she knew that didn’t matter. That was every bit as useless. Nobody could do anything about the Thunder, and no one ever would, all the way to the end of time. She was not the first from whom he’d taken everything. She would not be the last. And now, here she was, with everything taken from her all over again.

  Instead of charging across the clearing, she glared. She burned a hole through the thick summer midnight air with her eyes to the shadow, she dared him to drop his gaze from the sky, she dared him to meet her gaze with his own— and when he did, those eyes of hers dared him again, or maybe they begged him. They begged him to take his weapon and strike her down as well. They begged him to just be done with it. They begged him to just put an end to things.

  But no, he just laughed at her.

  “You’ll have to be patient,” he said. “Your turn will come.”

  And with a flicker of the breeze, he was gone.