Luna's Gift
Copyright© 2025 by Megumi Kashuahara
Prologue
Long before the wolves claimed the western shores, before stone fortresses rose against Irish mists, before the name Tir Faelán was whispered in any tongue, there was rage, and a curse that would echo through millennia.
Arcadia, Greece. The Age of Gods and Kings.
King Lycaon ruled the mountain realm with cruelty wrapped in pride. When Zeus, King of the Cosmos, came disguised as a humble traveler to test the wickedness of men, Lycaon sought to mock the god’s omniscience. He slaughtered one of his own sons, cooked the flesh, and served it to Zeus as part of a feast.¹
The god’s wrath was immediate and terrible.
Thunder shook the palace to rubble. Lightning consumed Lycaon’s fifty impious sons. And the king himself—the king was transformed. His body twisted. Bones cracked and reformed. Fur erupted where skin had been. His scream of agony became a howl that echoed across the mountains.
A wolf. Not a simple beast, but something caught between—cursed to wear fur while retaining the shattered mind of a man, forever savage, forever hungry.
Lycaon fled into the wilderness. In his madness, he attacked innocents. His bite spread the curse. His victims became like him—trapped as wolves, unable to shift back, their humanity slowly drowning beneath instinct and rage.
The curse spread like plague through Arcadia.
Desperate, the people hired Gale, a mortal witch known for her evil dealings and abnormal powers. She could not break a curse laid by Zeus himself, but she could starve those who bore it. She cursed the crops and livestock. Humans could eat safely, but any creature carrying Lycaon’s taint would sicken and die from the poisoned food.
The wolves began to starve.
But Gale’s magic was crude, indiscriminate. In a small mountain hamlet, innocent people—farmers and shepherds who had been bitten but were not wicked—began to die. Men and women trapped in wolf form, unable to speak or plead, watching helplessly as their bodies wasted away. Some had been children. Some had tried to resist the curse and failed.
They were not monsters. They were victims.
The hamlet cried out to Hecate, goddess of crossroads, witchcraft, and the liminal spaces between worlds. Goddess of those caught between one state and another—neither fully human nor fully beast.
And Hecate heard.
She came in the dark of the moon, disguised as an old healer woman, her true power hidden beneath mortal flesh. She walked through the dying hamlet, observing, measuring, judging.
Finally, she chose.
A young woman named Selene—barely more than a girl, really. Orphaned, alone, surviving on the edges. But when Hecate looked into her heart, she saw what others had missed: a soul capable of fierce compassion. A spirit that had known suffering and chosen kindness anyway.
“Come,” Hecate commanded.
Selene followed the old woman to a clearing beneath ancient oaks. There, Hecate revealed her true form—tall and terrible and beautiful, crowned with silver light, eyes like the void between stars.
“The wolves starve,” Hecate said. “Gale’s curse will kill them all—innocent and guilty alike. I cannot break what Zeus has wrought, but I can transform it. I can give you the power to save them, if you are willing.”
“What must I do?” Selene’s voice shook, but she did not look away.
Hecate smiled. “Be their mother.”
The ritual was ancient, older than Zeus himself. Hecate anointed Selene with sacred oils—her breasts, her womb, her throat. She spoke words in a language that predated Greek, that thrummed with the power of creation itself. She placed her hand over Selene’s heart and poured her blessing into mortal flesh.
When Selene woke twenty-four hours later, her body had changed.
Her breasts were full, heavy with milk, though she had never been with a man, never carried a child. The sensation was overwhelming—warmth, pressure, purpose flooding through her. In her womb, she felt not pregnancy but potential. And in her mind, she heard them.
The wolves. Their howls carried meaning now. She understood hunger, fear, pain, hope. She could hear their trapped humanity crying out beneath the curse.
“Go to them,” Hecate’s voice whispered in her mind. “Feed them. Speak to them in the old tongue. Be their Luna—their moon, their mother, their mercy.”
Selene walked into the forest where the cursed wolves hid, starving and desperate. They should have attacked her. Should have torn her apart in their madness.
Instead, they smelled her milk and fell still.
The weakest came first—a she-wolf too sick to stand, crawling forward on her belly. Selene knelt and gathered the wolf to her breast. The she-wolf latched on and drank, and as the blessed milk flowed, something miraculous happened.
The madness cleared from the wolf’s eyes. She remembered. Not how to shift back—Zeus’s curse held too firm for that—but she remembered who she was. She remembered her name, her children, her humanity.
She wept, and Selene wept with her.
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