~Maxwell~

The cold did not bother me the way it should have.

I had been walking for four days through territory that belonged to no one — the stretch of borderless land between the valley packs that existed in the maps as blank space and in reality as a corridor of frozen ground and bare trees and the particular silence of places that predated wolf law entirely. I had no shelter beyond what I constructed each night from whatever the forest offered. I had no food beyond what I hunted with ...