Six months after the ritual, the Grove stopped being a refugee camp.

It did not happen on a specific day. It happened the way most real changes happened, gradually and then suddenly, the specific morning when Marina walked through the camp and realized that what she was seeing was not people surviving but people living.

Children playing near the boundary stones without anyone positioned to grab them if something went wrong. Wolves from different packs sitting together at the same fire not because the situation required it but because they had started to prefer it. Senna running her medical work with two assistants she had trained herself, neither of them...