The test did not arrive as a trial.

It arrived as a drowning.

Origin-mud erupted from the split southern grounds in slow, deliberate waves. It was not the ordinary dark soil of the pack lands. It was the mud of the first night—mineral, iron-scented, heavy with the memory of a dying Luna’s blood and the newly written fourth temperature—forced upward through living territory like a foundational truth demanding proof of concept. Where it touched black-vein script, the script flared and then sank into it, becoming part of the rising tide. Where it touched stone, the stone softened and remembered being riverbed. Where it touched living wolves still bonded to the...