Don't wander into the woods, the old tales say. They are dark and deep, and the branches will scratch at your ankles and tear you apart. Do not wander into the wilds where you will feel the wind through your hair. Stay in the village with its latched fences and doors with peeling paint. Stay where you will grow old with seven children, daily kneading dough with fingers calloused by years of work.

Do not go out into the mountains whose ragged snowcapped peaks are the home to dragons who lay on gleaming hoards of treasure.

The problem was that the girl had always had a wild heart. The stories that her elders whispered to her with cracked lips never scared her. If anything, they made her want to explore all the more.

As a child, she would wander beyond the safe fences of her village and bring home insects cupped between her hands. In the chill of autumn, she would look up through the crisscrossing tree branches, wondering at what lay in the blackness.

The people around her always quietly tutted, saying things like, "A problem child, that one. Hope that she grows out of it."

But the problem with a wild heart is that they never go away. They only become more yearning and ponderous with age. When she became a woman, she still went into the woods, gazing at the unending lines of trees and the stars with eyes of one who has wisdom.

There was even more to be understood than when she was a child. But the village always inevitably called her back, and she left her heart in the woods.

—

The wolf watched the girl from the edge of the forest. Oh, he didn't look like a wolf then, he looked like a handsome man with a sharp smile and black tumbling hair, but the wolf was in him, just beneath his green smiling eyes.

He had seen the girl before, tramping through his woods. He had smelled her scent, half-domesticated, half-wild, like a barn cat that drinks milk from a saucer but refuses to be petted.

That intrigued him.

What a shame it was that her people tried to put a collar on her and leash her to the land.

He could change that.

Oh, and he fully intended to. He'd come to the village, pretending to be a handsome man, and lure her away into the wilderness like the tales always warned.

It's what she deserved. And most important of all, it's what he deserved.

After all, wolves were not made to live alone. Every wolf needs a moon to guide him.