The morning they left for Glendive, Libby woke colder than it had all winter, but the cold felt right — sharp, purposeful, ready. The convoy lined up outside the east gate in a formation nobody had commanded, but everyone seemed to understand. Trucks loaded with goods — sacks of flour from Kalispell, preserved fruit from Spokane, jerky and smoked meat from Whitefish, medical supplies from Libby, and handmade cloth from Eureka — all arranged like gifts instead of spoils.
Thirty-three wolves walked among the humans. Libby’s pack. Sable’s northern ferals. They moved with an easy, unimaginable quiet — all calm muscle and intent, their breath ghosting in white plumes that vanished in morning light. The townsfolk hardly looked twice anymore. Wolves belonged here.
Thane stood beside the first truck as Hank did his final checks, the same way he would before leading a group of deputies out of town back when “civilization” still meant lights on at every house. Beside Thane were Holt and Rime, both standing straight and serious, ready, flanking him like sentinels carved from fur and frost.
Marta came up to them with a rolled map tucked under her arm and that soft steel in her eyes. “I’ve seen a lot of plans in my life,” she said, “but I don’t think even the old world ever dreamed of something like this.”
Thane nodded once. “You don’t conquer the world by force,” he said. “You shock it by being better.”
Marta smiled, small and real. “Ready?”
He didn’t have to answer. Across the snow, the convoy of five human-driven trucks, one wagon pulled by horses from Eureka, and an entire pack of wolves on foot began to move as though one heart beat in all of them. They weren’t marching. They were arriving.
News traveled fast in the ruins. Before the convoy even reached Glendive’s outskirts, the town already knew something was coming. Children were pulled inside. Doors shut. Guns were loaded. From atop the walls, frightened faces stared as the column drew closer — humans, wolves, carts and trucks, white breath and bright colors, a moving circle of life instead of death.
Thane watched the town gates as they came into view — no guards on the ground, only trembling rifles up high. No one shouted warnings. Nobody opened fire. Because they remembered. They remembered the wolves in the dark. They remembered not dying.
The convoy stopped fifty yards from the gate. The quiet roar of idling engines fell to silence. Even the wind seemed to hold still.
Thane stepped forward. Holt and Rime flanked him — closer than ever before. They didn’t growl. Didn’t snarl. They simply stood with him — unshakable, like they had been born for this moment.
Then the gates cracked. Slowly. Uneasily.
A man stepped out — older than Thane remembered Voss looked, hair thinner, fear cutting the angle of his shoulders. Beside him were a handful of townsfolk, half trying to look brave, half looking like they’d rather dissolve into ghost stories.
“You’ve… come back,” the man said.
Thane nodded. “Not to do what you’re afraid of,” he replied. “To show you what’s possible.”
Nobody moved.
Marta came around the first truck then, coat buttoned up tight, hands visible at her sides, face free of any threat but full of authority. “Mayor,” she said calmly. “You’re the one they chose?”
“They… we… voted him in,” one of the other townsfolk said quietly.
Thane’s voice didn’t shift. “Garrick Voss, town caretaker and orchestrator of Black Winter.”
Voss blinked, confused at the absence of blood. “You’re not here to—”
“We’re here to trade,” Thane said. “And to extend a promise. This is not a cleansing. It’s a chance.”
Behind him, the truck tarps came down in a wave — revealing the goods. Clean, good things. Things nobody takes from the weak anymore, because the weak don’t stand alone.
Whitefish’s mayor raised a jar. “Sugar beets,” he said. “You’ve never tasted anything like this.”
Kalispell raised a sack. “Flour. Soft as pre-fall. And enough to feed fifty families.”
Eureka’s cloth workers held up bolts of dyed fabric. “Colors,” they said, smiling. “You get tired of brown and gray.”
Spokane’s envoy stepped forward last, a crate of sealed cans and a ceramic jar in hand. “Coffee,” he said. “Hard to make. Impossible to fake.”
Everything was visible. Everything offered. No chains. No threats. No deception.
Voss stared at the food. At the wolves. At the quiet, endless strength standing in snowdrift and wind. “Why… why are you doing this?” he asked, voice cracked.
“Because what you take,” Thane said, stepping closer, “dies. What you trade — stays alive.”
Voss’s jaw tightened. “I threatened your town. Sent raiders. Shot you! And now you want to sell me sugar?”
Thane’s voice never shifted. “No. We don’t sell you anything.” He stepped aside, motioned to the goods. “You trade us something you can spare. You get something you truly need. The valley grows because we stop acting like hunger is power.”
Silence. Voss’s hands shook. “And if we… don’t?”
Thane didn’t raise his voice. He just looked at him — steady and unblinking. “Look behind me,” he said.
Voss did.
Hundreds of eyes met his — human and wolf and everything in between. Not hostile. Not hungry. Just there. Unmoved. Unafraid.
“No one wants to meet the thing that ends them,” Thane said. “But I’d rather meet the thing that saves us instead.”
Holt shifted beside him, slow and easy, like a mountain reminding people it is still there. Rime’s gaze narrowed, not dangerous, but final. Voss understood.
Slowly, he raised a hand and gestured to the townsfolk behind him. “Bring… what we have,” he said.
And for the first time in years — Glendive walked out of its own fear.
The next three hours didn’t feel real.
Glendive’s people came forward with bundles of leather straps and simple tools. Clay jars of early winter honey. Salvaged steel parts. Things they had — things nobody else did — and the trade began in careful, trembling handfuls.
No one cheated.
No one schemed.
And townsfolk who hid in their houses at the first sight of a wolf… now stood in front of one and watched in awe as a young feral from Sable’s pack spun a bolt of cloth in the snow, delighted by the color. A group of children approached Gabriel to pet his tail, and he let them — laughing when they gasped at the thickness of his fur. Rime stood completely still as a blacksmith compared the edge of a claw to the sharpness of forged iron. Sable herself walked the quiet margin of the square, neither smiling nor scowling — just observing, like a queen deciding if the place before her would survive the winter.
And Holt? He found a crate of grain spirit, shook it once, and shouted, “Marta! This true trade! Make city happy!”
Marta burst into laughter so forceful she scared a pigeon off the roof of the old library.
Even Voss, though wary, couldn’t pretend he wasn’t stunned. Every few minutes, he glanced at Thane. Not with hatred.
With shock.
With a kind of newborn respect.
At sunset, Grendell, the oldest woman in Glendive, stood up on a crate and addressed the whole gathering in a voice made of years and iron: “I should be afraid. But I’m not. Because this…” — she gestured at the shared crowd — “…is what we were supposed to be before we forgot how.”
And the valley — for one long minute — believed her.
As dusk thinned into blue ice, the convoy loaded up again, lighter in goods but denser in something that couldn’t be carried — change. Glendive watched from its gates, still unsure, but no longer frozen in fear. For the first time in a long time, a town that survived by taking… was now willing to build by giving.
Thane looked at Voss one last time before stepping into the truck. “You trade with respect,” he said softly. “You stay alive. And if the past comes back?”
He jerks his chin toward Rime, who looks at Voss without blinking.
“Then the wolves come walking again.”
Voss didn’t argue. Only nodded.
“Understood.”
And with that — the convoy pulled away.
Wolves and humans.
Side by side.
A new kind of army.
One built on food, mercy, and steel that knows when not to cut.
In the truck, as the snowy highway pulled away behind them, Marta exhaled, long and slow.
“We really did it,” she said. “One more town. One less wound.”
Thane stared out at the dark road, eyes catching the reflection of stars. “Little by little,” he murmured.
From the back of the truck, Holt raised his arm in triumph. “We teach trade!” he shouted.
Rime, quiet behind him, nodded once. “And we teach fear,” he added.
Thane smiled at that.
“Both are useful.”
The convoy howled — some in voice, some in spirit — and the sound carried on the cold night air, rolling past fence posts and empty highway signs, sweeping over abandoned farmland and frozen riverbanks.
Somewhere behind them — in the stillness of Glendive — a child repeated the sound from a rooftop and smiled.
Because no matter who you were, or where you stood — every soul who heard it understood exactly what it meant:
There is a new world now.
And it travels in packs.