Kendra Sunderland Vixen -

She closed the distance in a heartbeat. She didn't attack Silas. She attacked the stone . Her jaws, now strong enough to crush granite, closed around the shard. The cold tried to freeze her from the inside out, but the Vixen spirit was older than cold—it was the fire of survival, the cunning of the hunted turned hunter.

But Kendra hadn't chosen this life. She had been a wildlife biologist, tracking a rare fox species for her thesis. Then she’d found the den—not of foxes, but of something older. A sinkhole lined with runic stones that hummed with a low, territorial magic. When she touched the central stone, it didn't burn her. It recognized her. A sliver of the forest’s ancient consciousness, the "Vixen Spirit," flowed into her bones. Now, between moonrise and dawn, her auburn hair lengthened into a thick, shimmering pelt, her hazel eyes slitted into gold, and her voice became the bark of a predator. kendra sunderland vixen

Kendra, still half-human, watched from the ferns as the foreman, a brutish man named Silas, held the shard. Where it touched his skin, his veins turned black. He grinned, not with his own malice, but with the emptiness of the thing he now served. She closed the distance in a heartbeat

The loggers dropped their chainsaws. Silas raised the sky-stone, and a beam of null-light shot out, turning ferns to gray dust. Kendra didn't dodge. She re-directed . With a twist of her lithe body, she kicked a fallen log into the beam's path. The wood didn't burn; it ceased to exist, but the distraction was enough. Her jaws, now strong enough to crush granite,