The girl arrived back in the house where the witches were still chanting. Her skin grew clammy as she suddenly realized something unseen had distorted time between when she’d left the house and arrived. “NO!” The fairy screamed in frustration, feeling the blast of the spell gone wrong as it slammed into her body, disintegrating her and the box that held the gisaeng’s heart.

The outward blast of the backfire of the spell spread across the area encompassing Hanyang. In the midst of the grief for the Queen, and the preparations for the Japanese invasion, as the king could only assume that the Japanese had killed his wife, the pained, panicked howls of wolves in the forest that surrounded parts of the city walls suddenly vanished from hearing.

The gisaeng house was shut down pending an investigation of a dead gisaeng whose heart had been cut out of her body, but no evidence or other leads could give away the culprit who’d vanished into thin air the moment the wolves stopped howling in the forest. The guards didn’t even recall Yesung being in the room, only concerned with the fact that a gory murder had happened right under the servant’s noses and none of them had heard a thing.

In the course of the Japanese invasion and subsequent takeover of Joseon, renaming the country Korea, many places were burned in an effort to bend the will of the old Joseon people to their new leaders. Records were burned in the magistrates houses while the magistrates themselves were executed for resisting the Japanese Emperor’s authority. Ministers and other high ranking officials in the Joseon court were stripped of their titles, lands and money, some sent to exile on the island named Jeju, while others were forced into slavery for the Japanese.

No one knew what had happened to Minister Lee’s son Donghae, not even the younger’s newlywed wife Sulli, only that he’d gone out for a walk the night the howling stopped and had vanished along with Seungri. Sulli's own maid had vanished as well, and Sulli was unfortunately, and quite unwillingly married off to some high ranking Japanese officer.

Life eventually went on for the people of Joseon, dealing with the oppression of the Japanese and eventually winning their freedom from the Japanese rule, and becoming a very independent country.

Years passed, bonds formed and broken, people living and dying. And then a girl was born in the year 1981, born knowing that a terrible purpose had been bestowed on her by her grandmother Park Jiyoung, a woman so old that any amount of wind could bowl her fragile frame over, and break something.

Jiyoung smiled as her granddaughter was born, a spitting image of herself and named her Park Ha Rae. This girl was special, born into the small pack that remained after the sudden disappearance of the Packs in Hanyang. Even she did not know what had happened that night so long ago.

Jiyoung did not live to see the terrible purpose that her granddaughter has inherited, passing away unexpectedly when Ha Rae turned 13. By this time the Pack had grown a bit again, expanding their territory out further under the cautious guidance of Jiyoung’s son and daughter in law who were the alpha and second of the Pack.

It was in the year 2012, a number of years after Jiyoung had passed that Ha Rae’s terrible purpose materialized out of thin air in their country home just outside of Seoul where her grandmother had set up a residence in the hopes that members of the old Packs Lee or Kim showed up though Ha Rae’s parents has scoffed at the idea, and had been contemplating selling the place since they were happy with their current property in Busan when Ha Rae announced she wanted to move into the home that reminded her deeply of Jiyoung.

Ha Rae was in the older home, putting the final touches on a painting when she heard an unnatural crash in the back yard and a whole lot of swearing. ‘There are 12 shifters outside.’ Her wolf, Mihue, said, sounding oddly smug in her assessment of the invasion of a whole bunch of scents she’d never smelled before.

‘Well duh.’ Ha Rae retorted back to her shifter, rolling her eyes. ‘I think today is the day that my purpose arrives.’

Ha Rae had never told her parents or her grandmother that she knew where the old Pack members had disappeared. Somehow, some way a bit of the old fairy magic had been floating around the Pack den on the day she’d been born, and had fused itself within her, becoming part of her wolf and herself.