Lily's first memory in this life began on a frigid winter day blanketed in snow.
She could no longer remember the place's name, the location of those mountains and forests, or even which country she had been in at the time. She could not remember what her adoptive parents looked like, either. She only remembered waking beside a small cabin deep in the mountains and forests, and that the year had been bitterly cold.
It was the dead of winter, and heavy snow had sealed off the mountains. White snow weighed down the branches of century-old trees, while sled tracks, wagon ruts, and hoofprints had been blurred by the northern wind overnight. She lay in a kennel lined with wool blankets and straw mats, waking when a cold draft swept over her.
Beside her was a litter of little puppies squirming and jostling against one another, their bodies still covered in soft fuzz.
Among Lily's earliest thoughts, she still knew that those puppies were her brothers and sisters. But soon, those vague notions vanished as her mental world continued to reshape itself. Within seconds of opening her eyes for the first time, the "human personality" in her had completely driven out the "beast personality." Over the many years that followed, she went from firmly believing she was human to firmly believing she was a werewolf. Yet she could never remember lying on the same blanket with a group of fluffy little huskies.
An elderly couple—the owners of the cabin in the woods—were awakened by the commotion among the dogs. When they discovered the little girl crawling out of the kennel, they were utterly stunned. Then they realized that Heaven had bestowed a gift upon them.
Lily's thoughts drifted among fragments of time she had nearly forgotten.
She rarely told anyone