Gwynviène Avenloré first met Panvier as a child, during a quiet family picnic near the edge of the grove. She had wandered slightly from the blanket, still clutching a half-eaten piece of crusty bread, when she noticed a shivering bundle of fur tucked beneath the roots of a gnarled willow. He was small then—just a pup—but his coat already shimmered with a strange blue-grey hue, and his eyes, pale and glassy-lavender, met hers with eerie stillness.
She knelt, cautious but instinctively gentle, and broke off a bit of her bread to offer him. The pup inched forward, sniffed, then accepted the bite with trembling jaws. That moment, quiet and soft and utterly unplanned, sealed something between them.
When her parents called her back, she simply looked down at the little creature and murmured, “Panvier”—a name that came from nowhere, and yet felt like everything. She would later laugh, remembering it had likely been inspired by the bread in her hand—pain, the old word for it—but the name stayed. Somehow, it suited him.
She didn’t know then that he was anything more than a lost, wild pup. Only much later would the signs begin to show—that Panvier was no ordinary wolf, but something older, wilder, and bound to her in ways she still didn’t understand.