Nea was born with the spirit of the wolf in her blood.
Raised on Secwépemc land, torn between modern life and ancestral calling, Nea has always walked between worlds—fierce, gifted, and guided by dreams that blur the line between vision and reality. But when betrayal shatters her connection to culture and love, she spirals into self-destruction, forgetting who she is.
An ancient force begins to awaken on her twin flame journey—one that has haunted her bloodline for generations. As sacred land is threatened by corporate greed and an old prophecy stirs, Nea must confront her pain, reclaim her gifts, and remember her place in the greater unfolding.
Will she answer the call, or be lost to shadow?
Of Spirit and Bone: Legacy of the Wolves is a powerful debut novel blending Indigenous prophecy, intergenerational trauma, and spiritual realism.
For those those called to remember.
Nea was born with the spirit of the wolf in her blood.
Raised on Secwépemc land, torn between modern life and ancestral calling, Nea has always walked between worlds—fierce, gifted, and guided by dreams that blur the line between vision and reality. But when betrayal shatters her connection to culture and love, she spirals into self-destruction, forgetting who she is.
An ancient force begins to awaken on her twin flame journey—one that has haunted her bloodline for generations. As sacred land is threatened by corporate greed and an old prophecy stirs, Nea must confront her pain, reclaim her gifts, and remember her place in the greater unfolding.
Will she answer the call, or be lost to shadow?
Of Spirit and Bone: Legacy of the Wolves is a powerful debut novel blending Indigenous prophecy, intergenerational trauma, and spiritual realism.
For those those called to remember.
Preface
Welcome, beloved one.
Of Spirit and Bone: Legacy of the Wolves is not just a novel—it is a remembering. A soul-deep journey across timelines and bloodlines, where the past howls through prophecy and the future is shaped by the ones brave enough to reclaim it.
This story was born at the crossroads of ceremony and survival, rooted in ancestral knowing and fed by the flames of personal transformation. Though the characters and events are fictional, the medicine carried here is real. You may recognize pieces of yourself—or your ancestors—woven between these lines. You may feel the spirits walking beside you as the veils thin. Set in a world that mirrors our own but pulses with the presence of the unseen, this tale walks between land and spirit, trauma and healing, sovereignty and surrender. It is shaped by Indigenous teachings, spiritual visions, and a lifetime spent walking with the wolf.
You will meet Nea, a woman torn between worlds—guided by the wild, betrayed by love, and called by something older than memory. Her path is tortured, sacred, and deeply human. She is not a heroine, but a mirror.
This book is for the ones who’ve lost themselves and fought to rise again.
For those who know their dreams are not just dreams.
For the ones carrying stories in their bones.
For those called to remember.
Take what you need. Leave what you don’t. And walk gently—because what you are about to enter is not just fiction. It’s my medicine.
Part 1: Daughter of the Wolf
Chapter 1: The Awakening of the Wolf
For months—no, for years—I dreamed of running barefoot through the forest, my body shifting in fits and jolts. My muscles stretched like taffy, my bones cracked open like thunder, and my skin burned, not with fire, but with becoming and becoming something else. Something ancient. Something wild.
The dreams always began the same way: the intoxicating rush of speed—the slap of bare feet against damp earth. Trees blurred past me like memories I couldn’t quite reach. My breath came sharp and fast, my lungs burning with cold air, my chest rising and falling to a rhythm I didn’t choose. Initially, it felt like freedom—like an instinct rising from some forgotten core of me. Something deep, something primal. As I remembered how to exist in my proper form.
But then—came the shift.
The bones in my hands twisted unnaturally, fingers clawing inward as if some force beneath my skin demanded to be let out. I watched, helpless, as claws erupted through flesh, blood spilling hot over my palms. My spine arched violently, a snapping pain blooming as the vertebrae twisted and reshaped themselves. My face stretched forward, my jaw tearing open as fangs shoved their way through my gums. I tried to scream, but what escaped my throat wasn’t human. It was a guttural, feral snarl—raw and unrecognizable.
I fell. Convulsed. My bones shattered and reformed in seconds. The pain was exquisite. Blinding. And yet... necessary.
Then came the running again. Always the running. Faster this time. Stronger. Paws instead of feet. Fur instead of skin. The scent of prey in my nostrils. The wind is no longer against me—but of me.
This was the dream. My dream. Over and over. A loop I could never escape. A lesson I hadn’t yet learned.
I had always been... different.
As a child, I felt the world more sharply than others, not just in terms of emotions but in the unspoken, the invisible. Rooms carried energy. Trees whispered truths. People’s sorrow seeped into my skin before they even spoke. I didn’t have words for it then—I only knew I carried more than just my feelings.
My father, my Daddio, was the only one who didn’t ask me to dull myself. A tall, sweet, silly cowboy-Indian with dark eyes full of knowing. He carried himself like a man who had seen pain and chosen to greet it with laughter. The kind of man who shook hands with strangers like cousins and made even the angriest logger grin by the end of a conversation. When he was home from the camps, the whole house shifted. It brightened. It softened. I was never afraid of the dark when he was around.
My mother was a different kind of woman. Beautiful. Strong. With eyes that had seen too much. The Indian Residential School had stolen her childhood, and the years with my father—his drinking, his wandering—had nearly stolen the rest. She loved us. She cared for us. But she lived like a woman who had built a fortress around her heart and had long forgotten where the door was.
Still, she taught me things my father didn’t. About the old ways. About the spirits. About what it meant to be seen by the other world.
Some of my best memories were out in the bush with my dad. Fishing in the early morning mist, hunting under golden autumn leaves. He’d teach me how to track, listen, and wait. There was a rhythm to it all. A respect. He’d tell stories while we waited—of old warriors, shapeshifters, and wolves who were once men. Stories, I thought, were just legends until I began to dream.
The dreams started slowly. A flicker in my subconscious. A single paw print in the snow of my mind. But by the time I turned fourteen, they were relentless. Night after night, I didn’t just see the wolf—I was the wolf. And in those dreams, I wasn’t always a girl. Sometimes, I was a man, a mother, something with no name. A spirit. A shadow. A hunter. A guide. Something that existed beyond the lines of gender, beyond time. Something old. Something sacred.
Then, one night, the dreams bled into the waking world.
I opened my eyes—or thought I did—but couldn’t move. I was suspended in that space between sleep and wakefulness, that liminal realm where the veil between worlds thins. My limbs were heavy. My chest is tight. The air around me buzzed with energy, thick and electric. The walls of my room seemed to breathe.
And something was in the room with me.
I couldn’t see it. Not exactly. But I felt it. A presence—tall, dark, not human. It stood by my bed, silent, watching. Its energy pressed in around me like water. My body screamed to run, to flee—but I was frozen. Fear surged in my blood like lightning.
I remembered what my mother had said. “If a spirit ever comes for you, and you’re afraid—pray.”
So I did.
I repeatedly closed my eyes and forced the Lord’s Prayer into my mind, each word a shield. I summoned every drop of courage and imagined my spirit rising, standing, pushing back. I slowly shoved the presence away with invisible hands, not with strength but with will. It resisted. Then relented.
And just like that—it was gone.
The air shifted. The pressure lifted. My limbs loosened. Exhaustion wrapped around me like a blanket, and I fell into a deep, empty sleep.
I didn’t wake up until morning.
Downstairs, everything looked the same. Sunlight streamed through the kitchen window. My mother was at the stove, flipping eggs. The scent of bacon and coffee filled the air. But I wasn’t the same. Not anymore.
She turned when she heard me, her eyes scanning my face. “How did you sleep?” she asked.
I hesitated. “Not great,” I said. “I... there was a spirit in my room. It stood beside me. I prayed, like you told me. And I pushed it away.”
She froze. Then, she slowly turned to face me, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Her voice was low. “I know,” she said.
I blinked. “What do you mean, you know?”
“I saw them,” she said. “Two wolves. One black. One white. They stood at your bedside last night. You were swatting at them in your sleep. And then... they left.”
My knees nearly buckled. She hadn’t been in the room. She hadn’t seen me struggle. And yet... she knew. She saw.
At that moment, the world I thought I knew unraveled at the seams.
I was no longer just a girl with strange dreams. I was part of something older, sacred, terrifying, and beautiful. And I wasn’t alone.
That moment marked the beginning of everything.
In the following weeks, my mother spoke to me in ways she had never spoken to me before. She told me of spirits she'd seen in her childhood. Of the times she felt her dead brother beside her, of the figure who once stood at the edge of the reserve road, beckoning. She told me the stories she'd never dared say aloud.
And I listened. And I asked questions. And I read everything I could—on spirit guides, mysticism, Wicca, astrology, meditation, the unseen laws of the universe. I wandered through the library as if it were a holy place. Knowledge became a lifeline. But so did silence. Because this wasn’t something I could talk about to friends. To teachers. To strangers.
This knowing was too wild. Too raw.
By then, my father was sober. He had come back to us after years of drifting. My parents had stitched their lives back together with trembling hands and quiet forgiveness. Our home, for once, was still. But I... wasn’t. I was vibrating and changing and seeing things I couldn’t unsee.
I was a girl standing between worlds—one foot in the ordinary and the other in the sacred.
And the first time I met my seméc, my wolf spirit guide, I did not meet it with understanding. I met it with fear. With trembling limbs and a soul unsure if it was being chosen or cursed.
It would take time to understand that fear and power are siblings.
Learning that my path wasn’t punishment but invitation would take time.
And that night, when the wolves came to my bedside, it wasn’t just a visitation.
It was a calling.
And I would never be the same again. It was time to visit Grampa Oliver.
Grampa Oliver. The name alone made my stomach flutter. He was the one they called the Old Wolf, the medicine man who never left the ridge and spoke with spirits as easily as most people breathe. The mélems`tye, the wolf, was in my lineage. I’d only met him a few times at family gatherings, but even then, I’d felt his eyes reading me like he knew something I didn’t. Like he remembered me from another life.
I had never been to the sweat lodge before. Not because I hadn’t wanted to—but because I hadn't been ready. There’s a difference. Readiness isn’t about age. It’s about memory. It's about waking up to what’s always been inside you.
When we arrived, the air around the lodge was thick with the scent of sage, smoke curling through the trees like spirits returning home. Grampa Oliver stood barefoot in the dirt, a bundle of cedar in his hands. His face was lined with years and wisdom, his eyes dark as soil, as old as stone. When he took my hands, his grip was firm but kind.
“So you’ve been running with the wolf,” he said, voice low, ancient. “And now you want to know why.”
Inside the lodge, the heat swallowed me whole. Steam rose from the glowing stones, the scent of cedar and sweetgrass swirling like a song. My breath came in shallow gasps as Grampa sang. The songs weren’t in English, but my soul understood. They were the words of my ancestors, calling me home.
The fire cracked and hissed, casting shadows that danced on the curved walls. As Grampa's voice grew stronger, something inside me broke open. My body trembled. My vision blurred. I felt her—the wolf. Not just inside me—but all around me. My skin burned, but I wasn’t afraid.
That night, the dream returned. But it wasn’t just mine anymore.
I wasn’t running alone.
Beside me ran the wolves of my bloodline—women and men with eyes like mine, spirits fierce and untamed. I recognized some of their faces from photographs and old stories. Others I had never seen but knew by heart. They were guiding me, surrounding me, keeping me from straying too far from the path I hadn’t yet discovered. We ran together through a forest older than time, chasing something I didn’t yet understand. But I knew this:
This was the beginning.
Not of the dream—but of remembering who I was before the world made me forget.
Nea was born between times and worlds. She was born and raised on Secwépemc land, but now that land is under threat (again), and this time the threat comes from one of their own. She and her family are now faced with a choice: fight for the one at risk of becoming lost, or fight for the land.
Life, events, and pain keep getting in the way, causing Nea to lose her path in life. Worse, to lose her connection to the past.
Whew. Of Spirit and Bone: Legacy of the Wolves: The Prophecy Unfolds is an incredible and emotionally tense read. Seriously, buckle up and get ready to get invested in Nea’s story. Personally, I had to read the whole novel in one sitting, because I was that desperate to see how Nea’s past, present, and future would unfold.
Of Spirit and Bone: Legacy of the Wolves does more than dig into Nea’s life; it digs into her people’s history, merging magical realism elements in the process. Readers will find a unique blend of Indigenous prophecy, intergenerational trauma, spiritual awareness, historical details, political battles, and so much more.
At the center of this complex tale is Wusnea, aka Nea. Her journey is full of choices, and readers are invited to follow along as she faces numerous obstacles in her path, ranging from personal battles to concerns that encompass her entire life and those of the people around her. It’s an inspiring and heartbreaking read, in equal measure.
Of Spirit and Bone: Legacy of the Wolves: The Prophecy Unfolds is, without a shadow of a doubt, worth reading. The magical realism elements help to elevate the overall premise and increase emotional tension. Meanwhile, Dr. Cheryl Matthew’s writing hits hard, especially when it comes time for Nea to speak. Those are the moments that will stick with me for years to come. I am thrilled to say that this is the first in a series, and I am looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Highlights:
Magical Realism
Fierce & Determined Character
Multiple POVs & Time jumps