Prequel stories revealing the wounds that shaped Declan, Elena, Ben, Renee, Carter, Wren, Vince, and Elara.
Declan Rourke
An Origin Story
2015 (Age 26) • 1400 words
Declan was twenty-six when they gave him the C. Not the letter, he'd worn letters before, in junior hockey, in the AHL, but the weight. The understanding that from now on, he would carry alone.
Read StoryElena Marlowe
An Origin Story
2006 (Age 16) • 1200 words
At sixteen, Elena Lupino filed a misconduct report against a physician. This is the story of what happened when the system protected its own, and how a girl learned that documentation was the only protection she could trust.
Read StoryBen Kowalski
An Origin Story
2011 (Age 19) • 1400 words
Ben was nineteen when his father died. At the funeral he ran the same calibrated handshake for three hours, smiling at everyone who came to say the same sentence. It was his mother, on the back steps in November, who told him he was doing his father's job. This is the moment he put the smile on and understood it would fit perfectly. It always had.
Read StoryRenee Lavoie
An Origin Story
2023 (Age 27) • 1400 words
Third period, Wolves up 3-1, and Renee has a USB drive in her bag that's been sitting there for two weeks. When her editor calls after the final buzzer, she learns exactly what he did with her investigation. She files the recap. She deletes the lede. She drives home without looking at her bag. This is the night she chose the comfortable lie, and knew she was choosing it.
Read StoryCarter Knox
An Origin Story
2024 (Age 21) • 1450 words
Carter Knox arrived at the Portland Wolves tryout camp at twenty-one with a duffel bag, a mattress on the floor back in Toledo, and a seven-year-old's survival math he'd never stopped running. He made the team. He sat in an empty locker room afterward with no one left to perform for, and the smile was still there. That was the scariest thing that happened all week.
Read StoryWren Gallagher
An Origin Story
2025 (Age 26) • 1500 words
Wren Gallagher is covering a youth hockey tournament in Portland when a mother with a glitter-paint sign asks her to watch for number fourteen. She watches. She gets the shot. Afterward, Noa asks about Toronto. Wren tells more than she means to. Her hands are steady during the shot, shaking after. By the end of the day, they are still again. That is enough.
Read StoryVince Mercer
An Origin Story
2019 (Age 28) • 1500 words
Vince Mercer is called into Conference B with three people on one side and one chair on his. The Portland Wolves front office wants him to sign a document they're calling a contextualization statement: his own words, timestamped and typeset, reshaped into something that says he chose to play through a shoulder injury at six when he was reporting it as four. He doesn't sign. He drives to the parking lot. He opens a notebook.
Read StoryElara Vasquez
An Origin Story
2022 (Age 29) • 1450 words
Elara Vasquez has a forty-five-minute window, three medium boxes from Office Depot, and a four-year-old named Leo who doesn't know they are moving. She staged her exit from this marriage the same way she staged every team dinner: with a run-of-show, a timeline, and a window that closes on schedule. The difference is that this production is hers. The binder is lighter than a cereal box. Everything that makes her mine is in that binder or buckled into the seat behind her.
Read StoryMilo Varga
An Origin Story
2020 (Age 19) • 1400 words
Milo Varga is nineteen, a backup goaltender in Winnipeg, eating rice from measured containers across from a defenseman named Lev Sorokin who talks enough for both of them. Over seven weeks, Milo watches Lev's left shoulder drop three millimeters at a time. He notices. He files it. He says nothing. The hit comes on a Tuesday in practice. Two days later, Lev's stall is empty. Milo buys a notebook from a Shoppers Drug Mart on Portage Avenue and writes the first entry: everything he saw and did not say.
Read StoryRisa Kwon
An Origin Story
2026 (Age 30) • 1400 words
Risa Kwon arrives at David Yoon's office at 7:42 on a Tuesday morning to find the nameplate already gone. Four sentences in an email for twenty-two years of service. Three binders remain on his desk. Red tabs, blue tabs, green tabs. She reads all three cover to cover by noon. Then she takes them home and rebuilds them from the ground up with her mother's tab system, because David chose the pension and Risa chose the record.
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