The stream ran cold and wrong, its current stuttering like a broken heartbeat. I knelt beside it, filling our waterskins while trying to ignore how the liquid moved—not flowing but lurching forward in fits and starts. Above us, the night sky stretched clear and star-filled, but the absence at its heart made everything feel tilted.
Three nights. Three nights without moonrise.
"The compass is dead," Dorian said quietly, showing me the instrument. Its needle spun lazy circles, finding no true north. "And look at the water. The tide should have turned hours ago."
I watched a leaf drift downstream, pause, then drift backward before continuing on. "No moon means no tides. No tides means no death ceremonies." My voice caught on the implications. "No death means no rebirth. The world is forgetting how to cycle."
Birds flew overhead in patterns that hurt to follow—sharp angles where there should be curves, stopping mid-flight to hover before remembering motion. In the distance, where wolves should howl at the absent moon, only silence pressed against our ears.
The world wasn't dying. It was stagnating, stuck on a cosmic exhale with no inhale to follow.
"We need to find shelter," Dorian said, but I heard the unspoken concern. Shelter from what? From the wrongness itself? From whatever had swallowed the moon?
We made camp in the shadow of Caelmir's ruins, the abandoned wolf city now more vegetation than stone. Vines thick as my arm wound through empty windows, and roots had cracked the great plaza where alphas once held court. The city slept beneath its green shroud, and we slept uneasily beside it.
I woke to silver light.
Not from above—the sky remained stubbornly moonless. The glow came from Ashara, cradled between us. Her skin emanated soft luminescence, pulsing with her breath. Inhale—the light waxed. Exhale—it waned. My daughter had become her own lunar cycle.
"Dorian." I barely breathed his name, afraid to disturb whatever was happening.
He was already awake, hand on his sword but frozen by the same wonder that held me. Around us, the ruins responded to Ashara's light. Vines lifted themselves from stone, reaching toward her with vegetable yearning. The air filled with whispers of wings as creatures emerged from the darkness.
Moon moths, their wings transparent except where silver traced delicate patterns. Blind owls that navigated by celestial memory rather than sight. And standing at the edge of our firelight, a ghostly stag whose antlers bore the perfect curve of a crescent moon carved deep into bone.
"Should I—" Dorian's hand tightened on his blade.
"No." I watched the creatures arrange themselves in reverent circles around our camp. "She's not summoning them. She's replacing what's missing. The moon is trying to be reborn through her."
The stag stepped closer, and I saw its eyes were holes filled with starlight. It lowered its great head until the carved crescent almost touched Ashara's glowing form. For a moment, the light between them bridged, and I saw—
The moon, not in sky but in flesh. My daughter's essence spread thin across heaven's vault, her consciousness becoming tide and cycle and the rhythm by which the world measured madness and magic both.
"No," I whispered, gathering her closer. The vision shattered, but its possibility lingered like smoke.
When exhaustion finally pulled me under, Ashara still glowing in my arms, I found myself elsewhere. The Moon Temple—not as I'd known it but as it truly was. Broken. Columns cracked down the middle, altar split by some cosmic violence, the pool that once reflected futures now dark and still.
Twelve figures surrounded me in perfect circle. Moon-robed, faces hidden not by cloth but by absence itself. They glowed with reflected light, as if they were memories of illumination rather than sources.
"You broke the Moon Path." Their voices harmonized into something that bypassed ears entirely. "The child is the fragment that could seal it. Return her, and the sky will remember how to rise."
"Return her how?" Though I already knew. Had known from the moment she'd started glowing.
They showed me. Not in words but in visions that tasted of silver and sorrow. Ashara's essence poured like liquid starlight into a hollow moonstone the size of a temple. Her body would remain—sleeping, breathing, even growing. But empty. A beautiful shell while her true self hung in the sky, providing light and tide and time's measurement.
"She chose to be born," I said, tears running unchecked. "She fought for flesh and breath and—"
"She chose to exist." No cruelty in their interruption, only cosmic certainty. "Not to replace the sky. But the sky needs replacing, and she carries the only light that fits."
They gave me until the next moonless nightfall to decide. As if I could. As if any mother could pour her child into the sky and call it necessary.
I woke to find dawn breaking grey and reluctant. Dorian sat watch, Ashara cradled in one arm while his other hand stayed ready on his weapon. The creatures of the night had vanished, but their reverence lingered in the disturbed earth, the patterns their gathering had worn.
"Did you dream?" he asked.
"They want her to become the moon. Not metaphorically. Literally. Pour her consciousness into stone and hang her in the sky." The words tasted like ash. "They say it's the only way to restore balance."
His jaw tightened. "There's always another way."
"Is there? Look around us. The world is forgetting how to turn. If she could fix it—"
"By ceasing to be our daughter?" His voice cracked with rare emotion. "By becoming a thing to be worshipped instead of held?"
I had no answer. Only the weight of Ashara in my arms, still faintly glowing, still breathing in moon-phases. My daughter, the accidental cosmic anchor.
Movement at the edge of camp drew our attention. A figure approached through morning mist—tall, robed in ceremonial dress that had seen better centuries. As she drew closer, details resolved: cracked moon-pearls sewn into fabric, face painted with ash and starlight in patterns that hurt to follow, and carved into her face from left eye to jaw, a crescent scar that wept silver.
She carried a blade that shouldn't exist. The last visible moonbeam, given form and edge.
"Aria Nightbloom." Her voice was gentle water over stone. "I am Seraphel, Last Priestess of the Lunar Order. I've come to help you make the choice you cannot make alone."
"I haven't decided—"
"You have." She stepped into our camp with movements that flowed like liquid light. "A mother's heart decides the moment the question is asked. You will not give her to the sky. So the sky has sent me to collect what it needs."
Not a threat. Not malice. Simply fact delivered with the certainty of someone who'd given everything to their faith and had only duty left.
"She's not the moon," I said, standing to place myself between this priestess and my daughter. "She's mine."
"She is both. That is the tragedy." Seraphel drew her impossible blade, moonlight singing as it cleared its sheath. "I do not come as enemy, Aria Nightbloom. I come as mercy. Better a quick ending than a slow unmaking as the world forgets how to turn."
She bowed then—not in respect but in mourning. For what she must do. For the child who would die to birth a moon. For the mother who would fight the very sky to keep her daughter earthbound.
"Please," I whispered, though I knew words wouldn't turn her from her path. "There has to be another way."
"If there is," Seraphel said, raising her blade to catch light that no longer fell from above, "you have until my stroke falls to find it."
The morning held its breath. Somewhere above, the empty sky waited to be filled.
And between us, Ashara glowed on, unaware that she was both problem and solution, both child and cosmos, both mine and the world's.
The blade began its descent, slow as moonrise, certain as sunset.
And I prepared to fight heaven itself for the right to keep my daughter human.
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