The night felt hollow, as if something essential had been scooped out and replaced with absence. Ashara stood in the clearing, her small form casting a shadow that stretched wrong—too long, too dark, moving independent of the light that should have shaped it.
She hummed to the sky, that haunting melody that had once brought divine attention. But tonight, nothing answered. The moon hid behind a veil of ash that shouldn't exist, hadn't been there an hour ago, and her song met only silence.
"It's not listening," I said, the words tasting like betrayal.
The Moon Goddess—who'd marked me, tested me, used my daughter as a vessel for prophecy—had turned away. After everything we'd survived in her name, she offered only this cold absence.
Dorian's hand found mine in the darkness. "Maybe that's better. Maybe—"
"No." I pulled free, moving closer to Ashara. "This isn't better. This is abandonment. She's withdrawing her protection."
"From you?"
"From her." I watched my daughter hum her lonely song to deaf stars. "The divine don't simply stop watching. They stop watching for a reason."
The old rites lived in my muscle memory—movements my mother had taught me before I understood their weight. I began the calling, feet tracing patterns in dirt, hands shaping air into sacred geometries. The words came rusty but true, pulled from depths I'd tried to forget.
"Moon Mother, Silver Eye, Watcher of Thresholds—"
Nothing.
"Bearer of Tides, Keeper of Changes, Guardian of—"
Still nothing.
The silence pressed down like judgment. I'd performed the rite perfectly, each gesture precise, each word properly intoned. The moon should have answered. Something should have—
A reply came. But not from above.
From beneath.
The ground thrummed with presence that felt almost right, nearly familiar, but wrong in crucial ways. Like hearing your mother's voice through water—recognizable but distorted, coming from the wrong direction.
Ashara's humming changed pitch, harmonizing with the underground pulse. Her skin began to glow—not the silver-white of lunar blessing but something muddier. Earth-light. Cave-glow. The luminescence of things that had never known sky.
Her lips moved, shaping words in no language meant for human tongues. But I understood them anyway, felt their meaning crawl up my spine:
The Moon has fled. The depths remain. What was above now roots below.
"No." I stepped between my daughter and the sky, between her and the false presence trying to wear divinity's mask. "You don't owe them prophecy. You don't owe anyone your voice."
The words hit like stones thrown at glass. Ashara's humming shattered mid-note. The earth-light flickered, and something screamed—not with sound but with wind, a howling gust that tore through the clearing, bringing the taste of deep places, forgotten places, patient places.
But my daughter's eyes cleared.
The possession—for that's what it had been, subtle and wrong—retreated like tide pulling back from shore. Ashara blinked, confused, present. Just a child who'd been singing to stars that wouldn't sing back.
"Mama?" Her voice came small, uncertain. "The moon won't talk to me anymore."
I knelt, gathering her close, feeling how her skin had cooled from its unnatural warmth. "I know, baby. I know."
"Did I do something wrong? Did I make her angry when I didn't finish the words?"
How could I explain divine abandonment to someone who'd barely learned to speak? How could I tell her that gods were fickle, that their love came conditional, that being chosen meant being discarded when you no longer served their purpose?
"You did nothing wrong," I said firmly. "Sometimes... sometimes the moon just needs to be quiet. Like we do."
She pulled back, studying me with those silver eyes that held too much weight. "But if the moon leaves me... if she takes back the light..." Her small hand pressed against her chest, over her heart. "Will I still be yours?"
The question broke something in me. This child, who'd carried prophecy in her bones, who'd been vessel and voice and bridge between worlds—she thought my love was tied to her divine purpose. Thought I'd claimed her for what she could be rather than who she was.
I cupped her face in my hands, ensuring she saw the truth in my eyes. "You are mine because you chose to be born. Because you fought to be human. Because you picked love over power." I kissed her forehead, tasting moonlight and mortality in equal measure. "The moon can withdraw. The gods can forget. The prophecies can crumble. You will still be mine."
"Even if I'm ordinary?"
"Especially then."
She considered this with the gravity of someone rewriting their understanding of the world. Then, with the trust only children can muster, she nodded and pressed herself back into my embrace.
Dorian approached carefully, watching the shadows that still moved wrong around us. "The thing underground. It's still there."
"I know." I stood, lifting Ashara with me. "It's been waiting for the moon to turn away. Waiting for her to be vulnerable."
"What is it?"
"Something that wants to be worshipped." I thought of the earth-light, the backward divinity, the way it had tried to slip into the spaces the moon had abandoned. "Something that thinks it can replace what's been withdrawn."
"Can it?"
I looked at my daughter, drowsing now against my shoulder, worn out from singing to silence and being answered by the wrong things. Her shadow had returned to normal—mostly. Sometimes it still moved a heartbeat late, as if remembering its brief independence.
"Not if we're careful. Not if we remember that gods—real or false—only have the power we give them."
We left the clearing as the ash-veil thickened overhead, blotting out even the wrong stars. Whatever had answered from below watched us go, patient as stone, certain as gravity. It would wait. It would whisper. It would offer what the moon had withdrawn.
But I'd meant what I told Ashara. She was mine not because of prophecy or power or divine purpose. She was mine because we'd chosen each other, mortal and messy and real.
The moon could sulk in her ash-shroud. The false gods could circle like carrion birds.
We had something stronger than divine favor:
We had each other.
And that would have to be enough.
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