The Moon Slayer moved with water's grace, each step a prayer written in flesh. Her blade sang in frequencies that made my teeth ache—not metal but crystallized moonlight given edge and purpose. The crescent scar on her face pulsed with its own light, as if her very skin remembered when such marks meant blessing instead of burden.
"The child carries enough moonlight to restore balance." Her voice held the cadence of liturgy, words worn smooth by repetition. "Her name is a fracture. Her birth, a blasphemy against the order that keeps the world turning."
Dorian stepped between us, sword already half-drawn, but the priestess's gaze never wavered from where I held Ashara. He might as well have been mist for all the attention she paid him. This was between mothers—one who'd given everything to faith, one who'd give everything to defy it.
"Who sent you?" I demanded, though I could taste the answer in the air around her—incense and old starlight, the scent of temples where choice went to die.
She bowed her head, and silver tears tracked down her painted cheeks. "Not who. What. The Moon itself cries out for wholeness. The Choir sings of empty skies. Balance demands a price, and your daughter is the only coin that fits."
The blade rose, slow and inevitable as tides that no longer turned. I clutched Ashara tighter, ready to fight with teeth and nails and whatever scraps of power I'd gathered. But I needn't have worried.
Ashara opened her eyes.
Not with the unfocused wonder of infancy. With purpose. With knowledge that sat strange in features still soft with newness. She didn't speak—couldn't yet, despite all her early words. She didn't cry.
She remembered.
Light poured from her, but not in beams or waves. It came in echoes, in layers, in moments stacked atop each other until reality grew thick with repetition. The clearing filled with us—dozens of versions, all true, all happening at once.
There—Aria singing the lullaby for the first time, Ashara minutes old and still bloody from birth. There—Aria facing down the mirror-child, choosing the real over the perfect. There—a thousand small moments of comfort, of choosing, of fighting for the right to love imperfectly.
Time stuttered under the weight of so much remembering. The Moon Slayer stumbled, her perfect grace failing as past and present collided. Her blade wavered, its light fracturing into prismatic confusion.
"What... is this?" She pressed one hand to her temple, the other still gripping her weapon but without certainty.
"Memory," I said simply. "Motherhood. Her shield against anyone who'd make her less than she chooses to be."
The light faded gradually, time settling back into linear flow. But the warning hung clear in the air—my daughter was no longer defenseless. She'd learned to weaponize love itself.
The Moon Slayer straightened slowly, and when she spoke again, her voice had lost its ceremonial distance. Now it carried weight of personal loss, of choices that carved souls hollow.
"I had a daughter once." The admission seemed to surprise her. "Before I was this. Before devotion ate everything else. Her name was Lyralei, and she laughed like silver bells."
I said nothing, but my grip on Ashara loosened slightly. The priestess wasn't looking at us anymore—her gaze had turned inward, toward memories that cut deeper than any blade.
"I served as High Lunarch in the Moon Temple. Before it fell. Before we understood the price of touching divinity." Her scarred face twisted with remembered agony. "There was a rite—the Lunar Flowering. My daughter was chosen. Such an honor, they said. To carry moonlight in mortal flesh."
The blade in her hand trembled. "She absorbed too much. The fragment took root, grew like cancer made of light. Within days, she'd forgotten her name. Within weeks, she moved only with the tides. She'd become nothing but rhythm and radiance, trapped in a body that remembered being human."
"So you killed her." Not accusation. Understanding.
"I held her down as the priests hollowed her soul to anchor the sky." Tears flowed freely now, silver mixing with ash on her cheeks. "I sang her favorite lullaby while they poured her essence into stone. I chose the world over my child, and the world rewarded me with this—" She gestured to herself, to the blade, to the scar. "Eternal service to the balance I helped maintain."
"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it. "But I won't follow your path."
Her eyes snapped back to focus. "You think you're protecting her? You're damning her. Every moment she carries that light, she moves further from human. One day she'll wake and won't remember your face. She'll see only the cosmic role she was born to fill."
"Then I'll damn her with love, not obedience." The words came out harder than stone. "I'll teach her to choose her shape, her path, her name. Even if it breaks the sky. Especially then."
"The world will die without its moon!"
"Then the world should have thought of that before demanding my daughter as sacrifice."
The Moon Slayer's face crumpled with grief and fury in equal measure. She raised her blade one final time, its light steady now with terrible purpose. "Lay the child down in the moon circle. She will sleep eternal but peaceful. She will become the new satellite. The world will spin again, and mothers will tell their children stories of the girl who became the night's jewel."
Ashara began to cry—soft, human sobs that had nothing to do with cosmic power. Just a baby frightened by raised voices and sharp light. Dorian's hand found mine, grounding me in the choice I'd already made.
"No one chooses our daughter's shape but her," he said quietly.
The blade began its descent. Dorian moved to intercept, but I stepped past him. This wasn't his fight. This was between mothers—one who'd bent to heaven's will, one who'd break heaven itself before bending.
"You killed your daughter to serve the sky," I said, drawing the small silver dagger from my belt. My mother's blade, used for blessings and blood-lettings, for cutting cords and carving names. "I'll kill you to save mine."
She paused, perhaps recognizing the blade's significance. "That won't pierce moonlight."
"It doesn't need to. It just needs to pierce you."
We moved at the same moment—she with a dancer's precision, me with a mother's desperation. The space between us collapsed, filled with silver light and the scream of metal meeting impossible things.
But just before impact, Ashara spoke in her sleep. Not babble, not crying. A word clear and terrible and new:
"Lunara-sei."
The Moon Slayer's blade cracked down its length, moonlight spilling like blood from the wound. We both froze, weapons nearly touching, as understanding dawned.
"She's naming the sky itself," the priestess whispered, horror and wonder warring in her voice. "Not becoming it. Claiming it."
Above us, the empty darkness flickered. Not with returning moon but with something else—a light being born from will rather than cosmic accident. My daughter, barely months old, had begun to speak new names for old powers.
The cracked blade sang its death song, and in that sound, I heard the future fracturing open.
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