The sigil pulsed like a living heartbeat, each throb sending waves of heat through our small chamber. I reached toward it, drawn by something deeper than curiosity—a mother's need to understand what threatened her child.
My fingers barely grazed the charred wood before the world tilted.
I stood in a temple I'd never seen, yet knew with bone-deep certainty. Blood pooled in ritual channels carved into white stone, still warm, still flowing. At the altar's heart sat a woman with silver eyes and midnight hair, crowned with my daughter's face aged to terrible perfection.
Ashara. But not. This creature wore her features like an inheritance twisted wrong.
"Mother," she said, and her voice held the weight of dead stars. "You came to worship?"
Around her, bodies knelt in reverence or death—I couldn't tell which. Those who dared raise their eyes burned in moonfire that left no ash, only absence. She ruled not through love or wisdom but through the simple fact that opposing her meant ceasing to exist.
"This is what she becomes," a voice whispered from nowhere, everywhere. "If you don't choose soon."
"Aria!" Dorian's voice cracked through the vision like lightning through glass. I gasped back to myself, knees hitting the floor hard enough to bruise. His hands caught me before I could fall further, but I barely felt them.
Ashara's humming had grown louder. Not just sound now—vibration that set the walls trembling, the floor cracking in spider-web patterns that spelled words in languages better left dead.
The door burst open. A priestess I didn't recognize stood there, face pale beneath ceremonial paint, breathing like she'd run from the far side of the compound.
"The eclipse is accelerating," she gasped. "The High Priest demands your presence. You must come to the sanctum now."
"Accelerating?" Dorian's arm tightened around me. "Eclipses don't—"
"This one does." Her eyes fixed on Ashara with barely concealed terror. "Since she woke. Since she sang. The moon races to swallow the sun, and we're not ready."
We had no choice but to follow. Through corridors that grew older with each step, down stairs carved before humans learned to count, into the depths beneath the Elder Grove where even moonlight feared to tread.
The sanctum opened before us like a wound in the world. Ancient trees formed living pillars, their roots diving deep into stone that hummed with gathered power. At its center waited an altar older than memory, and around it stood the Elder Circle in full regalia—robes that moved without wind, crowns of woven starlight, hands clutching relics I'd only heard whispered about in warnings.
Above, through a gap in the canopy, the eclipse had begun. The moon's shadow crept across the sun like a closing eye, and with each degree of darkness, the air grew heavier.
"Place the child on the altar," the High Priest commanded. His voice carried the authority of centuries, but underneath, I heard fear.
"No."
"This is not a request, Aria Nightbloom. The ritual must—"
"Your ritual is a trap." The certainty came from somewhere deeper than thought. Every instinct screamed that whatever they planned, it wasn't salvation. "You're not trying to bind her power. You're trying to steal it."
The Elders shifted, relics glowing brighter. The High Priest's mask of calm cracked. "Foolish girl. We're trying to save the world from what she'll become."
"By becoming it yourselves?"
Ashara stirred in my arms, and I saw with growing horror that the sigil from our chamber now glowed beneath her skin. Not on it—beneath, as if she were translucent paper and power itself was writing its intentions from inside.
She began to float.
Not violently. Gently, inevitably, like smoke rising. My arms passed through her as if she were made of moonlight, and panic clawed up my throat.
Offer her blood to the moon, Velara's voice echoed in my mind, and her power is sealed forever. Refuse, and she is crowned by the eclipse. Choose quickly, little mother. The window narrows.
"I refuse both," I said aloud, reaching for my daughter with hands that found purchase through will alone. She solidified in my grasp—warm, real, mine.
The Elders stepped forward, power gathering. The eclipse deepened overhead. And I did the only thing left to me.
I stepped off the ritual platform entirely.
"My child will not be sacrificed to prophecy," I declared, holding Ashara tight against my chest. "She will not be sealed or crowned or made into anything but what she chooses. She will live—not as a goddess, not as a curse, not as your solution or your problem. But as my daughter."
"You don't understand—" the High Priest began.
"I understand perfectly. You see power and want to shape it. Control it. Use it." I backed toward the entrance, Dorian flanking me, sword drawn against enemies that couldn't be cut. "But she's not power. She's a person. My person. And I'll burn the world before I let you unmake her for your comfort."
The eclipse reached totality.
Darkness fell like a physical weight, and in that darkness, Ashara opened her mouth. What emerged wasn't her voice—it was older, hungrier, shaped by spaces between stars where names went to die.
But I'd faced gods trying to steal my daughter before.
I placed my palm over her mouth, gentle but firm, and sang. Our lullaby. The one constant through every trial, every transformation, every moment of doubt. The melody that bound us more surely than blood or prophecy ever could.
"Not today," I whispered between verses. "Not like this. You are Ashara. You are mine. And you will speak when you're ready, not when the sky demands it."
She calmed, the alien presence retreating like tide. Her weight settled fully in my arms again, and she looked up at me with eyes that were—blessedly—just silver. Just hers.
The High Priest screamed.
Not in rage but in terror, pointing at the gap above where the eclipsed sun should have been. "You've broken the veil. You've refused the compact. Something is coming through."
I looked up, still humming our lullaby, still holding my daughter who would not be sacrificed to anyone's future.
Through the eclipse, where darkness should have been absolute, something moved. Not light, not shadow, but the space between. It descended slowly, inevitably, carrying the weight of eons and the hunger of things that existed before existence had rules.
And from the eclipse, something older than prophecy began to descend.
The Elders fled. The High Priest fell to his knees, prayers tumbling from his lips like broken teeth. But I stood firm, my daughter in my arms, my partner at my side, and waited to meet whatever came.
Because I'd meant what I said.
I would burn the world before I let it have her.
And something in that descending presence recognized the promise, and approved.
🌙 If this chapter moved you, left you breathless, or made you feel something you can't quite name… vote with a Power Stone.Each vote is a thread in the tapestry we're weaving together — and I feel every one.Let's keep this story burning under the moonlight.