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“See what?”

Jace glanced toward Elarian. “That she is not the thing destroying you, but the first thing you have chosen not to destroy.”

For once, Lucan had no answer. Jace rose and stepped toward the door, his shoulders heavier than when he entered.

“I hope for both your sakes that you learn the difference before Aurelion does.”

The doors closed behind him.

Elarian softly gasped as Lucan’s hand instinctively found her chin and wrenched her gaze to his.

“Why didn’t I kill you all those years ago?”

forty

Run, Star

The old elf sensed it the moment she crossed into the shadow of the castle still looming far in the distance.

Ancient stones rose from the earth like the bones of some long-dead creature. She had seen kingdoms built and swallowed before. Towers crumbled with ease. Thrones meant little more than convenient places to murder a monarch. Every monument eventually became a grave.

But beneath the stench of iron and ash, beneath the corruption that clung to the land like rot beneath a dying tree, she felt something else.

A whisper.

A thread.

That starlight reborn that once kindled her own soul.

Starin.

For centuries, she had forgotten the sensation—forgotten what it felt like to sense that fragment of the stars burning beneath mortal flesh. Moon elves had always carried their former lives with them. Starlight beneath the skin, a quiet pulse beneath every breath. Blessed by Melistra, they lived anew upon the world they fell to.

She had believed she would never feel it again.

The old woman stopped at the edge of the forest, one hand trembling against the bark of an ancient tree. The massive fey wolf stood beside her, silent as the moon itself, ears angled toward the distant castle.

“She is there,” the woman whispered.

The words frightened her.

For so long, she had carried one sin above all others: her daughter. The child she had held beneath the stars. The girl whose light had faded with the taint of her father’s cursed blood, whose eyes did not reflect the stars but the blood that stained their lives.

She had told herself that leaving was mercy; that there was nothing left to save, no path she could tread that would reunite the mother and child. Death did not come for her, and so she lingered, haunted by the memory of what could have been.

But what if she had misunderstood? What if Melistra had not taken Saelith from her?

What if she had carried her somewhere the old woman could not follow?

A broken laugh escaped her. How arrogant she had been to believe she understood the path of a goddess.

The first moth landed upon her hand at dusk. Once, they had followed her everywhere. They gathered around her lanterns and nested in the folds of her robes. They filled the quiet spaces between trees, tiny fragments of moonlight fluttering around the woman who carried Melistra’s blessing.

Then her daughter died.

And the moths left with her.

One became two.