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Looking down at the shadows swirling around my body, I jerked as they settled into a robe of darkness, dressing me with moonlight on the hem and cuffs, swirling like smoke around my feet.
Fear clogged my lungs.
Where is she?
My arms were empty.
I was alone.
No Runa. No Solin. No Zetas, Syn, or Natim.
I spun on the spot.
Panic soared.
WHERE IS SHE?
Where am I?
What is this place?
“You called. We answered,” a smug, slithery voice said. “You walked through air. You travelled in shadow. You are where you want to be.”
My head pounded with pain. “I-I don’t understand.”
“You do understand.” The cool, crisp voice chuckled. “You just don’t remember.”
“Where’s Runa?”
“Where you left her.”
“Take me back.”
“You wanted to get away from her. To protect her from you. You summoned. We obeyed.” A fierce wind rustled in the forest surrounding me and the lake, dislodging a few orange leaves, hinting at the changing season. “We bowed to your command, Moon Master.”
Balling my hands, I growled, “Why do you call me that?”
“Because that is what you are.”
I shook my head as pain banded around my temples.
I groaned as the pain in my head turned into a hammer, smashing at my skull.
I grunted as the agony built and built.
My knees buckled.
I collapsed at the bottom of a towering tree. Its leaves glimmered blue in the moonlight, and the late-summer blossoms attracted a cloud of hummingbirds. Some as small as bees and others as big as sparrows, they fluttered from flower to flower, their buzzing jewelled wings loud and obnoxious in my ears.
Agony kept growing, kept pressurizing, kept burning.
I cried out as I bent over my knees, pressing my forehead to the ground.
What was happening?
Why couldn’t I stop the pain?
“Awakening is pain, Moon Master. Give in to it.”
I fell onto my side as searing, crippling agony flowed down my spine and bellowed through my bones. A wave of destructive cramps worked its way through my muscles.
I cried out.
I couldn’t stop it.
Couldn’t endure it.
I trembled with cataclysmic torment.
Another wave of bone-snapping pangs.
The pressure in my skull became too much.
I was nothing but death-born misery.
“Let go...” the air element whispered. “Give in.”
I groaned and curled into a tighter ball.
Corroding nightmares tore through my bones and boiled my blood.
I plummeted into darkness.
Spiralling.
Falling.
I became the black.
I was an eclipse.
And when I reached the bottom of blackness, the pain wasn’t just pain but slaughter.
I screamed.
I let go.
A bolt of power ricocheted outward.
It rippled like a droplet in a pond, cutting through air and night, silent and deadly. The moment it shot free from my shaking body, the pain ebbed. My bones transformed from pounding misery into lightest moonshine.
Sitting upright, my vision returned, just in time to see the shockwave of my power I’d unwittingly released. It sliced like a scythe, tearing through the living, not picking favourites, not saving those deserving—offering no salvation or mercy.
It snuffed out the life of every single innocent creature close by.
The hummingbirds froze mid-flutter, their feathers gleaming with iridescent blues, purples, and greens as they tumbled to the earth. An owl dropped from the tree above me.
The night music performed by crickets, cicadas, and frogs screeched into silence, leaving nothing but the sensual blow of air through the leaves and the heavy, awful pounding of my heart.
Dead.
Everything that’d been close to me was dead.
“Now, do you see?” Rivoza licked around my ear, its cool breath as fresh as air blown from the heavens. “Now, do you remember?”
Grief clutched the back of my throat as I blinked at the death littering me in a morbid circle. Not a single pulse or aliveness. Blank eyes and still chests, dull scales and broken feathers.
Tears stung my eyes.
How?
How had I done that?
And how did I prevent it from ever happening again?
“It’s time you dust off your memories, Moon Master. Before your power decides to rule you instead.”
Gulping back stomach-churning sadness, I stumbled to my feet and scooped up a tiny hummingbird. Its neck lolled lifelessly as I stroked its plumage with my thumb.
It was still warm.
What a waste.
What an awful, sickening waste!
Fury roared through me.
Sick, sick fury.
What sort of monster could kill so many creatures in one swoop? What sort of demon had the power to stop every heart?
Temper tore through my fury; I snarled at the empty night. “I’m a killer.”
“You are death, not a killer.”
“I just ended countless lives.”
“And now you will see them again.”
My eyes widened. “What? How?”
“Just wait.” Air danced through my unruly black hair. “Just another breath and then—”
My head fell back as the pain I’d pulsed outward into the world returned a hundredfold. The quake of death I’d delivered snapped back into my blood, burning and crippling, throwing me back to my knees.
I barely heard the air laughing as wake after wake of agony fed red-hot through me.
A rush of silver lights.
A crush of pulsing orbs.
I jolted as they slipped through me, kissing my spirit, travelling through what I was.
