Filed to story: When the Moon Hatched Book
Just a flat wall.
I appraise the space …
There’s nothing else on the walls in this sterile room. Meaning she can’t possibly have hidden it here. But this is where she spent the last chapter of her life. I know that for a fact—that she was too unwell to even make it into the streets and see her folk. To celebrate the impending birth. Something that meant so much to all Arithians, since conceiving has never come easy to those who don the Aether Stone.
I look to the balcony, realization slapping me so hard my knees almost give way.
Half the room was crumbled when her Moonplume broke through the wall after Elluin passed away, scooping up her lifeless body she then carried into the sky where she curled around her and died.
Perhaps she tore up the diary, too?
“Shit,” I mutter, dropping to the pallet, dragging my hands down my—
Ayda’s
—face.
I should’ve thought of that before I flew all the way here.
A deep wash of failure sweeps over me, the weight of it shoving me back onto the thick, cushiony pallet, tossing my arms out as I stare at the black velvet canopy.
I’ve been compulsively chasing a truth that doesn’t belong to me. That never did. Guess this is what I get.
Sweet fuck all.
Creators, this room feels morbid. And cold. What a shitty place to be stuck—rise after rise—pitted with the knowledge that you’ll probably die giving birth. Probably too exhausted to even walk to the balcony and get a clear view of … the … moons …
I lift my head, looking toward the balcony door—panes of glass that frame the sky littered with balled-up gray, pearly and iridescent moons.
My heart skips a beat.
If she were pallet-ridden, she would’ve hidden it within reach. Surely.
Why make things harder on herself?
Frowning, I sit up, imagining my belly is laden with life. Imagining I have a diadem on my brow that’s draining me to death, making it almost impossible for me to draw enough energy to breathe, let alone nourish my youngling into existence. Imagining that I’d want to look out at those moons right there. Mostly—the one belonging to …
Haedeon.
I edge myself off the side of the mattress, dropping straight down onto my ass on the floor beside it, looking out the balcony door to a perfectly framed view of Hae’s Perch. A sad smile lifts the corner of my lips …
This feels right.
Devastatingly right.
I plunge my left arm under the risen pallet, eyes on that gimpy-winged moon spilling its silver luster upon Arithia as I feel around the back post.
Across the back wall.
My hand pushes into a jagged hollow, a lump forming in my throat as my fingers graze across the face of a leather-bound book.
There you are …
I pull it into my lap, tracing my finger over the black and silver depiction of Kaan’s m?lmr. Something she must’ve painted on the otherwise black front.
The backs of my eyes sting at the sight.
“Oh, Elluin,” I whisper, hand trembling. I nip a glance toward the door before I lift the front cover, flipping through the yellowed flaps of parchment, each so beautifully scrawled upon. Even when she was small, her handwriting was immaculate—all dainty curls and twirls.
Just looking at each entry makes me feel as though I’m tumbling through a veil into another world seen only through her eyes.
First the young her. Then the adolescent.
Then the mature.
Lacking the time to read the entire thing right here, right now, but also lacking a single shred of patience, I flip straight to the end—to the final three entries. Immediately regretting it, realizing I shouldn’t have read this here.
I shouldn’t have read this at all.
My hand flies up and cups my mouth that I can’t seem to shut, my heart growing more laden with each barbed word I swallow. With each soul-crushing, life-changing word that doesn’t belong to me.
But I’m already there. I’m already invested.
Intertwined.
Reaching the final entry, I pull a shuddered breath and force myself to continue.
Every cycle I grow bigger, yet weaker in my bones. Almost too weak to reach into my hiding spot to retrieve my diary and read of happier times that remind me there’s still some good in this world.
The city folk celebrate in the streets each dae, as if my youngling is already here. As if the ashes of my loved ones don’t still taint the very air we breathe.
If Tyroth suspects the babe isn’t his, he hasn’t let on—not that we speak at all. Not that I have anything I want to speak to him about.
I’ve heard from one of his loyal aides—the only folk I’m allowed contact with—that a Bloodlace has arrived on dragonback this rise. If she’s here to test my youngling’s blood once I give birth, the paternal line won’t draw in Tyroth’s direction.
It’ll draw north—to Kaan.
All I’m allowed to do is wither here, bleeding my life force into this youngling, occasionally drawing enough energy to slide off the pallet and garner myself a clear view of Haedeon’s moon. I sing to it, and I swear I can hear it singing back.
Like it’s calling me.
I want to curl up with Sl?tra—to be with her while I labor—but I struggle to move on my own anymore. All but stuck on this pallet where Mah and Pah died. Where I pretended to conceive a youngling that was already seeded inside me. This pallet that used to be filled with love and song but now reeks of death and pain.
A battle is coming, I can feel it in my bones. Like my body is shoring up the courage to charge into a war I don’t think I’m going to survive. Even if I do, I feel like there’s a scythe hanging over my head, waiting to slice.
Either way, my heart is heavy with a seed of understanding I can’t dislodge. That I will climb back upon the pallet once I whisper goodbye to Haedeon’s moon, and I won’t rise from it again.
Casting my stare up at the sky, I sob through short, sharp breaths that are so far from adequate …
She lied for us. For him.
Kaan.
She lied for the youngling she carried all the way from their love den in Dhomm to this cold, caustic room where she’d lost so much already, all because she believed the words that spat out of my pah’s mouth. And for what?
To die right here.
To not see Kyzari grow.
For Tyroth to raise Kaan’s daughter as his own.
I close the diary, a venomous truth settling in my chest like a serpent poised to strike …
These pages are going to rip the world to shreds.
From deep within the inky clutches of a shadow too dense for the average eye to see within, the Scavenger King studies the young female fae coiled in the corner of her cell, rocking back and forth, hands threaded deep into her pale hair. Eyes squeezed shut, she mumbles a chain of incoherent words perhaps hewn from the crevices of her swelling insanity.
She’s speaking to someone, of that he’s certain. Just as certain as he is that this particular someone only exists within the confines of her peculiar mind.
His head tips sideways as he studies her more deeply: red lips, large eyes mantled with a thick fan of lashes, a shapely elegance the likes of only one he’s encountered before.
His
Fire Lark.